What Happens to Afghanistan Now?

Brian Cloughley

Afghanistan is America’s longest war, and it seems it could go on indefinitely, if only because, in shades of the Vietnam catastrophe, there is no face-saving way out, and national pride is very much at stake.

President Trump says he will “pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past” but has inherited a blunder he is going to find very difficult to resolve.  The situation in Afghanistan is dire to the point of calamity, and while Mr Trump has not yet made his intentions clear it is difficult to imagine him approving negotiations with the Taliban, and equally hard to see him in the position of an “America First” Commander-in-Chief who ordered his forces to retreat.

Perhaps money might affect his final decision.

The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) Mr John Sopko, recently reported that “Afghanistan needs a stable security environment to prevent it from again becoming a safe haven for al-Qaeda or other terrorists. More than half of US reconstruction dollars since 2002 have gone toward building, equipping, training, and sustaining the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF).  However, the ANDSF have not yet been capable of securing all of Afghanistan and have lost territory to the insurgency.”

The ‘reconstruction dollars’ noted by Mr Sopko total a mind-boggling $115 billion, a figure most of us are incapable of comprehending.  One way of understanding how much this is, in a historical context, might be to consider that the entire 1948-1952 Marshall Plan, the US initiative for reconstruction of the whole of Western Europe following the devastation of World War Two, cost $103 billion in current dollars.  The tiny country of Afghanistan has swallowed up even more but remains a disaster area.  Of major relevance is Transparency International’s report released on January 25 which places Afghanistan 169 of 176 in its Corruption Index and notes that “there is no comprehensive legal framework for preventing, detecting and prosecuting corruption.”

In Mr Sopko’s words, “the United States contributed significantly to the problems in Afghanistan by dumping too much money, too quickly, into too small an economy, with too little oversight. Poor understanding of Afghan political and social realities led to unrealistic timelines and false assumptions about what was possible.”

The SIGAR’s summation is too kind.  It has to be faced that after the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 it engaged in a full-out war, thereby alienating millions of Afghans because the Pentagon had no understanding whatever of the country’s ‘political and social realities.’  (Some of the troops on the ground tried hard to become involved in local realities but got nowhere because their tours of duty were far too short, and their generals wanted victory in terms of conquered territory and dead bodies, not social understanding.)

The US-NATO military alliance directed the war from 2003 to 2014 when it was announced that its combat operations would cease and the US would leave a residual force until the end of 2016 (now extended).  Some thousands of US soldiers, mainly Special Forces, under the ‘Freedom’s Sentinel’ Mission, continue combat operations but other foreign contingents are confined to training and advising the Afghan army, air force and police.

In an election speech in 2008 Mr Obama declared he would ‘make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.’ But the war had already been lost.   Then in 2013 he said that withdrawal of US forces was possible because ‘we achieved our central goal, or have come very close, which is to de-capacitate al-Qaeda, to dismantle them, to make sure that they can’t attack us again.’

This was willfully ignoring reality, because the country was already lurching towards civil war, with disparate bands of insurrectionists creating mayhem at the same time as countless numbers of people within and connected to the Kabul government played politics, acquired vast sums of money, and bought expensive mansions in Dubai.  It was hoped, against all evidence, that the Afghan army would be able to defeat the Taliban and other insurgents, but this has not happened, and US special forces have now ramped up their operations.

The sad fact is that foreign meddling in Afghanistan has been catastrophic and the place is verging on anarchy, while masses of money continue to be poured into the place, especially by the United States.  This doesn’t make sense, and President Trump has said he wants to end wasteful expenditure.  This is the man, after all, who made a campaign speech declaring that ‘the people opposing us [the Democrats] are the same people — and think of this — who’ve wasted $6 trillion on wars in the Middle East — we could have rebuilt our country twice — that have produced only more terrorism, more death, and more suffering – imagine if that money had been spent at home.’

Trump is right about waste (although the figure of $6 trillion is suspect), and if he really thinks that building at home is better than battling abroad,  then he would immediately shut off Washington’s Afghanistan money tap which is scheduled to pour out another 4.6 billion dollars in 2017.

So will the President adhere to his publicly announced principle and abandon Afghanistan for the sake of America First?

The research agency Stratfor noted that before his bid for the presidency, “Trump released a video arguing that the United States’ decision to invade Afghanistan was a mistake and that its troops should withdraw. He stuck to a modified version of this view throughout the campaign season, presenting himself as a can-do technocrat with zero tolerance for waste.”

If the Taliban take over Afghanistan it is most unlikely there would be any direct threat to the United States.  Life would be hell for ordinary citizens, but since when has Washington worried about such things?  None of the insurgencies and coups in Libya, Syria and Ukraine, has resulted in a better life for the unfortunate people who have been the supposedly intended beneficiaries of Washington’s meddling.

President Trump declared that “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first . . .  we’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.”  But will he really “learn from the mistakes of the past”?

His promise appears indicative of intention to avoid further expensive catastrophes such as have been visited on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya — although he did take time, during an Inauguration ball in Washington, to speak by video link to US troops in Afghanistan and tell them that ‘I’m with you all the way . . . we’re going to do it together.’ This was certainly a thoughtful public relations gesture — but was far from being assurance that the Trumpian United States would remain committed to Afghanistan’s future.

His final decision may well rest on discussions with the trio of generals he has appointed to high positions.  Generals Mattis, the Secretary of Defense;  Kelly, the Secretary of Homeland Security; and Flynn, National Security Adviser, are not people who are disinclined to present their views forthrightly.  Nor are they reluctant to wage war. It’s what they’ve been doing all their lives, after all.  The fact that their wars ended in dispossession, displacement and death of millions of people is neither here nor there.

The war in Afghanistan is an economic, social, moral and military fiasco, but we can expect it to go on for a long time. The Kabul government will stagger from indecision to dire decision and corruption will prosper while the Afghan people suffer unimaginable hardships and the barbaric loonies of extremist Islam have a wonderful time killing for the enjoyment of killing.  Just like the intellectual General Mattis, now Pentagon Supremo, who declared that “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

The hope that President Trump’s foreign policy will learn “from the mistakes of the past” is sadly optimistic.  Carry on shooting.

Liberalism as Class Warfare

Rob Urie

With apologies in advance for forcing unpleasant thoughts this early in an essay; reflexively, what economic class do the national Democrats’ ‘deplorables’ inhabit? With the persistence of institutional racism (graph below) across both Democrat and Republican administrations, why wouldn’t the answer be the rich who own the corporations that employ people and the professional class that does the hiring? If racism doesn’t motivate institutional racism, what does?

