Pax Americana Is Dead and Gone

Dying Imperialism Lashing Out
On the Road to World War III

· Drive for Bonapartist “Strong State” Governments · Intensified Exploitation of Semicolonial Countries · The Only Solution: International Socialist Revolution!

By Jan Norden

We print below the translation of a presentation, edited for publication, at an educational meeting of the Grupo Internacionalista, Mexican section of the League for the Fourth International, in mid-August 2025. An abridged version was published in The Internationalist No. 76, June-October 2025.

Since January 20, the day Donald Trump took office for his second term as president of the United States, the whole world has been in turmoil. Capitalist governments around the world have stepped up repression, threatening fundamental rights. Alliances between imperialist countries that have lasted for 80 years, since the end of World War II, are tottering. A one-sided economic war has been launched, imposing sky-high tariffs amid unprecedented chaos in world trade. This is already beginning to have its predictable effect: in the imperialist centers, inflation and stagnant production combined – so-called “stagflation” – and intensified exploitation in semicolonial countries, like Mexico. At the same time, the imperialists are up to their necks in their proxy war against Russia over Ukraine, in the genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, and in the attack on Iran in June.

All these aspects of the global panorama are interlinked, and are further evidence of the fraying of the imperialist system in its advanced state of decay. They reflect the attempt, both by the prior Democratic administration of Joe Biden and by the Republican administration of Donald Trump, to prop up the crumbling imperialist hegemony of the United States. But these efforts are doomed to failure. On the economic level, the replacement of “free trade” treaties with arbitrary tariffs was supposed to reindustrialize the U.S. But although the wave of “globalization” of production appears to be coming to an end, there will be little resurgence of industry in the imperialist centers, which have already lost entire sectors of the economy. And militarily, we see that the imperialists have failed to win any of the wars they have waged this century, beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and their humiliating withdrawal in 2021. Behind these “forever wars” lies the military and economic weakening of the imperialists.

This remains the case today. The NATO imperialists are bogged down in their war for Ukraine, which Russia is clearly winning. The U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran in June did nothing whatsoever to slow down its nuclear program or bring about “regime change.” In fact, it made clear that Iran needs to exercise its right develop a nuclear deterrent capability. The “made in the USA” genocide in Gaza, carried out by Zionist militarists with giant bombs supplied by the United States, dropped from U.S.-made warplanes,¹ has not only killed more than 100,000 Palestinians and destroyed almost the entire territory, but has also caused deep divisions in Israeli society, and even in the military apparatus. Nevertheless, it is the ultra-Zionists and the far-right government, with fascist ministers in the cabinet, who are calling the shots.

As we have stressed, this imperialist war drive is pointing to a Third World War with the goal of dismembering Russia and provoking counterrevolution in China. Our League for the Fourth International calls for defense of the Palestinians and defeat of the U.S./Israel genocidal war against Gaza. We defend Russia, an intermediate capitalist state, against the NATO imperialist proxy war, and we fight for the defeat of the puppet government in Kiev and the Ukrainian army, infested with fascists. We defend the bureaucratically deformed workers state of China against the economic and military war of the imperialists, who still imagine themselves to be masters of the world. And we defend the right of Iran, a semi-colonial country, to have nuclear weapons to defend itself against the Zionist and imperialist nuclear powers.

In all these fields we fight with our own proletarian methods, campaigning for workers action – labor boycotts, rail and port work stoppages, and strikes – to block arms supplies to Ukraine and Israel. And we warn that only international socialist revolution can stop World War III.

All-Sided Repressive Crackdown Accompanies the War Drive

The war drive goes hand in hand with an escalation of repression and the regimentation of social and political life. In the imperialist countries, measures to suppress protests against the war of extermination in Gaza continue unabated. In Germany, countless pro-Palestinian events have been banned, and almost all those that are allowed are viciously attacked by the police. In the United States, in April-May of last year, more than 3,000 pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested over the encampments on university campuses across the country. This persecution is ongoing – now they are expelling students and revoking their degrees for participating in occupations. Everywhere, repression is justified by the vile slander, coming from politicians of both the Democratic and Republican parties, that protests against the crimes of the Zionist state of Israel are antisemitic, i.e., express hatred of Jews, when the real antisemites are supporting Israel and many Jews are fiercely opposed to this vile slaughter.

