John Ross - No Cold War

The New Cold War is rapidly heating up, with severe consequences for people around the world. Our series, Briefings, provides the key facts on these matters of global concern.

On 6 November, Donald Trump was elected as the 47^th President of the United States, ensuring he will return next January to the office he vacated in 2021 under the shadow of constitutional crisis and a failed far-right putsch. In doing so, he secured a more decisive and uncontested victory than in his first election in 2016, when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton while prevailing in the United States’ Electoral College system – an arcane and profoundly undemocratic mechanism through which as little as 0.03% of the country’s voting population can decide the overall winner, with outsize consequences for the entire world due to US military and economic hegemony.

Shifting electoral trends

This time Trump scored over two million more votes than Vice President Kamala Harris, becoming the first Republican Party candidate in two decades to win the national popular vote. (This outcome had far more to do with the Democrats’ loss of almost ten million votes since 2020 than with the marginal increase in Trump’s support.) More consequentially, Trump swept all seven ‘swing states’ in the Electoral College.

One of this election’s most emblematic swing state outcomes was in Michigan, home to the country’s largest proportion of Arab American voters. Here, the Biden-Harris administration’s full-throated military and diplomatic support for Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza and Lebanon arguably sealed its ignominious defeat. In the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Harris scored less than half of Biden’s 2020 vote share, falling behind Trump while anti-genocide Green Party candidate Jill Stein surged to over 18%. Nationwide exit polling by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that a stunning 53% of Muslim voters opted for Stein, recognising that both major parties are ineluctably invested in imperialist aggression abroad and violent repression of the Palestine solidarity movement at home.

While core elements of the traditional Democratic Party voter base have deserted the Biden-Harris administration over its murderous foreign policy, the incoming Trump presidency will not bring any relief to Palestinians after more than a year of full-scale genocide. Trump has stated on multiple occasions his intention to let the Netanyahu regime ‘finish the job’ in Gaza, and all indications suggest that he will maintain and indeed accelerate Biden’s push for a ‘new Middle East’ fully subordinated to Zionism and US imperialism. Judging by his past and present bellicosity towards Iran – having assassinated Qassem Soleimani and unilaterally reneged from the Iran Nuclear Deal (formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA) in his first term – he will likely display even fewer inhibitions about escalating the crisis into a full-scale regional war. One clear indicator of this is Trump’s choice of Iran hawk Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and of Brian Hook (author of the ‘maximum pressure’ strategy against Tehran in his first term) to oversee the transition.

US foreign policy: More wars

The appointment of Rubio, who has historically been almost equally hawkish on Russia, seems to pour cold water on largely speculative hopes that Trump would at least de-escalate the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. Such hopes had been buoyed by his closest foreign policy advisers’ plans to condition US military aid on Ukraine’s willingness to negotiate and accept a temporary ceasefire with Russia, while threatening to ‘open the floodgates’ if Moscow in turn refuses this arrangement. This was motivated not by any principled commitment to diplomacy but by an equally belligerent realpolitik that envisions China as the United States’ number one enemy and aims to redirect US military assets into an even more menacing encirclement of that country.

Trump insider Eldridge A. Colby has laid out an exhaustive plan to provoke China into a shooting war over Taiwan, which his proposed National Security Advisor Mike Waltz would be well-placed to execute. Indeed, Trump in his second term will almost certainly intensify the US hybrid war against China that escalated dramatically in his first term and continued unabated under Biden – not just in the military domain but in information warfare and trade policy as well. In particular, he has proposed a minimum 10-20% tariff on all imports into the United States and a steep 60% tariff on those from China. This would sharply increase consumer prices and thereby cost the average household around $3,000 per year according to the Tax Policy Center.

Empire in economic decline

Such a policy would only further immiserate a population already reeling from the Biden-Harris administration’s attack on working-class living standards – the proximate cause of the Democrats’ collapse. Real weekly wages have noticeably declined over the course of Biden’s term in office and rates of inequality increased (as of December 2023 one in nine adult women were living in poverty, including 16.6% of Black women and 16.8% of Latina women). At the same time, US billionaires’ aggregate wealth increased by an astonishing 88% (to $5.5 trillion) between March 2020 and March 2024, while capital wealth as indicated by the S&P 500 index rose by 72%. Small wonder that Trump won a majority of households earning under $100,000 a year (including a massive 74% of those reporting ‘severe hardship’ due to inflation) while losing the $100,000+ bracket: a complete reversal from the partisan breakdown in 2020 and all previous presidential elections in living memory.

Ultimately, such economic grievances garnered Trump large enough winning margins that the third-party vote share proved not at all decisive: a further humiliation for the Democrats, who mounted Herculean efforts to keep progressive anti-genocide candidates off the ballot. At first glance, the fact that many voters were disappointed with the failures of the Biden-Harris administration’s massive domestic spending initiatives would appear to complicate narratives that directly attribute Harris’s defeat to Biden’s foreign policy. But one can hardly call a country’s domestic budget ‘domestic’ when it includes its military budget – including maintaining a globe-spanning empire of over 900 military bases, investing $175 billion into the proxy war in Ukraine and $18 billion into Israel’s genocide, and when the actual military spending stands at more than double the official figure – an astounding $1.5 trillion in 2022 alone. Trumpism, in all its paradoxical extremes of isolationism and belligerence, populism and nativism, is but another morbid symptom of this violent imperial decline.