The question is loaded for a reason— the corporate titans and capitalist class that fund the major political Parties have uniformly rejected explicit race and gender bias in hiring through the institutions they own and / or control. As a point of social logic, if economic outcomes differ by race and gender but the entities doing the hiring aren’t racist or sexist, the fault must lie with jobseekers. Enter the bourgeois storyline of racism and sexism as misplaced blame from ‘losers’ for their own failures.

An obvious problem with this explanation is the systemic nature of institutional racism and sexism. The White / Black employment rate (below) is one of many measures that demonstrate systematic differences in economic outcomes by race across time. Unless one wants to posit bottom-up causality, that corporate hiring, compensation and wealth distribution are decided along racial lines by working class ‘deplorables,’ blame belongs with those who control the institutions that produce it.

Graph: Institutional racism has persisted across Democrat and Republican administrations since the onset of neoliberalism despite claims by Democrats and their supporters that they are the Party of racial reconciliation. Economic cycles explain the periodic convergence and divergence of the ratio of White to Black employment. Dean Baker explains the appearance of convergence in 2016 here. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

The practice of blaming down in an increasingly hierarchical and anti-democratic society produces an obvious benefit for the economic powers-that-be and their servants in the political class. It blames the powerless for social dysfunction over which they have little to no control. And the self-serving tautology at work, that social power is distributed through a natural distribution of virtues— qualifications in the language of corporate apologists, provides faux meritocratic cover for the social violence of economic exclusion.

The issue here is not racism per se, but rather the division of the working class along racial and gender lines for the benefit of plutocrats and their servants. In what configuration of the world does it make sense that a working class that has been systematically disempowered for the last half-century is responsible for the social disintegration currently unfolding across the West?

In the case of institutional racism, the savage histories of slavery and genocide are used in the present to misrepresent the current distribution of social power as their artifact to the exclusion of class explanations. To the extent that working class racism does exist, it doesn’t explain the differences in institutional outcomes that have resulted in increasingly widespread economic exclusion. Again, assertion that the poor and working class determine institutional prerogatives is not supported by the evidence.

Put differently, the aspect of existing social divisions that has been carried forward from the pre-modern past is class relations. America was founded as a ‘new world’ plutocracy— there never existed a past where the poor and working classes determined the social policies that explain institutional racism. The idea that the laboring classes and petite bourgeois would create a slave class to lower wages and undercut their capacity for social negotiation is a non-sequitur created by plutocrats as cover for their own crimes.

As slight evidence— readers are invited to read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States for detailed background, the U.S. Constitution counted slaves as 3/5ths a person to accrue political power to the owners of ‘capital,’ not to the laboring classes. And today capital and its servants in the professional class determine who is employed and who isn’t and at what wages. Deference to labor ‘markets’ is misdirection, else systematic race and gender bias wouldn’t exist. (Ask an economist to explain why race and gender bias shouldn’t exist in a market economy).

Where economic power translates to political power, economic power frames the discourse. As the facts have it, this intersection finds the non-racist owners and senior managers of America’s dominant institutions being the major campaign contributors to both political Parties and thereby setting both the political and economic agendas of the nation. From this perspective racism is difficult to resolve because it requires the redistribution of social power. And it is this mal-distribution of social power that is the effective residual of the pre-modern past.

The class dynamic of the national Democrats’ ’deplorables’ comment has been lost on the liberal class for a reason. The corporatist frame that allows institutional rules to obviate factual outcomes under the manufactured logic of individual capacities only makes sense from inside a closed logic. It allows professional-class liberals to congratulate themselves on their social virtue without requiring the distribution / redistribution of social power that would affect the actual outcomes upon which this virtue is claimed.

In a material sense, enlightened liberal Barack Obama oversaw the near total destruction of Black wealth, a foreclosure crisis that continues to eviscerate communities of color and the elevation of the most predatory of capitalist institutions— Wall Street. The liberal chide that Mr. Obama’s (and Hillary Clinton’s) critics are racists posits an ethereal realm where intentions matter and factual outcomes don’t. Self-righteous liberals claim moral superiority based on their outcome-free intentions with social disintegration as their product.

Put differently, the two-Party back-and-forth between explicit and implicit racism since the rise of neoliberalism has had little to no impact on institutional racism. The evidence of difference that has been offered is economic cycles through which both institutional racism and the immiseration / evisceration of the laboring classes have persisted. Donald Trump is the ‘explicit’ variant who used the outcomes of bi-partisan policies as misdirection to win political support. He no more caused institutional race and gender bias than Democrats have resolved it.

The broader social product is a hermetically-sealed (through tautology) apologia for the existing order. It is hardly an accident that the deep-state, the self-perpetuating bureaucracy that supports the financialized death-state (militarism and environmental catastrophe), prefers the predictable ‘liberal’ hard-right to its loose-cannon brethren. The explicit racism and classism of the belligerent hard-right risks exposing the state-of-affairs ‘managed’ into existence by plutocrats and their political servants charged with overseeing the metaphorical plantation.

Graph: ‘Resistance’ to racism and sexism posed in terms of competition between the major political Parties confuses bi-partisan class warfare with product branding. Self-righteous posturing by liberals regarding racism and sexism serves as cover for the institutional perpetuation of both. Divide and conquer to protect ruling class gains is the intended outcome. Source: Cosmopolitan / U.S. Election Project.

Plutocrats and their servants have organized social resources so that ‘qualifications’ fall into their laps through the normal course of existing. This insight was behind the New Deal build-out of public education and Great Society programs of economic inclusion— without public provision of these ‘qualifications’ serve mainly to perpetuate the existing order. And even with these, a parallel private system that provides class distinction serves to undermine the leveling effect of public institutions.

The national Democrats’ con that they oppose racism while they support the institutions that perpetuate it links dog-whistle racial politics like the Clinton’s 1994 crime bill to the national Democrats ‘positive’ support for the capitalist institutions that perpetuate economic exclusion. The Clintons (and Barack Obama) aren’t racists— how could they be?—even though they supported mass incarceration, mass deportation and predatory lending by Wall Street that devastated communities of color.

Graph: Economic inequality is posed as a fact of nature as cover for political capture of the professional class for the benefit of the ruling plutocracy. In this context the liberal charge that social disintegration is being led by working class racists requires near-total ignorance of the mechanisms of economic distribution combined with class-based contempt for the working class and poor. Source: CBO.

The fear-mongering storyline of White backlash used to explain Donald Trump’s election perpetuates the myth of democratic rule in a plutocracy. It assumes that the political class is led from below when all evidence has it that wealth = political power. The political class does the bidding of the rich and the institutions they control. Race and gender bias are evidence of the mal-distribution of social resources, not the cause.

