LABOUR prime minister Keir Starmer has met with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris in a desperate attempt to find a way out of the political crisis that has erupted amongst the European leaders following the election of Donald Trump as US president last week.
The UK and France, two leading powers in NATO, are dreading Trump making good on his promises to dump Ukraine and leave the NATO war machine to be funded entirely by Europe and the UK.
Worst of all for them, is the pledge made by Trump that he would end the war being waged against Russia in the Ukraine on day one of his presidency.
This war, deliberately provoked by the US and NATO and designed to economically weaken Russia to the point where some form of regime change would open it up to full exploitation by capitalism, has rebounded both economically and militarily on the western powers.
Far from weakening Russia, all the economic sanctions, including seizing millions of Russian money held in western banks and banning it from the International SWIFT financial processing system, has led countries across the world, from Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America, to turn to trade deals in their own currencies and move away from using the US dollar as the sole means of trading.
This has dealt a massive blow to the supremacy of the dollar which underpins the global supremacy of the US. With this supremacy being challenged by countries across the world, Trump is clearly in no mood to carry on with a losing war.
Instead, he is preparing for a trade war with the whole world by imposing tariffs on imported goods of 10%, with China being hit with a massive 60% tariff on its exports to the US.
For Starmer, who has pledged £3 billion a year for ‘as long as it takes’ to prop up the fascist-supported Ukrainian regime, if Trump pulls out of the Ukrainian war and does a deal with Putin this would be a massive crisis for Starmer’s government.
The Labour government paid for its war by refusing to end the cap on child benefit and through ending the winter fuel payment to pensioners – only for Trump to declare it a waste of money.
Starmer and Macron will be hoping that Joe Biden in his last two months as president will succeed in escalating the war in Ukraine.
According to a report in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, Starmer and Macron spent Monday discussing whether Biden can be persuaded to give Ukraine permission to fire Storm Shadow missiles deep into Russia.
Until now the US has only permitted limited use of these missiles, which rely on US technology, on Russian territory out of fear of retaliatory attacks on Western military bases.
Retaliatory attacks provoked by NATO are precisely what Starmer, Macron and Biden are preparing in the hope of blowing up a full scale war between the US, its NATO allies and Russia in the next two months.
In a further development, the Pentagon said on Friday that it will send ‘a small number’ of US defence contractors to Ukraine – a reversal of Biden’s previous pledges not to put Americans in harm’s way in the conflict.
Now they will be on the front line of any retaliation by Russia and casualties amongst them used as an excuse for the direct military intervention of the US.
Starmer, Macron and Biden are organising for a war that will set Europe ablaze while Trump is plotting a trade war that will plunge America and the world into recession and slump.
The only force on the planet that can put an end to this historic crisis of capitalism is the working class.
With capitalism in its death agony, desperate to survive through wars and by inflicting destitution on workers, the only way to resolve the crisis is for the working class to organise its strength in mass strike action to seize power and go forward to socialism.
The victory of the world socialist revolution is the only way forward.
