On November 6, many of us woke to the reality that our nation is even more corrupt and dangerous than we had realized as a majority of U.S. voters embraced and voted for a fascist, racist, convicted rapist and felon, compulsive liar, insurrectionist, and would be a dictator. During the election, the country was warned that a Trump election could signal the end of constitutional democracy here.
In this period of tectonic geopolitical and political changes, we do well to heed Antonio Gramsci’s wisdom about interregnums: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Trump’s rule will certainly hasten the U.S. decline and that of its empire with Beijing looking to be the greatest beneficiary.
CONSOLIDATING POWER
Beginning with his January 20 inauguration, Trump will be consolidating what will increasingly be dictatorial power. With a stacked right-wing Supreme Court that last year ruled that the president cannot be held legally accountable for his official acts, Trump will preside as a near-absolute monarch. Consistent with the notorious Project 2025 recommendations, his immediate priorities will include replacing thousands of civil servants and replacing them with loyalists to block bureaucratic resistance, which he terms the “deep state.”. He will begin deporting the estimated 11 to 20 million undocumented immigrants. That will require police state methods including possible use of the military. Fulfilling his promise of retribution, Trump will use the Justice Department, led by the ethically challenge Matt Gaetz, to put his political opponents on trial and in jail. As commander in chief, he can recall retired generals and admirals back into service and court martial those who served him but later and accurately reported that he is fascist to the core. Trump will purge some current military leaders, putting loyalists in their place. Relying on an 18th century law, he will attempt to circumvent the constitution to use the military to repress protests. In the tradition of Putin, Orban, and Xi, he has promised to target the media. As the saying has it, first they came for the press, and we don’t know what happened after that. Legislation will likely be passed to enable Trump and his minions to attack and eliminate NGOs that criticize his policies. He will gut the Environmental Protection Agency so that the fossil fuel industry can reap greater profits and accelerate the already deadly climate emergency. Dark times and creative opposition lie ahead.
When it comes to U.S. foreign and military policies, fears abound. We seem to be sleepwalking into escalating wars and confrontations in Ukraine, the Middle East, and across the Indo-Pacific. Trump cannot end the Ukraine War within 24 hours, but under Putin’s escalating attacks, now augmented by fresh if ill-trained North Korean troops and swarms of attack drones, we again face the questions of how much of Ukraine he will seize, and what that will mean for Europe. There are Trump’s expressed doubts about the U.S. commitment to NATO and his threatened tariffs which are generating fears that they could lead to a profound disruption in U.S.–European relations and renewed European efforts to create a fourth military superpower. Trump’s embrace of Netanyahu’s racist Gaza genocide will likely facilitate Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaigns in Gaza and the West Bank. There is the possibility that he will give Jerusalem the green light to attack Iran’s nuclear and oil production infrastructures, and maybe even join in such aggression. There is the question of whether the killing of North Korean forces with U.S. weapons in Kursk reignited the Korean War and if a Russian victory in Ukraine lead China, in time, to invade or blockade Taiwan?
What do we actually know about Trump’s foreign and military commitments? Sophie Bolt, the new General Secretary of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament reminds us that the “last time [Trump] was President, the US bombed Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, carried out extra-judicial killings and developed ‘usable’ nuclear weapons. Under his leadership, the US withdrew from landmark nuclear arms control treaties including the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, and the Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA.) And it withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement.
Trump has been naming his leading mandarins, all of sycophants. They are incompetent loyalists with little or no experience. Mike Waltz, a former Green Beret officer and now a right wing member of Congress, will be his National Security Advisor. Senator Marco Rubio, a hardline America First China hawk will be Secretary of State. Peter Hegseth, an extreme Christian nationalist and misogynist, would be the least experienced Secretary of Defense in U.S. history. He served as a National Guard captain at Guantanamo and until recently was a right-wing Fox journalist totally loyal and subservient to Trump. John Ratliffe, head of national intelligence in Trump’s first term, will lead the CIA. Tulsi Gabbard, an opportunist who was once an apologist for the Syrian dictator, is to be Director of National Intelligence Elise Stefanic, among Trump’s most fascist and Israel-supporting attack dogs in Congress, will be U.N. ambassador.
