THE G7 summit has ended in tantrums, with US President Donald Trump lashing out at Canada’s Trudeau, who was hosting the gathering. Trump from his jet tweeted a bombshell, that he had instructed his representatives at the Quebec G7 to withdraw support from the G7’s final statement. He accused Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of acting ‘meek and mild’ during meetings, only to attack the US at a news conference.
Trudeau had described as ‘insulting’ Trump’s decision to invoke national security to justify tariffs.
Differences over the US tariffs on steel and aluminium imports were papered over in the joint communique that advocated a ‘rules-based trading system’, only for Trudeau to then vow to press ahead with retaliatory tariffs against the US on 1 July.`
He said in Trump’s absence: ‘Canadians are polite and reasonable but we will also not be pushed around.’ Trump responded that he had instructed US officials ‘not to endorse the communique as we look at tariffs on automobiles’, adding that Canada is ‘charging massive tariffs to our US farmers, workers and companies’.
In the original communique, the group of major industrial nations – Canada, the US, the UK, France, Italy, Japan and Germany – had agreed on the need for ‘free, fair, and mutually beneficial trade’ and the importance of fighting protectionism.
On Russia, there was a joint demand that Moscow ‘cease with its destabilising behaviour’ and withdraw its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This has now all gone up in smoke!
The western capitalist world is now poised to tear itself apart with a trade war, at the same time as a new worldwide financial crisis is developing, while the EU itself is imploding Russia was suspended from the G7 group – then called the G8 – in 2014 because it reclaimed Crimea from Ukraine.
On Friday, Trump made a surprise call for Moscow to be readmitted but German Chancellor Angela Merkel said other members were against the idea. Trump had already said that he wanted to see Russia rejoin the group since ‘we have to run the world’.
Trump seems to have worked out a tactic to make a deal with Russia, China and North Korea, starting perhaps with the Koreas signing a document to officially end the Korean war, and then to begin in earnest a campaign to deal with Iran and the EU states that wish to continue collaborating with Iran.
His campaign to ‘Make America Great Again’ is really a serious effort to try and secure US capitalism by further enriching its plutocrats and by restoring as much as possible the shattered living standards and living conditions of tens of millions of US workers to prevent the development of a socialist revolution in the United States. This is similar in its own way to the role that the Cecil Rhodes imperial drive led to the rise of UK living standards. Trump’s task inside the USA, makes it impossible for the US to carry the whole of the capitalist world on its back as it has been doing since 1945.
If any state is to be driven to the wall, Trump is determined that it will not be the USA.
His tactic is to work for a modern version of the Stalin-Hitler pact, under which the Hitler was able to tackle his western rivals, as a prelude to his main task which was always the elimination of Bolshevism. Trump wants a deal with Russia and even North Korea in order to settle accounts with the US’ new rivals in the G6.
Once that is done, then the hunger to possess the vast riches of Great Russia will prove to be irresistible. In the face of the growing trade war and the military adventures of the Western Powers the workers of the world have a clear role to play.
They must unite in a great international working class movement to overthrow the imperialist powers with socialist revolutions. These will create the conditions for the workers of Russia and China to remove the Stalinist bureaucracy and bring back rule through workers soviets to complete the victory of the world socialist revolution. Central to carrying out this task is the building up worldwide of the sections of the Fourth International, the world party of the socialist revolution