What anti-establishment voters, and those who consciously withheld their votes, got right in the recent election is that the illusion of choice provided by the major Parties is anti-politics. Liberals, as guardians of the status quo, are class warriors on the side of economic mal-distribution and the immiseration of the laboring classes and poor for the benefit of the rich. The ease with which the misdirection of ‘deplorables’ was sold illustrates the conundrum confronting any actual Left political movement.

Unclear Nuclear Pathways for 2017

Manpreet Sethi



The inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the US has just taken place. A lot of what happens in the nuclear domain in the coming 12 months will be dependent on the direction that is adopted by the new president as he settles in. Every fresh incoming administration normally brings in its own policies, and hence changes in economic, political, foreign policy and nuclear issues are always expected. But, the uncertainties being felt this time are more than usual. The statements and tweets made by Donald Trump as a presidential candidate and later as president-elect indicate a reversal of many of the previous administration's nuclear-related policies and actions. For the moment then, Trump looks like the proverbial bull in the nuclear china shop, and all are closely watching to see what all breaks, or not, under his nuclear watch. A few of the issues that will vie for his attention fairly quickly can be highlighted amid an as yet unclear nuclear path for 2017.

The first of the issues that can be expected to be handled by President Trump is the resetting of US relations with Russia. There is no doubt that this particular relationship has been left in a sorry state by the outgoing administration. Trump will most likely act quickly to arrest the trend and mend the situation. Will he do this by making compromises on sanctions, as he has indicated earlier? Will he link these actions to Russian concessions on nuclear arms control? Does the US itself have an inclination to undertake arms control given that it is looking to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal? After having been in a nuclear weapons reduction mode for some time, the US now appears to have moved in favour of modernisation. Before demitting office, Barack Obama approved a budget of US$ 1 trillion to be spent over three decades for this purpose. President Donald Trump has indicated the intention to stay the course and even tweeted that the US would not shy away from an arms race if his rivals so desired. While neither Russia nor China may rise to the bait, both are nevertheless engaged in modernising or building their own nuclear capabilities as per their visions of credible deterrence. 

As the US, Russia, and China proceed with their nuclear weapons programmes with an eye on one another, their behaviour and actions will have an impact on the global nuclear picture with ripples being felt in India and Pakistan too. Better US-Russia relations can be expected to have a positive fallout on the overall atmospherics. They may even help revive some of the bilateral US-Russia arms control agreements that have recently fallen by the wayside owing to lack of communication from both sides. But unless they specifically target arms control, a mere thawing of relations is unlikely to arrest the ongoing nuclear modernisation currently underway across all nuclear-armed states. 

A second issue sure to grab Trump’s attention is the nuclear agreement with Iran. In January 2017, international diplomacy should have been celebrating the first anniversary of the Implementation Day of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that brought a negotiated halt to the suspected military oriented activities of Iran’s nuclear programme. 2016 saw Iran living up to its promises under the agreement. It dismantled centrifuges that could have led it to enrich uranium, shipped out of the country enriched uranium in excess of what the JCPOA allows it to keep, removed the core from the Arak reactor that could have helped it build plutonium, and met the necessary requirements of IAEA inspections. In return, the country gained from a lifting of a majority of the sanctions imposed upon it. There was an upsurge in its oil production and exports, and many international leaders made a beeline to Tehran to establish new political and economic relations. 

However, instead of celebrating the successful conclusion of the first year of the JCPOA, the past few months have been spent in trying to read the tea leaves on how President Trump (and the Republicans now dominating Congress) would treat the Iran deal on assuming office. Trump has been vocal about his dissatisfaction with the JCPOA, and even let it be known that he intended to “rip open the deal” once elected. Now that he is the elected president, will he go through with the threat? Would he find it in US interest to do so, thereby destroying years of negotiations? Iranian leaders have signalled that any such act would mean the end of the agreement for Iran. They have been reminding the international community that the JCPOA involved multiple parties and that it cannot be for the US to kill it unilaterally. The other major powers - Russia, China and the European Union - too have invested heavily in the deal. The Iranian appeal, therefore, is to the rest of the actors to use their good offices to make good sense prevail on the new US administration. 

A third thorny nuclear issue that will seek Trump’s attention pertains to North Korea's provocative nuclear actions and behaviour. It may be recalled that in 2016, the country not only conducted two nuclear tests – in January and May – but also announced that it had miniaturised its nuclear weapons enough to be able to deliver them atop a ballistic missile. These actions and announcements were attention-seeking gestures, hoping to get the US to agree to conduct some kind of direct negotiation with Kim Jong-un, along the lines of those with Iran. However, the US was hesitant to be seen as negotiating with Pyongyang with the latter apparently holding a gun to it.  President Obama appeared content to leave the issue to be resolved by China, which nevertheless had little initiative to do so since it kept the US unsettled. China also claimed that its leverage upon North Korea was diminishing. With the change in administration, there is once again a window of opportunity for the US to take a serious relook at the issue. President Trump’s long experience as a successful businessman and his behaviour now as a politician show him to be a risk-taker. North Korea is obviously keen to engage directly with the US and there may be a deal here to look out for.

The North Korean issue also has special significance since it is tied up with relations between the US and its allies in Northeast Asia. Given that Donald Trump, during his campaign speeches, had mentioned that Japan and South Korea must bear a greater burden of the nuclear umbrella extended to them, including the BMD deployments, the two countries are anxious about how the North Korean imbroglio would be resolved.

As President Trump grants some clarity on his nuclear policies towards Russia, Iran, North Korea, and by extension, towards Japan and South Korea, he will be shaping the nuclear discourse that will dominate this year and beyond. Interestingly, amid this flux, a conference to negotiate a nuclear ban treaty is planned for 2017. The UN First Committee Resolution passed in October 2016 that calls for negotiations on a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading to their total elimination, has not yet caught the attention of President Trump. Of course, it may be recalled that the Obama administration had not succumbed to its charms either. But as the momentum for the conference builds up, it could catch Trump's fancy. After all, former President Reagan immortalised himself through the sanity he brought to the nuclear arms race when he and Soviet Premier Gorbachev pronounced in 1988 at Reykjavik that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought. Who knows if Trump might grow to like the idea of disarmament and does something about it - after all, he is a risk-taker.

Meanwhile, it can only be hoped that President Trump understands the significance of the Nuclear Security Summits (NSS) that concluded last year. While the usual politics can be expected to get in the way of a Republican president acknowledging merit in a former Democrat president's initiative, there is no doubt that the NSS process achieved success in raising awareness and political action on nuclear security at the highest level in countries across the globe. The consensus so built and momentum acquired in setting international benchmarks for national efforts must not be lost. While Trump has not paid much attention to this issue, nuclear terrorism remains a palpable threat and the world cannot afford to lose out on efforts towards securing nuclear material and technologies from non-state actors. 