A recent Foreign Policy article named other figures contending to join Trump’s “national security” elite. Among them was Elbridge Colby, perhaps the “loudest” voice seeking “a complete shift from Europe, NATO, and Russia and toward the growing challenge from China.” Fred Fleitz, once a protégé of the notorious John Bolton, is among the most ideologically right-wing MAGA figures in Trump’s national security orbit, Ric Grenell, was runner-up in the secretary of state appointment contest who will not be left out. He was Trump’s ambassador to Germany and closely aligned with neo-fascist European leaders including Orban, Le Pen, and Meloni. Keith Lighthizer and Peter Navarro (the latter just released from prison) are the leading trade war and tariff advocates with China their number one, but not only, target.
There are a host of other America Firsters who may be visited upon the world, including a raft of think tank nuclear weapons and war planners who have been competing with one another to publish the most hawkish revisions of U.S. nuclear doctrines.
THE POLICIES
In August, Robert C. O’Brien, Trump’s last National Security Advisor, published Trump’s foreign and military policy commitments. The article was titled The Return of Peace Through Strength: Making the Case for Trump’s Foreign Policy.. Here is a summary:
First and foremost, O’Brien reported that “Trump adheres not to dogma but to his instincts.” He is given to whims, and with his transactional approach to dea-making it is impossible to precisely predict what Trump will do. The New York Times concurred, reporting that “He has often said that keeping the world guessing is his ideal foreign policy.” He is once again referring to his love letter from Kim Jung-Un, and he is driven primarily by his drive for power and wealth.
Even as Trump has denigrated U.S. alliances O’Brien reminded us that “Trump never canceled or postponed a single deployment to NATO. His pressure on NATO governments to spend more on defense made the alliance stronger.” O’Brien asserted that “Ameria first is not America alone.” From this perspective, Trump’s threat to “encourage” the Russians “to do whatever the hell they want” to nations that fail to meet NATO’s two percent of GDP military spending goal can be read as a coercive fundraising strategy, and the new number may be 3%/ We can certainly expect Trump to pressure Japan, South Korea, and other Indo-Pacific allies to increase their multi-billion dollar “burden sharing” while also increasing spending on their own militaries.
Addressing the Ukraine War, O’Brien pledged that Trump will continue to support lethal aid to Kyiv, but he will insist that it be paid for by Europeans while keeping the door open for diplomacy with Russia. Out manned and out gunned, European support for Kyiv may enable President Zelensky to hold out against Russian advances for up to a year. But the longer Zelensky holds out with his overly ambitious demands – including for Crimea’s return to Ukraine – before initiating a ceasefire and returning to peace negotiations, the more territory will be lost and the greater the danger for all Ukrainians. Future Secretary of State Rubio has differed from Trump, urging more support for Ukraine, but Zelensky cannot count on Trump to defend Ukraine.
O’Brien’s response to these contradictions is that NATO will rotate ground and air forces to Poland, and “the alliance will defend all its territory from foreign aggression.”
Consistent with all of Trump’s foreign and military advisors, Biden’s National Security Strategy, and Congressional China hawks, O’Brien warns that China is “a formidable military and economic adversary.” Xi is seen as “China’s most dangerous leader since the murderous Mao Zedong. And China has yet to be held to account for the COVID-19 pandemic.” It is “pablum,” O’Brien wrote, “to believe that China is not truly an adversary.” Therefore, reflecting Trump’s priorities, he wrote that the U.S. should “focus its Pacific diplomacy on allies such as Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea…[and] traditional partners such as Singapore and emerging ones such as Indonesia and Vietnam.” Washington, O’Brien urged should “seek to decouple its economy from China’s” with a 60% tariff on Chinese goods and tougher export controls on technology. Since the publication of O’Brien’s article, Trump has threatened tariffs of up to 200%, which would punish U.S. consumers far more than China’s economy. Yet, not kowtowing to Washington, we can read that Beijing is reinforcing its global monopoly on the rare earths needed for high-end computer chips, electric vehicles, missiles, and a host of other 21st century technologies
Bolstering these alliances, which may be tested by “America First” arrogance, values and financial “burden sharing” demands, Trump’s advisors urge that the Navy move an aircraft carrier from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and move the “entire Marine Corps to the Pacific” (This was later clarified to be operational troops, not administrative forces).The Navy, they insist, should increase its ambitions to creating a 355-ship fleet, including more stealthy and nuclear armed Virginia class submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. Congress, they urge, should fund all 100 planned B-21s, as well as 256 strategic bombers for containing China. With such an escalation in U.S. military spending, we can forget financing climate resilience or the housing needed by Trump’s working and middle class base.