Now Trump’s reactionary administration is using this outrageous amalgam to blackmail universities, demanding that they expel pro-Palestinian students and dismiss pro-Palestinian faculty; if they fail to do so, they will lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. One after another, the universities capitulate.² This assault on academic freedom and freedom of expression, as well as the mass arrests and bans on pro-Palestinian protests and events, are the home front of the Zionist and imperialist war in the Middle East. They are also demanding that the media cancel liberal programs, eliminate “progressive” commentators, and pay millions in compensation for editing interviews in a manner not to the liking of Trump and his cronies.

In an article analyzing the November 2024 elections in the United States and the contours of the incoming administration, the Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International, published an article, “Trump 2: Gearing Up for Rule by Decree” (The Internationalist No. 74, September-December 2024). He has done just that. Almost nothing on his agenda has been voted on by Congress: the budget, an immigration bill, and that’s about it. The rest – canceling birthright citizenship, carrying out mass deportations, imposing stratospheric tariffs, cutting funding for universities; sending National Guard troops and federal agents to Los Angeles, and now to Washington – all of this has been done by executive order. And many of these measures are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, the federal government is ignoring or flatly refusing to comply with court orders pausing its actions. This behavior is the result of plans that have been in the works for decades. The truth is that the judicial system is not going to stop the administration either, given that last year, in a ruling on a lawsuit filed by Trump himself, the Supreme Court endorsed the so-called “unitary executive theory.” In defiance of the famous “separation of powers” of the French Enlightenment jurist and philosopher Montesquieu, which supposedly provides “checks and balances” against arbitrary government actions, this “theory,” promoted by conservative sectors of the bourgeoisie, maintains that neither the judiciary nor the legislature can limit or stop actions of the executive “in the performance of its official acts.”

Although supporters of this doctrine cite Alexander Hamilton’s writings in the Federalist Papers of 1788, the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution of 1789, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Marbury v. Madison case of 1803, in reality all these learned elucubrations served as the basis for Trump’s assertion in 2019, during his first term, to an audience of young people at a “summit” of the fascistic organization Turning Point USA, that “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” He just repeated this in his commencement address to cadets at the West Point military academy, where future high-ranking officers of the U.S. armed forces are trained. And that is how he is acting.

This “legal” framework lends itself perfectly to a Bonapartist-style “strong state” government, which is precisely what is in the process of being established in the United States. Giant strides are being made toward a police state.

There has been much discussion about whether Donald Trump is a fascist, as claimed by many in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, as well as some deluded leftists and General John Kelly, Trump’s former advisor, who recounted Trump’s admiration for Hitler. They use the term “fascist” simply as a derogatory term, or as a synonym for “very repressive.” So do the Stalinists, who labeled Pinochet’s Chilean military dictatorship fascist. We do not label Trump a fascist because he does not lead a mass movement of declassed petty-bourgeois elements that would serve as a battering ram to crush the workers movement, according to Leon Trotsky’s Marxist definition. Instead, Trump is an aspiring dictator.

In the United States, the bourgeoisie does not currently need a mass fascist movement, largely because there is no radicalized workers movement threatening bourgeois rule. Fascist groups are relatively small, numbering some thousands, but they are dangerous, and we fight for the working class to use its power to stop them. In 2017, our comrades in Portland, Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest, organized some 300 union members and supporters to stop a fascist provocation. What does exist is a fascistic sector – that is, fascist-like – of the Republican Party. At the forefront is Vice President JD Vance, a fascistic ideologue close to likeminded forces such as the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in England, and Giorgia Meloni’s fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy).

