We reproduce here an extract from an ICP-Proletarian article, “Russian-Ukrainian war: imperialist peace on the horizon...”, which essentially echoes the political analysis and content of our previous communiqué on Trump’s election. Its particular interest lies in the fact that it goes further than our position, and puts forward some serious hypotheses about the “debate” within the American bourgeoisie as to the imperialist strategy to be pursued in the present period: while no Western power, starting with the United States itself, “are currently ready for a Third World War”, Trump’s election would be aimed at “ensuring that ties between China and Russia do not grow stronger.” This is a hypothesis that our communique (above) does not envisage, and which deserves to be taken into account.

Many assumptions have been and are being made with respect to Trump’s electoral victory in the U.S. presidential election. In his election campaign, which began since the mass assault on Capitol Hill in January 2021, Trump, boasting that under his presidency America has not gone to war with anyone, announced that “in 24 hours” the war between Russia and Ukraine would end. Beyond the bluster, characteristic of a braggart like Trump, it must be said that personal relations with Putin may also play a certain role with respect to this war. Obviously, the international interests of U.S. imperialism far outweigh the personal relations between the head of the White House and that of the Kremlin. But in the background, one can point out a difference between the bourgeois factions that supported Biden and the war in Ukraine and the bourgeois factions that support Trump. The latter have a priority interest in containing Chinese expansionism and preventing the strengthening of an anti-Western bond between China and Russia, which would create many headaches for both America and Western Europe. According to Trump, the war between Russia and Ukraine might not have broken out, but he has not said how and does not say clearly how he plans to end it. One thing is certain, however: the real enemy, current and future, of the United States is not Russia, but China. And the real problem for Washington is to ensure that ties between China and Russia do not grow stronger.

According to Biden, this outcome could have been arrived at through the economic and financial weakening of Russia achieved through the war in Ukraine for which European countries compacted by suffering/accepting the Anglo-American ukases on sanctions against Moscow and Ukraine’s incorporation into NATO. This outcome would have weakened Russia to such an extent that it would no longer be a “reliable” ally for China, thus distancing Moscow from Beijing and bringing it closer again to the West. It was on the other hand clear that, with respect to the Russian-Ukrainian war, beyond former Prime Minister Medvedev’s rantings about the use of the atomic bomb against the West should the war in Ukraine turn into a NATO war against Russia, the real interest of the Western powers has never been to engage in a war against Russia. One only has to take into account the status of the arms stockpiles by the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union countries starting with Germany and France to understand that none of these powers are currently ready for a Third World War. This does not mean that they are not preparing – as on the other hand are Russia, China and even “peaceful” India-for a world war. In fact, the Russian-Ukrainian war has served, much more than the war in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya, to test on the real terrain of war the military, political and organizational capacity of the different protagonists, even if all this has in a sense emptied Western arsenals, but at the same time provided an opportunity to get rid of old and obsolete armaments, to test new-generation armaments, to field and test the warfare of unmanned aircraft – the famous drones – and to field test the resilience of ground troops in a war that has rapidly turned into a war of attrition, into trench warfare, proving that it is on the ground, in the end, that war can be won or lost.

With Trump in the White House, beyond his unpredictability, a number of issues of decisive importance with respect to the future of the imperialist powers return to the forefront. The Europe question, that is, of the attempt at political and military compacting that the member countries of the European Union would or could implement and the interest on the American side in keeping Europe in general subservient to Washington’s policies. The question of Germany, which in united or disunited Europe has and will always have great importance. The question of Russia, that is, whether this power will become the weak link or the strong link in the Western bloc led by the United States, or the Eastern bloc led by China. The question of NATO, that is, the question of a military organization that will or will not hold up in the face of sharpening contrasts between the various imperialist powers, contrasts that will, inevitably, form the basis for the rupture of current alliances and their reshaping. The question of the Middle East, where economic, financial, political and military contrasts are concentrated that can turn into casus belli both local and of world order at any moment – as on the other hand is already happening with Israel’s initiatives not only against the Palestinians, but also against every force and every country under the influence of Iran, the “enemy at the doorstep.” The question of the Indo-Pacific, an area that will weigh more and more heavily in the relations and contrasts between all imperialist powers and that, in all likelihood, will assume the weight that the Atlantic did in the last century. The question of Africa, a continent swollen with natural riches that advanced capitalisms are greedy for and in which China and Russia have been advancing for some time now, taking territories from the influence of the old colonial powers, and in which the United States has not defined a major plan of investment and intervention; indeed, with the first Trump government, and then with the Biden government, it has consistently reduced its economic and diplomatic commitment to this continent. On the other hand, the protectionist policy that will characterize the Trump Administration, as per election pledges, will probably tend to keep Africa still on the back burner among American priorities.