The nuclear pathways that the US adopts will become clear in the coming months. Undoubtedly, their impact will be felt worldwide as the fashion on the nuclear ramp is set by Washington. President Trump may believe in “America First” for many of his policy decisions, but on the nuclear front, one hopes he realises that he carries the burden of international security, too.

Central Bank governor says Sri Lankan economy “hospitalised”

Saman Gunadasa

Early this month, Sri Lanka’s Central Bank Governor Indrajit Coomaraswamy presented the financial institution’s “Road Map for 2017 and Beyond.”

Last June, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a $US1.5 billion loan to the Sri Lankan government in order to avert a balance of payment crisis. The Central Bank is working closely with the IMF to ensure that the international bank’s loan conditions are fulfilled.

Coomaraswamy said Sri Lanka was the only country in the Asia-Pacific region, apart from Afghanistan, under IMF conditions. “Having an IMF program is the economic equivalent to being in hospital,” he said. “We are not in the ICU [intensive care unit] but clearly in hospital.”

Coomaraswamy’s remarks, which underscored the depth of the county’s economic crisis, were underpinned by his insistence that the government had to keep implementing the IMF’s austerity measures.

The three-year IMF loan was provided under the bank’s Extended Fund Facility, on condition that Colombo imposes economic measures similar to those inflicted on the Greek working class in 2014–2015. These include a 50 percent reduction in the fiscal deficit to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2020, lifting the value added tax (VAT), other increases in government revenue and the privatisation of state-owned enterprises.

Last November, the government announced its 2017 budget, raising the VAT by 4 to 15 percent on all goods and services including essential items and cutting the fertiliser subsidy to farmers. It reduced expenditure on primary and secondary education by 50 percent, and by 30 percent for higher education. Health spending was also wound back by almost 7 percent and cuts imposed on public sector employees’ pensions.

In addition, since 2015, the Central Bank has allowed the rupee exchange rate to be decided by market forces, resulting in a devaluation of the currency by more than 10 percent, which has pushed up the prices of all imported goods.

These attacks come on top of IMF-dictated policies introduced by the previous government of President Mahinda Rajapakse in exchange for a $2.6 billion loan in 2009. That loan also sought to avert a balance of payment crisis, aggravated by Colombo’s massive expenditure on the communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and the impact of the 2008–09 global financial crisis.

The Rajapakse government maintained a wage freeze on public sector employees between 2006 and 2015, imposed various taxes on essentials, cut the fertiliser subsidy to farmers and intensified the privatisation of education.

Brutal state attacks were launched against workers and the poor opposing these measures. Police killed one worker when Katunayake free trade zone employees took strike action to defend their pensions. Another person was killed by police when fishermen protested against government cuts to kerosene subsidies.

The key purpose of the Central Bank’s “Road Map” is to insist that the current Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government enforces and extends the IMF’s austerity demands. The IMF measures were the only “medicine” available, Coomaraswamy declared.

To emphasise the point, Coomaraswamy stressed the underlying weakness of the economy. “Being a twin [fiscal and trade] deficit country increases vulnerability in an uncertain and volatile global economic environment,” he said.

According to the Central Bank’s figures, exports declined by 2.6 percent in the first 10 months of 2016, contributing to an increase in the trade deficit by 3.7 percent to $US7.2 billion. The IMF previously predicted a 5 percent annual growth of Sri Lanka’s GDP. This has now been downgraded to 4.5 percent.

Coomaraswamy warned that “unsustainable budget deficits boosted excess and untenable demand in the economy,” resulting in inflationary pressures and high interest rates. A higher deficit, he said, would further affect the balance of payments and the exchange rate.

The Central Bank governor declared that “consensus must be built among politicians, policy makers and the general public on the need for cohesive reforms.” In other words, the government must make the necessary political preparations to force the working class and oppressed masses to submit to the IMF’s demands.

Coomaraswamy’s remarks express the nervousness in ruling circles about growing social tensions as key sections of the working class, students and farmers have come forward to protest the government’s attacks on living standards.

In September-October last year, hundreds of thousands of plantation workers held strikes, demonstrations and pickets demanding higher wages. In December, tens of thousands of postal employees took part in two-day strikes demanding pay increases. University students continue to demonstrate against the privatisation of education.

Coomaraswamy insisted that the austerity measures would “strengthen the medium term stability of the economy.” In the context of increasingly volatile global conditions, these claims are a mirage.

In December, the IMF itself warned that the Central Bank “should be ready to tighten policy if global vulnerabilities grow. We emphasise this readiness.”

“Readiness” is a codeword for even more brutal social attacks on the living conditions of workers and the poor.

Any economic growth that has occurred has benefited a small wealthy elite and international investors. According to a recent Oxfam report, “the richest 10 percent of the population in countries like Sri Lanka, China, India, Indonesia, Laos and Bangladesh have seen their share of income increase by more than 15 percent,” matched by a 15 percent fall in the income share of the bottom 10 percent of the population.

The Central Bank governor’s program is for the further enrichment of international financiers and Sri Lanka’s wealthiest layers. The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, the country’s peak business organisation, issued a statement after Coomaraswamy’s speech, describing it as “an encouraging outlook for the Sri Lankan business community.”

Industrial court endorses sacking of Australian miners after union betrayal

Oscar Grenfell 

The full bench of the Fair Work Commission (FWC), the federal government’s industrial tribunal, last week endorsed the sacking of 83 workers at Anglo-American’s German Creek mine near Middlemount in Central Queensland. The dismissals took place in November, amid strike action targeting the mining giant’s move to cut wages and conditions via a new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement (EBA).

The ruling is the latest in a series of interventions by the FWC into industrial disputes that underscore its role as an apparatus of the corporate elite. It is the second time that the commission has backed Anglo-American’s job cuts at German Creek—the full bench rejected a trade union appeal against the initial decision last November.

In recent decisions, the FWC also backed AGL’s moves to slash the wages of 570 workers at the Loy Yang power plant in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, by up to 65 percent. In December, it endorsed 1,600 job cuts by Essential Energy. In other cases, the commission has banned industrial action by energy and other workers.

The plight of the sacked miners, who have been left jobless amid a marked slowdown in the mining sector, is a direct result of the activities of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU). Far from in any way challenging FWC and its repressive powers, the union acts as its policeman in suppressing strike action.