Trump is a megalomaniac and without doubt an all-around reactionary, but he is not an ideologue. He wants to be a strongman in the style of Napoleon Bonaparte, although his more likely model would be Napoleon’s nephew, Emperor Louis Bonaparte, who invaded Mexico and installed an Austrian archduke, Maximilian, as emperor in 1864, and who sought to legitimize his mediocre reign with plebiscites. (As an aside, it would not be surprising if Trump attempted to implement the program of his MAGA movement through a similar mechanism of plebiscitary pseudo-democracy.) In the 1930s, Trotsky labeled “pre-fascist” governments in France and Germany as Bonapartist, citing Karl Marx’s essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which analyzed the French coup d’état of 1851. The 1930s governments preserved the forms of parliamentary democracy, but in reality rested exclusively on the police/military apparatus.

And that is what we are experiencing now in the United States. We have already talked about the federal intervention in Los Angeles. Here I will simply quote from the leaflet published by the Internationalist Group in June that portrayed the new situation:

“Pounding on doors in pre-dawn raids. Masked police looking like terrorists grabbing people on the street. Unmarked vans haul­ing them off to be sent to concentration camps. People arrested when they show up in court for routine hearings. High school students seized and held incommunicado as parents are unable to locate them. Sound like Chile or Argentina under military dicta­torships in the 1970s? This is what a police state looks like – and immigrants across the United States are living in it right now.”

Los Angeles remains under the boot of masked police and federal agents prowling the streets, abducting people for the “crime” of looking Latino. The Democratic mayor described the city as something akin to a country on the brink of a coup d’état, or a city under siege.

Now Trump has imposed federal control over the municipal police of Washington, D.C., describing the city in apocalyptic terms: “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.” That the reality is completely different does not matter. In the current climate, any accusation will do. To justify eliminating immigrants’ right to due process, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in order to deport them without judicial review, Trump invented the absurd claim that the United States is being invaded by a Venezuelan army of drug traffickers. The people of Washington are already reacting with anger to this outrage. People in the streets are shouting at the federal agents, “Fascists, get out!” “Get off our streets!” and “Leave us alone.”

The government is responding to protests with harsh repression. In Washington, a man angered by the presence of immigration agents on street corners threw a Subway sandwich at a group of them. When he turned himself in at the police station, he was arrested on charges of “assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating, or interfering with a federal officer,” which could result in eight years in prison.³ Republicans in Congress have now introduced a bill, the ICE Act, which stipulates up to five years in prison for “impeding” immigration enforcement, which could be used against any protest. Democrats have not responded. Moreover, right-wing members of Congress are already requesting access to the financial documents of community and left-wing groups that have led protests against ICE.

In all this, it must be borne in mind that this escalation of repression is not limited to Republicans. It was Democratic city and state authorities that arrested the bulk of pro-Palestinian protesters last year. In the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd by racist cops, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden suggested shooting “rioters” in the legs. Democrats Barack Obama and Biden have also ruled by decree. And Obama deported 5.3 million immigrants during his two terms (2.9 million in his first term). Biden “removed” 4.4 million, while Trump “only” deported 1.5 million in his first term. The reality is that both capitalist parties are enemies of immigrants, and both want to strengthen the apparatus of police repression.

Nor are police-state measures limited to the U.S. Our Italian comrades, in their newspaper L’internazionalista of May 2025, have called for “A Real General Strike to Stop the ‘Security’ Decree and Rearmament.” Unlike many opportunist left-wing groups, we in the League for the Fourth International do not call lightly for a general strike, which, if carried out, would be the deployment of the strength of the working class in a fierce battle against the capitalist state power (and not a 24-hour work stoppage with a parade, as is the reformist practice). We did so in this case because the decree-law imposed by the right-wing government headed by Giorgia Meloni’s fascist Fratelli d’Italia would prohibit even strike pickets and street demonstrations, with draconian penalties.

“The question of Italy’s evolution toward an authoritarian Bonapartist police state is posed point-blank,” we explained. Just to be clear, Italy today is not a dictatorship: the role of the fascist party at the head of the government – and we have analyzed its nature in detail in the article “Giorgia Meloni and Her Fascist Fratelli d’Italia” – is precisely to be the spearhead of the drive toward a “strong state” regime. And it is important to understand that this push is directly linked to the “remilitarization” of the imperialist NATO countries and their proxy war against Russia over Ukraine. They need a reinforced police apparatus to better repress anti-militarist protests. More generally, as we wrote in our article “Fascism, Bonapartism, and Donald Trump,” in The Internationalist (No. 75, January-May 2025):

“[I]t is crucial to understand why there is a drive toward ‘strong state’ rule, in the U.S. and internationally, which is fundamentally because capitalism in its advanced state of decay requires more repressive force and a forceful executive to counter opposition.”

