President Donald Trump took office, for the second time, on 20 January 2025. He has proceeded to rip up the certainties of the Western alliance that has held together since the end of the Second World War. He has threatened to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal. He is waging a trade war against all-comers, including against China, Europe, Mexico and Canada; the latter to pressure Canada to integrate into the United States as the 51st state.
NATO is in tatters. For three-quarters of a century the US was the dominant state in NATO. Now the US threatens a military takeover of Greenland, a constituent part of Denmark, which is an EU member and original founder of NATO in 1949. Canada, too, is a founding member.
In addition to Trump’s threats and trade war, he has told European states to attend to their own defence against Moscow’s expansionism. Trump supports the dismemberment of Ukraine and offers no guarantee against Russia taking over the whole of that country at a later date.
With Trump’s support, political and as arms supplier, Israel is escalating (at the time of writing in mid-May) its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel’s war aims are now to re-occupy the Gaza Strip, which it withdrew from in 2005, and to corral the Palestinians into a tiny area pending expulsion. Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. Humanitarian catastrophe is hardly an adequate description of the suffering Gazan Palestinians are going through.
I say Trump is doing these things, but that is shorthand for Trump and his MAGA administration acting as agents of the capitalist ruling class of the United States. A necessary far-right “idiot”, an iconoclast, has been called forth by the billionaire class to restore their lagging fortunes on the world’s stage, especially in competition with China – “cometh the hour, cometh the man”. Trump’s radical programme of imperialist aggression abroad and war against the working class at home is not some aberrant madness. It is an expression of the US capitalist class putting its considerable weight behind far-right political actors. The same process is happening in Europe as capitalists swing from traditional centre-right parties to the far Right. Even in Aotearoa, there was a reflection of this trend for the 2023 general election when ACT raised $4.3m in donations.
We are entering a period of heightened imperial rivalries and military preparedness. The US’s abandonment of the defence of Europe is a clearing of the decks to square up with their main rival: China. This “pivot to Asia” predates Trump. It began under Barack Obama and continued under Joe Biden. The most significant military development has been the AUKUS agreement made in 2021 by Australia, UK and the United States. Under AUKUS Australia will acquire a fleet of nuclear attack submarines and provide bases for US and British nuclear submarines.
The European Union is an imperialist power block, but it is composed of independent constituent states that are not equally powerful. The EU is dominated by France and Germany, the latter having the strongest economy, largest population and greatest military forces. The imperialist rivalry in the region is over the control of weaker Eastern European states from Finland in the north to the Balkans in the south. Russian expansion westwards beyond Ukraine would not be fanciful if Ukraine had not fought Russia to a standstill. The Russian Empire under the Tsars had Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Bessarabia and the Caucuses. Under the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact Stalin occupied half of Poland, part of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and part of Romania. Stalin then launched a full-scale attack on Finland, which the Finns repulsed, despite being vastly outnumbered. Under the Yalta Conference in 1945 Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill carved up Europe to give Stalin territory as far westwards as East Germany and Czechia. In return Stalin held back strong communist parties in Italy and France from revolution. Who is to say that Russia will not move against its western neighbours at some point in future?
The US, Europe, Russia, China and Australia are increasing their military expenditures. In April, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported on an “Unprecedented rise in global military expenditure.” According to SIPRI:
“World military expenditure reached $2718 billion in 2024, an increase of 9.4 per cent in real terms from 2023 and the steepest year-on-year rise since at least the end of the cold war. Military spending increased in all world regions, with particularly rapid growth in both Europe and the Middle East. The top five military spenders – the United States, China, Russia, Germany and India – accounted for 60 per cent of the global total, with combined spending of $1635 billion […]
Germany’s military expenditure increased by 28 per cent to reach $88.5 billion, making it the biggest spender in Central and Western Europe and the fourth biggest in the world. Poland’s military spending grew by 31 per cent to $38.0 billion in 2024, representing 4.2 per cent of Poland’s GDP”.
Where does Aotearoa fit into the changing world order? Without doubt it remains within the sphere of US imperialism alongside Australia. New Zealand’s present and past military alignments point to no change to the status quo. The outstanding questions are whether Aotearoa’s Nuclear Free position will come under pressure, and whether Aotearoa will join “Pillar 2” of AUKUS. Whatever happens on these issues they will not change Aotearoa’s position as a loyal bit player in the US camp.
New Zealand has made commitments to the US imperialist cause over a long period of time. Since the Second World War New Zealand has been a loyal servant of firstly UK imperialism, then US imperialism. New Zealand deployed about 4,000 soldiers to fight in Britain’s anti-communist war in Malaya (the “Malayan Emergency”, 1948-1960). New Zealand sent 4,700 military personnel to the Korean War (1950-1953) and sent a similar number to join the US side in the Vietnam War from 1963 to 1975. The primary loyalty of New Zealand to the US, rather than to the UK, is demonstrated by the fact that the UK did not send armed forces to Vietnam. The British government did, however, support the Americans diplomatically.
In more recent times New Zealand has continued to respond to the US’s requests for military deployments. Over two decades 3,500 Defence Force personnel were sent to Afghanistan before the last were withdrawn in 2021. In 2015 a small contingent of soldiers was sent to Iraq. The last of them were withdrawn in 2023. Another small force was sent to the Red Sea in 2024 to join the US in attacks on Houthi fighters in retaliation for challenging the Israeli assault on Gaza.
In 2024 New Zealand participated in US-led naval exercises Valiant Shield and RIMPAC. It will continue to contribute towards military opposition to China and growing Chinese influence in Oceania. New Zealand is a member of the Five Eyes signals intelligence alliance with the US, UK, Australia and Canada. Rocket Lab, originally a New Zealand space company, is now an American company, with headquarters in California. Rocket Lab is a contractor of the US military. It has a rocket launch facility on the Mahia Peninsula.
The New Zealand government has joined in with the military build-up. In April it announced that spending will be doubled over an eight-year period. Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins immediately gave his support. One would think that a party of working-class origins would oppose military spending and instead demand that the money be put where desperately needed in public services. But no.
In Australia and the UK, Labour leaders Anthony Albanese and Keir Starmer have behaved most cravenly towards Trump, muting any criticism. In the United States the Democratic Party is just as imperialist as the Republicans. The Israeli attack on Gaza shows that. Joe Biden even kept the tariffs that Trump imposed on China during his first term. A change in government in the US is not the answer to the inter-imperialist rivalries.
History shows that the bottom line of reformist and liberal politics is the preservation of the existing capitalist system.
In 1914 most parties of the Socialist International tragically supported the rulers of their own nation. The worker in uniform was pitted against the worker in another uniform in a bloody imperialist struggle for territory. The Russian Bolsheviks were the outstanding exception who stayed true to their internationalist principles. There were other internationalist workers’ leaders – such as Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Clara Zetkin – but none of these individual internationalists had broken from the reformist socialist and labour parties. They had not built revolutionary socialist organisations that may have been able to bring down the war-mongers and stop the imperialist slaughter earlier. Let the lessons be learned and revolutionary socialist parties be built wherever possible. “Workers of all Lands Unite!”
Image Credit: Teirangi Klever