The union did everything it could to isolate workers at the mine after they went on strike on August 19. Despite widespread support for the German Creek miners, the CFMEU blocked any strike action by workers at other mines. Having worn the striking workers down over more than four months, the union ended the industrial action at the beginning of January, without the workers securing any of their demands.

The FWC’s re-affirmed decision establishes a precedent for the victimisation of any workers who take industrial or political action against the corporate onslaught on jobs, wages and conditions.

The commission made clear that the “protections” for workers contained in Fair Work Australia laws, introduced by the previous Labor government with the backing of the CFMEU and every other union, are a sham. Under the legislation, it is supposedly illegal for employers to sack workers for taking legally-protected industrial action.

The full bench stated: “Employees who engage in protected industrial action are ‘protected’ in that their action is not unlawful under the [Fair Work] act and that they are immune from certain civil and criminal liability for engaging in the action.”

But this did not mean, the FWC declared, that an “employer of employees who take protected industrial action is not able to respond to protected industrial action, or to circumstances created by such action, in a manner that addresses its legitimate business interests, provided it meets its obligations under the act.”

In other words, while certain provisions in the legislation may prevent workers from being jailed, or subjected to massive fines, for taking industrial action during an EBA bargaining period, there is nothing to stop employers from sacking striking workers if it furthers their “business interests.”

The company claimed that during the strike it tested new efficiency measures, which caused the retrenchments. The union argued that the German Creek mine was being operated by the same number of employees, but with contractors replacing the striking workers.

The decision was hailed by industry groups and business figures, and prominently reported in the financial press. Tara Diamond of the Australian Mines and Metals Association declared that “reducing the mine’s labour costs was a commercial opportunity identified by the company as a result of the circumstances it was put in by its striking workforce.”

The FWC ruling appears to be at odds with a decision by a single Federal Court judge at the beginning of this month to grant interim orders temporarily reinstating two of the sacked miners. The judge declared that the retrenchments were not “bona fide” because they were taken in retaliation for the strike action.

The CFMEU had hailed the Federal Court decision, and used it to bludgeon workers into accepting the end of the strike, without any concessions from the company. Union officials touted future court action as the way forward, with CFMEU district vice president Glenn Powers stating: “Let me tell you this is far from over. We’ve got all sorts of things going on in the courts.”

Powers’ comments were in line with the union’s attempts to keep workers shackled within the framework of Fair Work’s draconian industrial laws.

The sacking of the German Creek miners is part of a sweeping restructure of the mining sector, being assisted by the CFMEU and other unions. At German Creek, Anglo-American is stepping up its use of casual and contract labour as part of a global overhaul of its operations. In 2015, the corporation announced it would sack 85,000 workers around the world and sell-off 60 percent of its mining assets, amid a slump in commodity prices.

The use of contract labor is already widespread in the industry. Contract workers are grossly underpaid and have few rights. Labour hire company, Delta SBD, for instance has reportedly slashed contract wages by 40 percent over the past two years.

Other operators are also carrying out substantial restructures. BHP Billiton is seeking to enforce a three-year wage freeze and sweeping cuts to conditions at its Queensland mines at Peak Downs, Saraji and Goonyella.

The CFMEU has already enforced the destruction of thousands of jobs across the sector. An estimated 4,600 coal jobs have been cut in the Mackay region of Queensland since 2012. Another 5,500 miners have been sacked in neighbouring New South Wales since 2014. Last June, the National Australia Bank predicted that 50,000 more jobs would be axed in the mining and resources sector during the ensuing two years.

Video game industry strike in US now second-longest in screen actors’ history

Kevin Martinez

Voice actors in the video game industry have now been on strike since October 21 against selected companies, including Activision, Electronic Arts, Disney, and Warner Brothers. The 99-day strike, called by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), is now the second longest in SAG history.

The walkout is over pay, residuals and work conditions. It has now surpassed the three-month strike in 1980 when actors and management were involved in a battle over contract terms for pay TV and videocassettes. That bitter strike occurred just a year before President Ronald Reagan (the former president of SAG who aided the anticommunist witch-hunt in the union in 1947-52) fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers, initiating a decade of government-backed union busting and wage cutting by US corporations.

The longest walkout by SAG and AFTRA was the 183-day strike in 2000 against the advertising industry over commercial work compensation for basic cable and Internet. The current strike is the first in the history of the video gaming industry, the first actors’ strike in 17 years and the first since SAG and AFTRA merged in 2012.

Despite the intransigence of the giant media conglomerates, the union is isolating the struggle and has limited it to toothless appeals to management. SAG-AFTRA only ordered its members to stop working at 11 companies, two of which have since gone out of business since last year. The last time the union held a picket against one of the companies, Insomniac Games, was last November. A strike rally and token picket will be held on February 2.

The main issue in contention is residuals. The union wants the companies to either pay an upfront bonus or backend residuals for successful video games. Management has refused to budge on this question.

The union has asked for “full-scale payment” for every 500,000 video game units sold, with a maximum of four secondary payments if a game sells two million copies and every two million more. In addition, the union wants the industry to reduce the recording time for “vocally stressful” sessions to two hours, instead of four, to prevent an actor from hurting their voice.

The union is also asking for greater safety regulations for stunt work, as well as greater transparency. One of the demands is that workers be informed of the title and subject of the project they are working on, which is standard practice within the entertainment industry.

The companies reportedly offered a nine percent wage hike and additional compensation of $950 per game based on the number of voice acting sessions an actor performed for each game. Management knows fully well that such meager concessions will not impact the massive amount of profits they will make.

The unions have limited their strike to only video games that have gone into production after February 17, 2015. The union has blocked any common struggle with workers throughout the entertainment industry who face similar conditions at work and are struggling to keep a roof over their heads as well.

In a letter to SAG-AFTRA members, Gabrielle Carteris, president of the union, implored workers to “send management the message that resolving the strike will benefit everyone.” Workers are encouraged to attend the February 2 rally, the latest in a line of such protest, while the unions continue to promote the Democratic Party whose anti-working class policies paved the way for the Trump administration, the most right-wing government in US history.

In a related development, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) approved a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) that would increase wages by a mere 2.5 percent the first year and three percent in the second and third years of the agreement. These increases, which have been hailed by the union as an economic advancement for its members, do not begin to keep up with inflation and the soaring cost of rent and other living expenses.

The current master contract between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP will expire on June 30, 2017, and the Writers Guild of America’s contract will expire on May 1. The SAG-AFTRA national board approved its negotiating package with AMPTP on January 21. This new package will ensure that workers’ demands are limited at the very start of negotiations.

Hamon presents pro-war, law-and-order program in French elections

Anthony Torres 

Benoît Hamon, after having beaten former Prime Minister Manuel Valls into second place in the Socialist Party (PS) presidential primary, is placed to become the PS’s candidate, according to polls.