Not to be forgotten is Trump’s urging Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza. Not unrelated are Trump family ties to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and Trump’s hatred of Iran that led to his sabotaging the JCPOA nuclear deal with Teheran. Despite Iran’s new president’s hopes to renew nuclear negotiations with the West, the Republican call is for the U.S. to exert “maximum pressure” on Iran. “The truest source of the Palestine-Israel conflict” O’Brien amazingly argued, is not the dispossession and oppression of Palestinians, but Iran. This is a recipe for disaster. O’Brien informed us that the Trump administration will “[b]ack Israel to eliminate Hamas, not pressure Israel to return to negotiations for a long-term solution.”
Trump’s Middle East goal looks to be the same as Biden’s: a Saudi-Israel entente targeted against Iran and backed by a new U.S.-Saudi military alliance. However, as Biden and Blinken learned, this agenda has its contradictions. The vast majority of Arabian people identify with and support Palestinian resistance to a second and greater Nakba. And the Saudi monarchy believes that it could be overthrown if it officially recognizes Israel before credible processes are in place to achieve a two-state solution to the century-old conflict finally.
If there had been little discussion about foreign and military policies during the election campaign, even less would have been said about their nuclear dimensions. The reality is that we are facing the greatest danger of nuclear war since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Leading the way has been the Kremlin’s nuclear saber rattling and the reduction of its threshold for nuclear weapons use. The past few weeks have witnessed back-to-back U.S. and Russian nuclear war exercises and a demonstration North Korean ICBM missile test. The U.S., and its allies including Japan, as well as China, and Russia are continuing provocative and confrontational military exercises in the South and East China Seas and around Taiwan where an incident, accident, or miscalculation could easily escalate to the unthinkable. If this weren’t sufficient reason for concern, all of the nuclear weapons states are upgrading their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems – the U.S. for $1.7 trillion. And militarist forces in Iran, as well as in Japan and South Korea where confidence about Trump’s commitment to extended deterrence is increasingly in doubt, are all pressing for their nations to become nuclear powers.
Trump response to all of this? Pour more oil on the fire. His agenda includes “Test[Ing] new nuclear weapons for reliability…[and] resum[ing] production of uranium 235 and plutonium 239.” O’Brien also reminds us that we came much closer to nuclear war during Trump’s 2017 Fire and Fury Korean threats than most people understand, and Trump certainly won’t reverse course on nuclear weapons “modernization.”
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Hidankyo will be helpful in this regard, but the Japanese peace movement and the world must make the most of this opportunity.
Finally, there is the climate emergency. Trump will further endanger this and future generations by again withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, by burning fossil fuel regulations, and by defunding green energy initiatives. This will further isolate the United States from the civilized world, and it will ironically provide a powerful boost to China’s soft power diplomacy.
TO THE FUTURE
Friends, democratic, peace, and justice movements in the United States are just beginning to feel our ways forward as the world’s most powerful nation transitions – at least for the next few years – from liberal and internationalist imperialism to efforts to impose America First hegemony. In this new time, we will need to be thoughtful and much more strategic – thinking more critically about our assumptions and campaigning. As we enter this still darker period, we will need to find need the ways to work better and more closely with our international partners. As progressives in the United States increasingly come under siege, we will need solidarity and support from our friends abroad. We must all keep our eyes on the proverbial prize as we create new ways to build a peaceful and nuclear-free future, to defend people, the climate, and democratic values and culture.
Joseph Gerson, the President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security and a member of Nihon Hidankyo’s Nobel Peace Prize delegation.