ON TUESDAY, US President Donald Trump delivered his second address to the UN General Council but instead of the normal Trump arm-waving threats to ‘totally destroy’ US enemies, as he pledged to do to North Korea last time, Trump was subdued to the point of boring his listeners to death; even the US Secretary of Commerce was seen asleep during it.
In place of the bombastic threats, his speech was delivered in a monotone that consisted of reiterating his constant refrain of ‘Making America Great’ and ‘America First’ at the expense of every other nation on the planet.
Naturally, he reserved his greatest praise for himself for single-handedly rescuing US capitalism, with claims that ‘we’ve added $10 trillion in wealth’ and that the ‘stock market is at an all-time high’ and increasing spending on the military to $700 billion this year, and $716 billion next year.
But this could not disguise the fact that far from the US having triumphed over its ‘enemies’ it has in fact been pushed back on all fronts.
Last year’s boast about totally destroying North Korea for threatening the US and its allies was replaced by Trump thanking the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ‘for his courage and for the steps he has taken’.
Trump made his usual denunciation of Iran and the Iranian leadership calling them ‘bloodthirsty’ and causing chaos in the Middle East but he stopped short of threatening war, instead restricting his calls to other countries to join in more economic sanctions against the country.
On Venezuela, Trump railed against the legitimate Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro calling him a dictator and a ‘Cuban puppet’.
This tirade was treated with contempt by the Venezuelan delegate who ignored Trump, instead reading a book about the Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolivar.
The fact remains that Trump’s speech far from extolling the great strength of US imperialism merely served to underline its weakness. All the enemies of US imperialism identified by Trump, China, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela have not only stood up to the threats and defied him but have recorded significant defeats of it.
All US attempts to smash Iran and North Korea have been met with defiance, while Trump’s economic trade war against China has rebounded on the US with tens of billions of dollars being lost and US companies faced with being driven out of their biggest market.
In Venezuela, all the CIA plots to launch a coup to overthrow Maduro and replace him with the US puppet Juan Guaido have failed spectacularly, while the US sanctions against the country have failed to break the Venezuelan people who refuse to see Venezuela dominated by US imperialism.
Trump reserved his biggest attack for the danger of socialism across the world and in the US itself. Trump said, ‘One of the most serious challenges our countries face is the spectre of socialism.’ He added, ‘America will never be a socialist country.’ In fact, the spectre of socialism is haunting not just Trump and US imperialism but the entire capitalist world.
Despite all his boasting about the strength of US capitalism, the fact remains that all that Trump has achieved has been to hand trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the US bosses and bankers while the working class has suffered under wage cuts and now the wholesale closure of industry.
With US auto workers engaged in mass strike action over plant closures and for pay increases, the class struggle in the US is exploding – this is what scares Trump and the US ruling class.
Trump’s uncharacteristically subdued speech is indicative of the entire crisis gripping imperialism – the only way out of its historic crisis is war to re-conquer the world, which will fuel the revolutionary uprising of workers at home.
In imperialism’s death agony, the historic conditions for the victory of the socialist revolution, as Trotsky wrote, are not just ripe but rotten ripe.
The burning issue of the day is the building of the revolutionary parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International to lead the world socialist revolution to victory and put an end to imperialism and imperialist wars for good.