Hamon’s rise since the beginning of the primary campaign reflects broad discontent with the current PS government, as well as media coverage for Hamon’s call for a universal minimum income paid by the state to everyone. Valls, though his poll ratings benefited as prime minister from media promotion of his law-and-order policies as interior and then prime minister, was suddenly overtaken by a relatively minor candidate. According to a BVA-Salesforce poll, Hamon is set to beat Valls with 52 percent of the vote in the second round.

Nonetheless, any attempt to register opposition to the PS’s agenda of war, austerity and police state measures through a vote for Hamon is doomed to failure. Despite media promotion of Hamon as “left” due to his promise to set up a universal income, Hamon defends a foreign policy of war and a law-and-order policy oriented to the security forces.

It represents in the final analysis an attempt to continue the policies of PS President François Hollande. In fact, in the first primary debate, Hamon said that Hollande’s government left “a feeling that things were partially done, as if we left many subjects in mid-stream.”

As the installation of Donald Trump in the White House underlines the rising danger of large-scale war between the major powers, Hamon calls for an offensive of French imperialism. In foreign policy, he is aligned with the CIA and the sections of American and European imperialism that are the most hostile against Russia, and who want to continue the war in Syria.

Hamon has attacked the cease-fire organized by Russia and Turkey from the standpoint of defending the influence of Washington and the major European powers, who provoked the war by arming Islamist “rebels” against the Syrian regime. “I do not want a cease-fire accord in Syria that would come about, as is the case now, without the United Nations, without the European Union, without the Americans and without the Arab societies,” he declared.

To justify a French policy of continuing to finance the “rebel”-held areas in Syria while opposing financial aid to the Syrian people, Hamon said: “Spending money on zones controlled by Bashar al Assad, I do not see very well why this should be a priority of the European Union, when there is in Syria a wide range of other potential partners, like the quasi-autonomous and self-ruled cities. We, on our part, do not have to limit ourselves to simply rebuilding what was methodically destroyed by the Russians and Assad’s regime.”

As a representative of French imperialism, Hamon calls for using military means to reinforce the influence of France in its former colonial empire and sphere of influence, as in the wars in Libya and Mali. Asked if he would have intervened in Africa as did President Nicolas Sarkozy and Hollande, he said: “If a sovereign state asked you to intervene militarily to prevent the rise of a jihadist ‘state’ just across the Mediterranean? Of course I would have intervened.”

Hamon is resolutely pro-war. He is the candidate that demands the greatest increase in the military budget, to 3 percent of GDP, more than the 2 percent demanded by NATO: “If we want to conserve a level of investment that does not sacrifice our conventional forces to maintaining our nuclear capacity and deterrent, we will have to increase the defence budget. This means … that we will have to say, including to the Europeans … that investments made by France, so by French taxpayers, should be excluded from the calculation of budget deficits.”

Even if Hamon succeeded in convincing the EU not to count the military budget when calculating whether France had violated EU limits on budget deficits, spending billions of euros on the army would require slashing social spending to extract the cost of the military buildup from the workers.

Hamon, who has said there must “without a doubt be more” policemen in France, is calling for a massive increase in police force levels to make it possible to send troops—currently deployed inside France under Operation Watchman and the state of emergency—to fight in foreign wars. “It’s no longer possible to continue with the [current] Operation Watchman, which mobilizes professional soldiers who objectively would be more useful on the ground, and in training, than on guard duty in front of our buildings. So we need to strengthen the gendarmerie reserves, the armed forces reserve, to complement Operation Watchman, which should keep fewer professional soldiers busy.”

The call to boost the security forces, taken up by the Hollande administration, shows that Hamon is fundamentally on the same reactionary line. The criticisms he has made of the state of emergency imposed by the PS are purely tactical, insofar as they aim to make the police deployment more efficient and make it easier to fight foreign wars.

The media are not stressing Hamon’s support for Hollande’s wars and police-state policies. They are presenting Hamon as the PS’s left wing, citing his proposal to set up a universal income paying everyone somewhere between €600 and €800 per month.

Asked by Libération, “Does this mean that we have to abandon any hope in [economic] growth?” he replied: “Growth will not come back. And if it does return, it will not reduce either poverty or social inequality. And it does not mean anything about the level of health and education, which can develop independently of growth levels. GDP can no longer be an objective when it is obtained via a consumerist and productivist development model.”

Hamon’s proposition combines demoralization and charlatanry. He has nothing to propose to the workers besides accepting deindustrialization, mass unemployment and the pauperization of the population, reduced to an €800 salary on which it is impossible to live decently. While Hamon claims that it is possible to defend health and education while accepting the destruction of industry and the productive forces, this is false.

Moreover, such a measure would require an expenditure of hundreds of billions of euros that Hamon’s backers inside the bourgeoisie would not tolerate—a state of affairs that doubtless is not lost on Hamon. His proposal is simply made to give himself a bit of empty “left” cover, and, according to polls, two-thirds of the French population says they are hostile to his universal income scheme.

White House to issue executive order on “safe zones” in Syria, ban on Muslim immigrants and refugees

Niles Niemuth

US President Donald Trump declared in an extended interview with ABC News broadcast Wednesday that he will sign an executive order directing authorities to implement US-controlled “safe zones” in Syria. The order would also block the entry of refugees and immigrants from a number of majority-Muslim countries, including Syria.

During the presidential campaign, Trump called for a complete ban on Muslim immigration into the US. He played up fears over the admittance of a few thousand Syrian refugees displaced by the years-long civil war in that country fueled by the Obama administration.

In the interview with David Muir, during which the president adopted the tone of a mafia boss, Trump expounded on his planned immigration restrictions. “It's going to be very hard to come in. Right now, it's very easy to come in. It’s gonna be very, very hard.” Trump also declared that he plans to “absolutely do safe zones in Syria for the people.”

Coinciding with Trump’s interview, a draft of the draconian and unconstitutional executive order, billed as a measure for “protecting the nation from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals,” was leaked to the media.

The order would suspend immigration to the US from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and Somalia for 30 days and suspend the admittance of individuals under the US Refugee Admissions Program for 120 days. The admission of refugees from Syria into the US will be suspended indefinitely.

Several caveats would allow for the entry of refugees from Syria and the other countries on a case-by-case basis as well as allow the processing and admittance of religious minorities, i.e., non-Muslims.

Other restrictive measures spelled out in the document include the full implementation of a biometric entry-exit tracking system and new restrictions on the granting of non-immigrant travelers’ visas.