And finally, the domestic issue in the United States, for which Trump, in order to attract the vote of the working class and middle class, has pressed hard on the need to improve their living conditions, fighting against inflation, thus against the rising cost of living, and against foreign imports (particularly from Germany, Europe in general and China) by raising tariffs. The other horn of the problem concerns immigration, toward which the White House in Trump’s hands will adopt a much more direct repressive policy than Biden did; the announced vast deportation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, which has been one of his campaign warhorses, will in all likelihood be scaled back quite a bit because the American economy – as indeed the economy of any other country – needs to exploit vast strata of proletarians illegally present in the country both because the cost of their labor is significantly cheaper than that of native-born proletarians both because they are blackmailable not only economically, but socially, and because they are used as a weapon to pressure the labor costs of regularly contracted and unionized proletarians.

For America, as on the other hand for Europe or China, the coming years do not present themselves as years of economic expansion, but as years in which the struggle against the overproduction crisis will be even harder than it has been so far. The long-awaited growth, which is increasingly measured in a zero-point more or less than the previous year, will not be the common denominator of the most advanced economies; instead, it will be the worry of all advanced economies and will force the ruling bourgeoisies to press ever harder on the proletarian class to extort more and more surplus value from its labor and to counter foreign competition by every means, including the military. And as social tensions will tend to rise, war will become the permanent situation not only in areas outside Europe or North America, but also within them. The various bourgeois factions will be forced to do battle against each other to overwhelm opposing interests, which does not mean that there will be war of all against all, but that, just as monopolies, trusts, and multinational corporations have developed in the economy, so will the blocs headed by prevailing imperialism develop and continue to develop on the politico-military terrain. One bloc, which the media has become accustomed to calling “Western,” formed since the Second World Imperialist War around England and France, has developed with the primacy of the United States. The other imperialist bloc that opposed this, was formed around Hitler’s Germany and Hirohito’s Japan, with a historically unreliable Mussolinian Italy serving as a counterbalance, as proved as soon as the war turned in favor of the Allies. Another bloc was the Stalinized USSR. It was these three blocs that battled each other, first on the terrain of political and economic competition, then on the terrain directly military reducing, in fact, into two contrasting blocs with Russia’s move from an understanding with Germany, once Germany suddenly attacked it, to an understanding with the United States. It may not happen again in a future world war clash, perhaps not in the same form. And it is perhaps in the latter perspective that Trump’s America is aiming for a future reversal of sides: it would in fact be much more convenient for America to clash with China by having Russia on its side than by having to face China and Russia in a solid adversarial bloc.

After imperialist war, imperialist peace

The imperialist peace that Trump says he is striving for in the Russian-Ukrainian war could go in this direction: to draw Russia into the Western area of influence in order to draw it away from the Chinese area of influence. Of course, in order to lure Russia to the West, given its inevitable hunger for economic territories that prompted it to wage war on Ukraine, and given that the war is going in Russia’s favor and against the much-ballyhooed Ukrainian and Western “victory,” the armed conflict must be ended in order to get into negotiations. For peace negotiations to have a chance of succeeding, and since neither the United States nor Europe, let alone Russia and China, have any interest today in going to war, the only thing at stake is the pieces of Ukraine that Russia has already annexed: Crimea and part of the Donbass.