This Bonapartist evolution is not limited to imperialist countries. In Latin America, there are clearly Bonapartist governments in Peru under Dina Boluarte, who came to power through a civil-military coup; in Argentina under Javier Milei; and previously the Bonapartist regime of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who, after failing in his reelection campaign, tried to carry out a coup in January 2023. If the racist riot that stormed the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021 in Trump’s name was a mock coup d’état, a comic-opera coup, the coup in Brazil was very real, with plans to assassinate the chief justice of the Supreme Court and president-elect Lula. It only failed because, though the navy was on board, the heads of the army and air force (under pressure from the Biden administration) did not consent.

Our comrades in the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil called for a null vote in the 2022 elections, against the Bonapartist Bolsonaro and also against the “broad front” of Lula and the conservative Alckmin, and for class struggle in the streets by workers and the oppressed “to crush the coup and fascist danger.” Although Bolsonaro is currently on trial for his failed coup attempt, we must not forget that it is the same Federal Supreme Court that endorsed Lula’s imprisonment for almost two years when the bourgeoisie wanted to prevent his re-election. As the LQB called: “No to the dictatorship of the epaulettes or the robes, no to the deadly dictatorship of capital – For the liberating dictatorship of the proletariat that will put an end to imperialist domination.” Now that is a revolutionary Marxist policy against Bonapartism.

The Tariff War and Global Economic Chaos

Now let’s move on to the new global economic situation. On April 2, Donald Trump proclaimed American Economic Liberation Day. He expounded his theory that the rest of the world is ripping off the United States because the U.S. has a trade deficit with Europe, much of Asia, Mexico, Canada, and, above all, China. He then showed a table with a list of 65 countries and the new, supposedly “reciprocal,” tariffs that the US was going to impose, which have risen to 50% for Brazil and similar rates for a number of Asian countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, etc. His advisors then revealed a strange mathematical formula they used to calculate the new tariffs, which was based on the amount of their trade deficit in goods with the U.S.:

Bourgeois economists almost unanimously mocked the exercise. The formula meant that, except in the case of Brazil, the highest tariffs would be applied to poor countries such as Haiti (41%) or Bangladesh (37%), which export many goods, such as manufactured clothing or mangoes, but do not have the capacity to import much from the United States. The effect of the new tariffs would be to further impoverish these countries, making their products more expensive when there is no possibility that they could import more from the U.S. Above all, these economists explained, the reality was exactly the opposite of what Trump claims: that is, it is the United States that is ripping off the rest of the world, enjoying large quantities of imports of goods such as clothing, toys, household appliances, etc., even though it does not export enough to pay for them.

How does it do this? First, with a huge surplus in the balance of payments for services, particularly in so-called “intellectual property rights,” such as products from the cyber industry, monopolies such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc., or the rights to distribute Hollywood movies. Even so, the U.S. has a balance of payments deficit. This is covered by the purchases made by many countries of U.S. Treasury bonds, or T-bonds. On the one hand, the greenback –the U.S. dollar – serves as the currency for world trade: the vast majority of purchases and sales of products and investments are made in U.S dollars. On the other hand, if other countries have hard currency reserves, they prefer to keep a substantial part of them in the safest instruments, which since World War II have been U.S. assets.

The result is that foreign entities, both governments and individuals, hold colossal amounts of U.S. Treasury securities, approximately $8.5 trillion in total, or $8,500,000,000,000. Of these securities, Japan holds $1.1 trillion, and China holds about $760 billion. This cushion allows the United States to run a huge budget deficit every year without running the risk of economic collapse, as would happen to any other country. (Like Argentina, for example, which has defaulted several times.) However, this could be an Achilles heel for the U.S. economy, a potentially catastrophic weakness, if for some reason investors and governments around the world decide to stop buying and even sell their T-bonds, and/or use another currency for international trade.