In line with Trump’s remarks, the draft order outlines a process for the establishment of “safe zones,” justified by the indefinite suspension of the admission of immigrants and refugees from Syria into the US: “Pursuant to the cessation of refugee processing for Syrian nationals, the Secretary of State, in conjunction with the Secretary of Defense, is directed within 90 days of the date of this order to produce a plan to provide safe areas in Syria and in the surrounding region in which Syrian nationals displaced from their homeland can await firm settlement, such as repatriation or potential third-country resettlement.”

Moscow, which has intervened in the Syrian civil war to prop up President Bashar al-Assad, responded to Trump’s announcement of his plan to implement “safe zones” by denying that it had any input on the decision and warned of potential consequences.

“Our American partners did not consult with Russia [regarding the ‘safe zones’]. It is their sovereign decision,” Dimitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told reporters on Thursday. “It’s important to make sure that this does not further aggravate the situation with refugees. Evidently, all the possible consequences should be taken into account,” he warned.

Former President Barack Obama had resisted the imposition of safe zones in Syria, a policy fiercely advocated by Democratic advisers and war hawks such as former Secretary of State and Trump rival Hillary Clinton. The protection of such areas with a no-fly zone could spark a clash between US and Russian jet fighters, leading to all-out war between the nuclear-armed powers.

However, DEBKAfile, a website with ties to Israeli military intelligence, reported that an agreement has been worked out between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to carve up Syria into three separate spheres of influence divided between the US, Russia and Turkey. The deal reportedly requires all Iranian military forces as well as associated forces belonging to Shiite militias and Hezbollah to leave the country.

The plan outlined by DEBKAfile would involve the US taking military control over the area of the country east of the Euphrates River, as well as a portion of the south bordering the Golan Heights and northern Jordan. Approximately 7,500 US Special Forces currently based in Jordan would reportedly deploy to southeast Syria.

The rest of the country would be divided between Russia and Turkey, with Moscow controlling all territory west of the Euphrates except for a narrow stretch in northern Syria administered by Ankara.

While the alleged plan has not been confirmed by the Trump administration, it does line up with previous proposals made by Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, to deploy large numbers of US troops to Syria under the pretense of defeating ISIS and other Islamist militia groups.

In a 2015 interview with Der Spiegel, Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, outlined his vision for an expanded US intervention in Syria and a Balkanization of the Middle East, carving the region into spheres of influence and military control.

“We can learn some lessons from the Balkans. Strategically, I envision a breakup of the Middle East crisis area into sectors in the way we did back then, with certain nations taking responsibility for these sectors,” Flynn stated. “The United States could take one sector, Russia as well and the Europeans another one. The Arabs must be involved in that sort of military operation, as well, and must be part of every sector.”

Breakdown in Mexico-US relations as Trump threatens trade war

Eric London

On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced the construction of a wall along the southern border of the United States, provoking a diplomatic crisis without precedent in the modern history of US-Mexico relations. When Trump repeated his ultimatum that Mexico pay for the cost of construction, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto cancelled a visit to the White House that had been planned for January 31.

Following Peña Nieto’s announcement yesterday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer announced that the US government would fund the wall by imposing a 20 percent tax on Mexican imports. The New York Times wrote that “decades of friendly relations between the nations--on matters involving trade, security and migration—seemed to be unraveling.”

Though the White House later said a final decision to impose the import tax had not yet been made, the possibility of such a measure threatens to launch a trade war with profound implications for both countries. The move comes as the US threatens to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has formed the basis of close US-Mexican trade ties since its enactment in 1994.

The US is Mexico’s largest trading partner, with 80 percent of Mexican exports going to the United States. Mexico is the third largest US trading partner, behind China and Canada. Under NAFTA, American corporations have relied on the use of cheap Mexican labor for manufacturing. Within minutes of Spicer’s announcement of a possible import tax, the Mexican press ran the news with banner online headlines.

Spicer’s announcement is the latest in a series of provocative moves by the US government aimed at deliberately escalating tensions between the two countries. The Trump administration is treating Mexico like a semi-colonial subject and threatening to impose humiliating and unacceptable conditions as the price for continued trade relations.

Speaking yesterday at a gathering of Republicans in Philadelphia, Trump called for the “immediate construction of the border wall” and said the US will “generate revenue from Mexico that will pay for the wall if we decide to go that route.” He said he will not meet with Peña Nieto “unless Mexico is going to treat the United States fairly.” He reiterated his pledge to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he called “a total disaster.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced yesterday that they were prepared to move forward on constructing the wall.

Meanwhile, Trump is rolling out dictatorial immigration measures that place many of the millions of Mexican citizens living in the US in serious danger. Trump has laid the framework for a dragnet deportation offensive, issuing executive orders adding 5,000 border patrol agents, tripling the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, enlisting local police in efforts to round up and arrest immigrants and mandating the incarceration of hundreds of thousands who are waiting for a court date.

This program amounts to the establishment of a concentration camp system for immigrant incarceration. Trump defended these fascistic proposals by proclaiming that “the hour of justice for the American worker has arrived.”

The offensive against Mexico and the immigrant population in the United States is a forewarning that Trump’s “America First” program involves an aggressive push to expand US imperialism’s domination of Latin America, at the expense of China, whose economic footprint in the region has been growing in recent years.

John Kelly, Trump’s new secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is a Marine Corps general who formerly headed the US military’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), responsible for overseeing US military action in Central America, South America and the Caribbean. Kelly has previously said that “homeland defense does not begin at the ‘one yard line’ of our Southwest border, but instead extends forward, throughout the hemisphere, to keep threats far from our nation’s shores.”

During his confirmation hearing earlier in January, Kelly said he supports the construction of a wall, but that a “physical barrier will not do the job.” He told the Senate: “I believe the defense of the southwest border starts 1,500 miles south,” and that border defense cannot “be attempted as an endless series of ‘goal-line stands’ on the one-foot line at the official ports of entry or along the thousands of miles of border between this country and Mexico.” Thirty-seven of 48 Democrats voted to confirm Kelly last week. He sailed through the Senate with an 88-11 vote.

Peña Nieto’s decision to abandon the negotiations came after weeks in which the Mexican president obsequiously appealed to Trump, despite the latter’s claim that Mexicans are “rapists” and “criminals.” Earlier this month, Peña Nieto appointed Luis Videgaray as his foreign minister in an unpopular move that was widely seen as a friendly gesture to Trump. Videgaray was responsible for orchestrating Trump’s visit to Mexico during the US general election and the backlash forced him to resign as finance minister in September.

