US PRESIDENT Trump, dedicated to ‘making America great again’, to further enrich the bosses and the bankers at the expense of the US workers and the workers of the world, is now well into his war on two fronts. At home he is seeking to wipe out all healthcare for the poor, and virtually abolish taxation of the rich while scapegoating migrants as the source of all of the US’s problems.
His foreign policy is a continuation of this home policy. It is to threaten North Korea with nuclear war if it continues to develop its nuclear arsenal for its own self-defence, and to threaten Venezuela with invasion. Venezuela as well as having a left government has gigantic oil reserves and its return to being a semi-colony of the US would be a great enricher of the US bosses.
Further Trump seeks to drive back the advance of China and Russia, and also to prevent the EU from becoming a rival imperialist power to the US, by removing all of the barriers, industrial, political and military that holds back the US. At home, his attacks on workers, migrants and the poor have encouraged the right wing to take to the streets, behind the banner of ‘Unite the Right’ as it did in Charlottesville, in Virginia on Saturday. There, Neo-Nazis and the Klan carried arms and killed at least three people, one woman dying as a result of a terrorist car-ram attack.
He has condemned both demonstrators and counter demonstrators, and has refused to condemn the neo-Nazis and Klanners who were shouting ‘Heil Trump’. Even Republican Senator Cory Gardner said: ‘Mr. President – we must call evil by its name…These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism.’
The Southern Poverty Law Centre, a civil rights organisation, said that: ‘Trump’s run for office electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man’s country.’
However, both at home and abroad the Trump ‘make the US bosses great again’ campaign is running into trouble. Ba Dianjun, director of the Centre for Northeast Asia at Jilin University, has put the Chinese position. This is that despite the Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty between China and North Korea, Beijing will not come to help if Pyongyang attacks first. However he added… ‘At the same time, if the US strikes first and starts a war on the Korean Peninsula, China and other countries, including Russia, Japan and South Korea, will be against it.’
How will Trump and his Defence Secretary, General ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, currently posing as a moderate, react to this. The prospect is that the US will hold back over North Korea and attack the weaker Venezuela.
There is a historical precedent for this. In 1982 Trump’s hero, President Ronald Reagan sent US troops into the Lebanon, as a peacekeeping force, supported by the Sixth Fleet, after Israel had invaded it and the PLO forces had left the country.
241 US service personnel – including 220 Marines and 21 other service personnel – were killed by a truck bomb at a Marine compound in Beirut, out of a force of 1,800 marines on October 23rd 1983. It was a huge blow – the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since World War II’s Battle of Iwo Jima, the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Armed Forces since the first day of the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, the deadliest single terrorist attack on American citizens in general prior to the September 11th attacks.
What did Reagan do after this huge blow. The US marines and the Sixth Fleet withdrew and two days later on 25th October 1983 the US attacked the tiny island of Grenada, with a population of 150,000, an act that even Margaret Thatcher opposed. Many Americans were sceptical of Reagan’s defence of the invasion, noting that it took place just days after the disastrous explosion in the Lebanon. Nevertheless, the Reagan administration claimed a great victory.
Any attempt to attack Venezuela must be met by massive strikes and demonstrations of workers and youth all over the world, particularly in the UK and the US. The truth is that humanity’s future is under question until the workers of the world disarm the imperialist powers through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