The financial system was the result of the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, where the imperialist Allies set the rules for international commerce to avoid the economic turmoil that occurred after World War I. At the time, with the devastation of World War II, the U.S. economy produced more than 50% of global gross domestic product (GDP), the measure of all goods and services produced in a country. U.S. imperialism completely dominated the international economy. Today, the United States produces only a quarter of global GDP, 26% according to estimates, and its economic weight is far from dominating the world. China, for example, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, produces around 17% of global GDP, and in several branches of industry it is by far the largest producer. For example, with regard to the famous “rare earths” that are key to the production of powerful magnets for the automotive and military industries, China produces around 90% of the world total and has an absolute monopoly on their processing.

As for the U.S. trade deficit, that has remained more or less constant. But with the “neoliberal” policy of “globalization” of production, since 1990 the composition of U.S. international trade has changed considerably. Many products that were previously manufactured in the United States have been outsourced to countries with lower wage levels, such as Mexico, China, Vietnam, etc. This has had a devastating effect on many economic sectors and has contributed to the ruin of industry in much of the U.S. Midwest. Furthermore, the fact that it has been the Democrats in particular who have sponsored this policy of deindustrialization is one of the main reasons for the abandonment of that party, which traditionally boasted of being “friends of labor,” by a large part of the American working class, with many giving support to Trump, who promises to reindustrialize the country.

Democrats and Republicans pursued the illusion of becoming a “rentier” economy, living off the profits generated by production abroad, often by subsidiaries of U.S. companies. This was American capitalism’s response to the falling rate of profit at home. And it did bring substantial benefits to the owners of capital. However, it spelled ruin for key sectors of the working class, who suddenly found themselves mired in permanent unemployment. If you want to look for the origins of the fentanyl crisis in the United States, for example, there you have the prime suspect.

The problem for Trump is that his economic policy cannot restore the U.S. economy to its former dominant position. In some cases, such as the automotive or steel industries, higher tariffs may make domestic production more profitable, and the U.S. still has the industrial base to do so. But, first, the wage gap is so large – the auto giants pay workers in the U.S. ten times more than they pay in Mexico – that even with 25% tariffs, it is still more profitable to produce in Mexico. Beyond that, there are entire sectors of the economy, such as toys, appliances or almost any household item, where the United States no longer produces anything to speak of. So the inevitable result of high tariffs will be inflation, with little reindustrialization.

Meanwhile, in the semicolonial countries, the result of Trump’s “America First” economic policies will be increased poverty and, in many cases, the devastation of poor countries’ economies. Without access to the U.S. market, the textile and garment industries in Bangladesh and Cambodia would virtually disappear. In other countries, it would mean wage cuts for workers in export industries. On top of that, Trump has openly embraced the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine and policies of blatant U.S. domination over Latin America, which date back to the dawn of U.S. imperialism in the early 20th century.

Today, Trump threatens Colombia with destroying its economy with stratospheric tariffs if Gustavo Petro’s populist government does not accept military planes carrying Colombian deportees. He raised tariffs on Brazil to 50% because Lula’s popular-front government refused to drop charges against Bolsonaro, Trump’s friend, for his attempted coup in 2023.⁴ Trump repeatedly blames Mexico for the fentanyl crisis, even though it is driven by demand in the United States. And now he has signed a secret executive order directing the U.S. military to pursue drug traffickers based in Latin America. This raises the specter of U.S. fighter jets or drones bombing drug labs in Mexico, many of them located in densely populated urban areas, or even U.S. troops entering Mexican territory.

Although many Latin American governments, such as Nayib Bukele’s in El Salvador, would be more than happy to act as satraps of the United States in exchange for a share of the profits, among workers and the general population, Trump’s policies of economic blackmail and military threats will necessarily and justifiably arouse resentment and a desire to fight against imperialist domination. And obviously we support that. Of course, bourgeois politicians who adopt a nationalist stance will seek to exploit this sentiment, even as they yield on many aspects of the demands of the northern colossus. But some “progressive” and petty-bourgeois leftist politicians want to go further, imagining a new “multipolar” world order in place of declining U.S. imperialist hegemony. This is the illusion driving the so-called BRICS alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, now expanded to include Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia.