Peña Nieto came under irresistible pressure to cancel the meeting as his government faces widespread popular hostility due to both his appeals to the hated Trump and the rising cost of living. Protests have continued across Mexico throughout January after the government announced at the end of 2016 a 20 percent gasoline price hike as part of its efforts to privatize the state-owned oil company, Pemex. Peña Nieto’s poll ratings are the lowest of any Mexican president in the modern era—he is likely the second most hated politician in Mexico, behind Trump.

There is considerable nervousness within the Mexican ruling class about the implications of a trade war with the US and the prospects of growing social opposition within Mexico, which Trump is using as leverage in his efforts to renegotiate NAFTA. The Mexican peso fell 1.1 percent against the dollar yesterday and is down 14 percent since Trump’s election. Ford, GM and Fiat Chrysler have all announced they are pulling back investments in Mexico in anticipation of massive corporate giveaways by the Trump administration in the US. Consumer prices have already been rising with the cost of gasoline, and if the Mexican government takes retaliatory measures on imports from the US, prices would likely rise further.

The policy of hyper-American nationalism will also prove disastrous for the working class in the United States. Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told Bloomberg that “Mexico doesn’t pay for the wall, American consumers who shop at places that import, like Walmart and Target, pay for the wall, making it a regressive tax supporting a dumb, wasteful idea.” Trump’s provocative maneuvers against Mexico are aimed at paving the way for the super-exploitation of the country by American corporations, which will enrich themselves at the expense of workers in both countries.

Workers in Mexico and the US are tied organically through the process of production and through family connections and the large presence of Mexican workers throughout the United States. Trump’s attempts to whip up a toxic anti-immigrant climate are aimed not only against Mexican workers, but at paving the way for further attacks on the wages, living standards and social programs of workers of all races and nationalities in the US. This can only be opposed by uniting Mexican and American workers on the basis of a common socialist and internationalist program.

Trump’s meeting with the UK’s Theresa May and the US/European conflict

Chris Marsden

UK Prime Minister Theresa May expected today’s meeting with US President Donald Trump to be a political coup. It was to prove that Britain had a powerful ally in pursuing its exit from the European Union and could obtain a US trade deal to compensate for the possible loss of access to Europe’s Single Market. Trump’s support could even strengthen May’s hand in negotiations with Germany and France.

It is a measure of the rapid deterioration in economic and political relations between the US and the rest of the world that May’s visit has instead prompted bitter recriminations from leading voices representing British imperialism.

May arrives in Washington on the eve of triggering Article 50 and initiating a two-year negotiated exit from the EU. The British ruling class is deeply divided over Brexit, with the dominant sections that supported a Remain vote in last year’s referendum fearful of losing access to the European market. In an attempt to straddle this divide, May pledged that she would explain to Trump that she did not see Brexit as “a decision about breaking up the EU.”

No one believes that such promises have any significance. Commenting on Trump’s inaugural speech pledging a policy of “America First” protectionism, Martin Wolf warned in the Financial Times that the United States’ break with free trade and support for punitive tariffs means that “Its victims, particularly China, are also likely to retaliate... Mr Xi’s China cannot replace the US: that would take cooperation with Europeans and other Asian powers. The more likely outcome is collapse into a trade policy free-for-all.”

Fellow columnist Philip Stephens declared of Trump, “On every measure—free trade, climate change, NATO, Russia, Iran—his views collide with Britain’s national interests,” including his support for “a great unravelling of the European project.”

Perhaps the most extraordinary response came from the Guardian ’s Marti Kettle, who wrote, alluding to the policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany, “If May thinks that waving a piece of paper signed by Trump offering a US trade deal will be viewed as a triumph, she is wrong. It could make her not the new Margaret Thatcher but the new Neville Chamberlain.”

Trump’s ascendency is now widely understood within British and European ruling circles as marking the definitive end of the United States’ post-war role as the anchor of European integration and guarantor, through NATO, of Europe’s imperialist interests. Trump has described the EU as an economic rival to the US, a German instrument, and predicted that other countries would follow the UK’s example in leaving.

This has left the European capitalist governments scrambling to formulate a political, economic and military response.

In Germany, Social Democratic Party leader Sigmar Gabriel, who is positioning himself as a future foreign minister, declared, “Now is the time to strengthen Europe... If Trump starts a trade war with Asia and South America, it will open opportunities for us.”

In France, the centre-right candidate for this spring’s presidential election, François Fillon, travelled to Berlin Monday to deliver a speech to the Konrad Adenauer Foundation on how to defend Europe’s place “between Donald Trump’s United States, Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China.” He urged deeper integration of the EU, including a European defence community with a joint budget for foreign military deployments and, most controversially, for Russia to be accepted as “a major partner” of Europe. His rival, former Social Democrat, now independent, Emmanuel Macron, gave the same message on the EU in the Financial Times, only shorn of any suggestion of a rapprochement with Moscow.

Trump’s threats against China, Mexico and Europe have been generally treated by bourgeois commentators as an inexplicable break from the policies pursued by his predecessors. This not only fails to explain how he has risen to the leadership of the United States, but also why similar far-right movements have emerged throughout Europe. In France, the National Front of Marine Le Pen is in the leading position in the presidential election, and Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom is leading in the polls ahead of the March general election in the Netherlands.

The resort to extreme nationalism, intimidation and violence flows inexorably from the declining global position of US imperialism, under conditions of a general breakdown of world capitalism signalled by the 2008 crash. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has sought to counteract its economic decline through an assertion of military might. However, a quarter-century later, the wars waged by Washington have proved disastrous while its economic position has continued to deteriorate, as expressed above all in the rise of China as a rival power.

This has left the US unable and unwilling to any longer place itself at the centre of a network of economic and political mechanisms, including the EU, that are seen as imposing restraints on Washington’s drive for unchallenged global hegemony. The assertion of US military supremacy in the Middle East and North Africa has metastasized into threats of war against both Moscow and Beijing, along with a growing hostility to Germany as America’s major European rival. Increasingly, the US is pursuing a policy of divide and rule throughout the continent.

The destabilisation of world politics through the efforts of Washington to buttress its position as the world’s dominant power drives the European powers into conflict with the US. This is the road of trade war and military conflict.

May’s pilgrimage to Trump can do nothing to resolve these deep and escalating conflicts. They are rooted in the irreconcilable contradictions of the world capitalist system—between a globally integrated and interdependent economy and the division of the world into antagonistic national states; and between the socialized character of global production and its subordination, through the private ownership of the means of production, to the accumulation of private profit by the ruling capitalist class.

These same contradictions are also driving the working class into struggle. Everywhere, the destruction of jobs, wages and essential services accompanies trade war and military aggression. Only the working class in Europe, the US and throughout the world, united in a revolutionary struggle against capitalism, can bring an end to austerity, political reaction and war.