We are entering the third year of the war, and the most bogged down and without a victorious way out are the Westerners; the Americans, British and Germans are admitting it, more or less openly. Ukraine, in all of this, has actually played a secondary role from the very beginning with the illusion that it could one day sit at the table of the powerful as an equal, given the hundreds of thousands of dead put on the scales and a good part of the country to be rebuilt, all to the benefit of the Euro-American capitalists who have already set about to start dividing up the pie. There is nothing better than a destroyed country to be rebuilt to give breath to the capitalist economy. So, what will happen from now on is more about how than when to end this war. Obviously, it will be the Americans and the Russians who will dictate the terms, they are the ones who have to find common ground, and this can only be to the detriment of Ukraine, which will be able to go back to basking in its “independence,” its “territorial sovereignty,” and an economic and “peaceful” recovery on a territory that is stumped compared to 1991. It could end up, probably, as in 1953 between North and South Korea, with a red line not to be crossed by either side; however, it is more likely to resemble an ever-ready-to-bounce separation, not accepted by either the Ukrainians of the Donbass or the Russophones of the Donbass, and on which the Russians could behave like the Israelis toward the Palestinian territories. Russian-Ukrainian peace will be more of a war truce than a period of peaceful development of either country.

Lacks the class struggle of the proletariat

No agreement between ruling and imperialist bourgeoisies has brought and brings benefits to the people involved in inter-state confrontations, much less does it bring the peace and prosperity hypocritically extolled as the result of the goodwill of rulers. Only the class struggle of the proletariat of the countries going to war and supranational proletarian solidarity have a chance of stopping the imperialist war, turning it into the only war by which true peace can be achieved: civil war, the class war of the proletariat against its own bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisies of the other belligerent countries. The proletarian revolution in Russia in October 1917, in the midst of the world imperialist war, demonstrated, precisely by the proletarian class struggle and civil war against the warmongering classes at home, by coming to seize political power, that it could impose peace with the “enemy” even at the cost of losing territory; a peace, on the other hand, that had to be strenuously defended against constant attacks by the imperialist armies, calling the proletarians of all countries to revolution in their own countries.

The current historical situation in which wars are being waged, decade after decade, in every corner of the world, is quite different from that in which the European and Russian proletariat struggled, in the first two decades of the last century, on revolutionary ground against their respective ruling bourgeoisies. The Russian, European and world proletariat, betrayed by social-democratic and Stalinist opportunism in those years, were systematically bent to the interests of their own national bourgeoisies – whether fascist, democratic or falsely “socialist” – under the illusion that they could participate in widespread prosperity thanks to the greatness and economic power of the “fatherland,” accepting even the highest sacrifices as every war requires. The proletarians of the most advanced capitalist countries, after the carnage of World War II, benefiting from the crumbs that the most powerful imperialists decided to distribute to them in order to silence their most pressing needs, no longer had the strength to reconnect with the great classist and revolutionary tradition of previous proletarian generations. Continually titillated by peaceful development in democracy and benefited by all sorts of social buffers, generation after generation, they have become accustomed not only and not so much to thinking like the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, but to having the same ambitions to build their individual futures on their personal careers and to regard proletarians from other industries, other companies, and other nationalities as competitors against whom they adopt the same means that capitalists and, in general, the bourgeoisie, adopt in the struggle of competition against opponents and other bourgeoisies. Not only has the sense of belonging to the same class been obliterated and buried by decades of interclass collaborationism, but also the proletarian solidarity that once fraternized proletarians of all conditions and nationalities has been completely lost. The millions of proletarians bombed and mangled in the bourgeois wars seem to belong to other worlds, holed up in the four walls of their homes and jealous of their individual interests. Nothing worse could have happened to the international proletarian class that made all the chancelleries of the world tremble in the 1920s.

But the war, with its horrors and disastrous consequences for the daily lives of proletarians will ruthlessly bite into their apathy, pushing them to react for sheer survival. It will be their vanguards who will have to reconnect with the class struggle of the last century, and it is not certain that this will not happen thanks to the young Eastern or African proletariat.