Trump’s policies will not succeed in reindustrializing the United States, because the country has lost so much economic power that it does not have the means to restore entire sectors of the economy that are currently virtually nonexistent. Trump’s strongman stance also has its limits. He may have succeeded in intimidating his imperialist NATO (sometime) allies into adopting policies that seriously damage their economies. (Biden did the same by forcing them to abandon cheap energy from Russia, which has led to a prolonged decline in the German economy.) But the militarization of European Union countries, pushed by the U.S., will come at the cost of reduced consumption and social services. In the medium term, economic unrest could lead to inclusion of fascist and fascistic right-wing parties in the ruling coalitions of France and Germany.

The point is that, while Democrat Biden and Republican Trump have major political differences, both are attempting to restore U.S. dominance. Biden, like his Democratic and Republican predecessors in recent decades, tried to do so through alliance policies, but the weakened, parasitic economic position of the United States prevented this. Trump proposes to change that with tough negotiations, economic blackmail and military threats. But both policies are doomed to failure due to the advanced state of decay of U.S. imperialism and the other imperialist powers. In all advanced capitalist countries, attacks on basic social services, from education to public health, and crumbling infrastructure show that this is a dying system.

But neither can the BRICS countries peacefully replace imperialist domination. There are many illusions in the BRICS among the petty-bourgeois left, who see it as a counterweight to imperialism and above all as the nucleus of a “multipolar” world. However, not only are the BRICS countries still economically weaker, but this alliance lacks political coherence. The Chinese deformed workers state may seek diplomatic alliances with Saudi Arabia, but it has no fundamental common interests with a narrow-based monarchy whose fabulous wealth depends on selling its natural resources to the imperialists. The fact that this is not a coherent economic and political bloc has been demonstrated by the monstrous genocidal war waged by the United States and Israel against Gaza, and by their joint attack on Iran. In both cases, the BRICS countries played no role: they did nothing.

The fact is that imperialism will not peacefully give way to an alternative world order of harmony and cooperation. To think that it would is the old Stalinist chimera of “peaceful coexistence,” which did not save the Soviet Union but, in fact, was one of the things that undermined it.

Further proof of the BRICS’ inability to replace imperialist domination was their latest conference (in July) in Brasilia. If you read the joint communiqué issued at the end, there is not a single word of criticism of the United States, and this at a time when U.S. weapons and ammunition are causing untold suffering from Ukraine to the Middle East. Reportedly, this silence was due to Lula, who tried to appease Trump amid tense negotiations over tariffs. But it didn’t work. A few days later, Trump reacted with accusations and insults against the Brazilian president and increased tariffs on Brazil to a punitive 50%. And this despite the fact that Brazil is one of the few countries in the world that does not have a trade surplus with the United States.

Imperialist War Drive Points to a Third World War

That brings me to my final point: that the current war drive pursued by U.S. and European imperialists, under Trump and Biden, points directly to a Third World War, this time with nuclear weapons. We just saw the summit between Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska. The cold warriors of the imperialist media, European leaders and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky were all stunned and disappointed that the US president and the president of the Russian Federation had met, and especially that they met alone. But they were relieved that no agreement had been reached. They argue that Trump is attracted to Putin as one strongman to another. Whatever their personal chemistry, Trump’s purpose is to get the war in Ukraine off his plate so that he can concentrate on preparing for imperialist war against China.

And not for the distant future. If you read the strategic planning documents of the United States, the European Union, Britain and Germany, they all aim to be war-ready or kriegstüchtig – that is, fit for war – within two to five years, from 2027 to 2030. Their objective is very clear: their war aims are counterrevolution in China and the defeat and dismemberment of Russia. Naturally, they blame the Russians and the Chinese. In the case of the United States, the guiding statement for Trump’s 2025 National Defense Strategy prioritizes the defense of U.S. territory and “stopping China in the Indo-Pacific region.” An earlier Marine Corps document, Force Design 2030, emphasized the goal of being prepared “to operate in the Indo-Pacific against the pacemaker threat” (i.e., China) by that date.