The Biden/Harris presidency has been a disaster for the living standards of ordinary U.S. people and for progress internationally. Now Harris and Trump both promise to continue the same key international policies if elected President – any differences between them are purely on tactics and not aims.

Internationally, Biden/Harris’s policies are symbolised by its unswerving arming of Israel for its genocidal war in Gaza, and now its war against Lebanon and military attacks on Iran, against the opposition of the vast majority of the world’s population as clearly demonstrated in overwhelming UN votes and enormous international protests. Biden/Harris continued this policy even against their own electoral self-interest as it brought them into direct conflict with tens of millions of Americans who were sickened by Israel’s continuing massacres in Gaza. Harris continued this policy into the Democratic Convention which nominated her, banning even a single token Palestinian voice from being heard, and beyond. Trump has pledged that Israel should “finish what they started” in Gaza, while Trump’s Vice-Presidential candidate Vance called for Israel to be allowed to “prosecute this war the way they see fit”.

To develop aggressive policies against China, Biden/Harris created the AUKUS nuclear submarine military alliance with Australia and Britain, continued Trump’s policy of tariffs against China which cost the average U.S. household over $800 a year, and for the first time has established a U.S. military headquarters in Japan. Trump pledged to escalate this policy with a tariffs package that includes 60% on imports from China which, with the price rises it would cause, would cost the average middle income U.S. household approximately $2,600 a year. Beyond these economic policies U.S. military measures aimed at China include over 300 military bases in East Asia, provocative actions around Taiwan, which undermine the One China policy which has been the core of U.S.-China relations since their establishment of diplomatic relations almost 50 years ago, and U.S. military activity in the South China Sea – that is on the coast of China and 12,000 kilometres/7,500 miles from the US.. The U.S. has been further extending its provocative Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises, increasingly drawing in states which have no connection with the Pacific whatever such as Israel.

The Biden/Harris administration’s continued policy of expanding NATO, against the promises made to Gorbachev at the time of German reunification, is the root cause in Ukraine of the largest war in Europe since 1945. The U.S./NATO is now giving support to military strikes inside a nuclear armed Russia posing an ultra-dangerous threat to peace. This war, in addition to hundreds of thousands of deaths, has struck huge economic blows against Europe and other countries. Instead of attempting to bring the war to an end Biden/Harris sent over $80 billion to Ukraine to pursue the war at the same time as the U.S. population’s real incomes were falling.

Trump’s aggressive foreign policies on Israel and China by themselves show the error of any view that he is an “isolationist”. During his first term Trump accelerated military sales, of more than $18 billion, to Taiwan. Trump as President withdrew from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), creating the possibility of stationing such missiles in Asia, and made regular U.S. so called “freedom of navigation” exercises in the South China Sea. He has called for bombing of Iran’s nuclear programme – which could not be effectively carried out without direct U.S. military participation. Neither can the slightest trust be placed in Tump’s vague statements about peace in Ukraine. Trump could already have stopped U.S. military aid to the Ukraine war by opposing the latest Congressional Bill, granting $61 billion to Ukraine. The Republicans who control the U.S. House of Representatives would not have dared to vote for this Biden/Haris supported measure if Trump had opposed it. Instead, Trump deliberately remained silent, therefore ensuring the Bill’s passing.

Harris and Trump both pledge to continue to pursue the policy of illegal, unilateral sanctions against sixty percent of low income countries, including Cuba, which has faced an economic war for seventy years.

Domestically, real inflation adjusted U.S. wages have been continuously lower than when Biden/Harris assumed office – on the latest data they were still 1.5% below the time of their inauguration. But in direct contrast to the impact on ordinary Americans, the U.S. rich under Biden/Harris achieved huge increases in wealth. The combined wealth of U.S. billionaires rose from $4.6 trillion in April 2021 to $5.7 trillion by April 2024. The U.S. share market, measured by the S&P 500, is more than 40% higher than when Biden came to office.

In summary, the result of Biden/Harris’s economic policies was a massive transfer of income and wealth from average American workers to the rich. This is fundamental reason why Biden was so unpopular, long before his health issues became transparent, and had to be dumped by the Democrats. Those U.S. “liberals” who attempt to claim that Biden’s economic policies were a success, because of abstract GDP growth, were completely out of touch with the reality of Biden/Harris’s impact on the great mass of the U.S. population.

Harris is simply making an attempt to divert the attention of the U.S. electorate, during the short dash to the election, from the fact that she supported and pledges to continue all these policies of Biden both internationally and domestically.

Trump’s domestic policies are centred on an extension of tax cuts for the rich, tariffs which will raise prices for ordinary American’s, accompanied by a racist campaign against immigrants aimed to divert attention from these effects while pledging authoritarian measures and McCarthyite witch hunts against opponents of his domestic and international policies.

Both Harris and Trump refuse to support even the most elementary reforms that would release the resources to benefit ordinary Americans – such as reducing U.S. bloated military spending necessary to sustain its aggressive foreign policy, or the U.S. grotesquely inefficient health service which costs a higher proportion of its economy and delivers lower life expectancy than any other major advanced economy.

With such policies it is certain that whether Harris or Trump is elected U.S. President they will continue their interrelated policies of aggression internationally and attacks on the US population domestically to finance and sustain this. That is, whether Harris or Trump is elected President U.S. policies of cold, and increasingly hot, wars, will therefore continue and intensify. No Cold War therefore will continue to seek to extend cooperation and dialogue with all those internationally and inside the U.S. who, whatever their difference on other issues, oppose the great threats to humanity that such aggressive U.S. policies represent.