European imperialists, on the other hand, repeatedly emphasize the goal of being prepared to confront Russia in the short term. The European Commission has a Joint White Paper for Defense Preparations 2030 (March 2025). Britain has a Strategic Defense Review 2025 (June 2025) that focuses on achieving warfighting readiness against “the immediate and pressing threat from Russia.” Not mincing words, Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy titled a report, Ready for War in 2030? The European Rearmament Effort Against Russia (June 2025). The document cites NATO statements that the imperialist military alliance should be prepared to wage war with Russia even “before 2030.” And on the eve of the June 2025 NATO summit, the head of the Bundeswehr (the German army) declared that “we must be ready by 2029, or even earlier” (BBC, June 1).

All of this is based on the mythical danger of a Russian invasion of Europe, that if Russia wins the war in Ukraine – which it is in the process of doing – tomorrow it will march on Berlin and Paris, as French President Emmanuel Macron keeps saying. Utter nonsense. Russia, a mid-level capitalist country and regional power, is not and will not be in a position to invade the European imperialist countries. Since Napoleon’s 1812 invasion, Russia has always sought to ward off attack from the West. What could happen is provocation by NATO countries. Thus in July, the new commander of U.S. armed forces in Europe and Africa, General Christopher Donahue, highlighted that the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad is surrounded on all sides by NATO, and threatened that NATO could “take that down from the ground in a timeframe that is unheard of” (Defense News, 16 July). And the West accuses Putin of rattling nukes when he said, a couple of days later, that “Russia can defend itself with every means at its disposal”!

When we say that the imperialist powers, led by the United States, are rushing headlong toward World War III, we emphasize that their detailed planning and military doctrines pointing in that direction would make a global conflagration almost inevitable, unless it is prevented by international socialist revolution. Look at what they are doing – and what they are not doing. So on the one hand, NATO countries have not substantially increased production of 155mm shells, which the puppet regime’s army in Ukraine is crying out for to feed its artillery. And on the other hand, in 2019, during Trump’s first term, the U.S. withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Now Trump 2 is proceeding with the Biden administration plan to station intermediate-range Tomahawk cruise missiles and Dark Eagle hypersonic missiles, both with nuclear capability, in Germany starting in 2026.

What do these facts tell us? First, that NATO has no intention of waging an extended ground war with Russia in Europe, especially after the experience in Ukraine. And second, that Washington intends to threaten Russia with nuclear blackmail, with missiles whose flight time from Germany to Moscow is about 6 minutes from launch to impact, and which the Russian General Staff would have to assume could have nuclear warheads. This is a deeply destabilizing and high-risk game of nuclear poker. But while the Dark Eagle has not yet been fully tested, Russia has already deployed its Oreshnik hypersonic missile, in an attack on Dnipro, Ukraine, in November 2024. NATO has nothing that can stop the Oreshnik. Thus, the Cold War nightmare scenario of “deterrence” through mutually assured destruction (MAD) has been revived.

This brings to mind the beginnings of the previous world wars, both preceded by preparatory wars: the Balkan Wars (1912-13) in the case of the First World War, Italy’s war against Ethiopia (1935-36) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) in the case of the Second World War. The Ukraine war plays the same role, to gear up the war machine. As Barbara Tuchman pointed out in her 1962 book The Guns of August on the beginnings of World War I, the outbreak was not simply a chain of events following an unforeseen occurrence (the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Ferdinand, by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo). It was the outcome of years of detailed war planning by all the belligerents. At bottom, it was driven by the fact that capitalism’s productive forces had surpassed national borders and all the powers were driven to conquest, as V.I. Lenin wrote in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916).

Today, in the twilight of decaying imperialism, we see the interconnected drive toward global war and growing police-state repression. This is the result of the erosion of productive forces in the metropolises, where large capitalist conglomerates, suffering from falling profit rates, seek to save their dying system by conquering new markets through the destruction of the Chinese deformed workers state and the dismemberment of Russia.

This combination of external imperialist war and internal capitalist repression can be seen in military preparations. The most ambitious plan to expand NATO armies envisages increasing the number of brigades in the German, British, French and Polish armies from 83 to 133. To this end, the number of main battle tanks would increase from 1,627 (2024) to 2,920 (2030). But according to the same calculations, Russia, which will have some 235 brigades in 2030, already produces 1,776 tanks per year, while the maximum annual European production would be 216. So even with the maximum expansion of NATO armies, enlisting 300,000 new soldiers, they will not be in a position to defeat Russia, or even wage a prolonged war against it. Question: what then is the point of all this new equipment and new military personnel? Answer: They will serve above all to further militarize the imperialist countries in crisis.

It is for this scenario of capitalist class war against the working people that revolutionary Marxists must prepare ourselves, swimming against the tide of frenetic war preparations. However, the vast majority of the left in the imperialist countries is tailing after sectors of their own bourgeoisies. Some are dogpaddling in the wake of imperialist war, as is the case with some left-wing groups in Western Europe – the PCL in Italy,⁵ sectors of the Linkspartei, the Left Party in Germany, and some social democrats disguised as “Trotskyists” – who support Ukraine in NATO’s proxy war against Russia.⁶ Even those who appear to maintain a certain distance from the NATO warmongers capitulate to imperialist war propaganda. This is the case with centrists such as the Trotskyist Fraction, which proclaims “Neither Putin nor NATO!” while denouncing the Russian invasion and marching in pro-Ukrainian “anti-war” protests.⁷

In the case of the militant Italian “grassroots unions,” such as SI Cobas, USB, etc., which have actually taken some action, such as boycotting shipments of weapons and military goods to Israel, they push a workerist brand of pacifism opposing all war under capitalism (“they’re all bosses”), even a war against the imperialists. Unlike opportunists of all stripes, the League for the Fourth International, without giving any political support to the bourgeois regime of the Russian Federation or the Stalinist leadership of the People’s Republic of China, fights for proletarian mobilization to defeat the imperialist war leading to World War III, and to defend the targets of this war – Russia, China, and semicolonial countries such as Iran – in the struggle for international socialist revolution. Specifically, we have campaigned for workers action to stop the shipment of imperialist arms to Ukraine and Israel.

Precisely because the drive toward imperialist world war and the push for a police state “at home” are expressions of the rotting capitalist system, they can only be fought with a revolutionary proletarian program. Different currents that claim to be communist and even Trotskyist judge that because this is a period of economic, social and political regression, with bourgeois reaction in full swing, it is necessary to adopt a defensive posture, seeking to preserve the achievements of the past and not undertaking risky “vanguardist adventures.” Here they rub shoulders with social-democratic reformists, the union bureaucracy and bourgeois liberals. On the contrary, it is precisely in times of harsh class struggle, when the edifice of welfare state capitalism is crumbling and lasting reforms are no longer possible, that we must fight on the basis of a program that aims at the seizure of power by the proletariat.

The Transitional Program, written by Leon Trotsky in 1938, was adopted as the founding program of the Fourth International. Its original title was The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International. Its central thesis is expressed in the words: “The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened’; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.” The vast majority of those who falsely claim to be Trotskyists hold that this thesis is outdated. For us, as we emphasized in the 1998 “Declaration of the League for the Fourth International,” this proposition remains entirely valid today.

In its opening paragraphs, the program of the Fourth International summarizes its purpose:

“It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.”

Today, the struggle to save humanity from the impending catastrophe depends on cohering a proletarian vanguard based on this revolutionary program, tempering in the class struggle the core of a party like that of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. This vanguard must not be limited to the economic struggle but act as a champion of all oppressed layers of capitalist society, enlisting them in concrete struggles against racism, the oppression of women and all forms of social oppression to lead them toward the only way out that promises a future of peace, emancipation and equality: the international socialist revolution. Reforge a Fourth International that Trotsky would recognize as his own! ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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