The foreign policy of the Trump administration likewise does not arise out of nowhere. For a quarter century, the American ruling class has been engaged in a desperate project to reverse its economic decline through military force -- in the Balkans, North Africa, the Middle East and central Asia. Fifteen years of the "war on terror" have metastasized into an ever more direct conflict with larger competitors. Trump's focus on China is in fact in continuity with the Obama administration's "pivot to Asia," which has seen the deployment of US military resources throughout the South Pacific and East Asia.
What Trump adds to these processes is the distinct odor of fascism, of extreme nationalism and the threat of violent repression of opposition. His declaration in his inaugural address that the "bedrock of our politics will be total allegiance to the United States of America" is a threat to criminalize dissent, which will be associated with treason.
However, here too Trump is giving naked expression to the long-term decay of democratic forms of rule. It was, after all, Obama who will go down in history as the president who proclaimed the power to assassinate US citizens without due process. Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, drone assassination, NSA spying -- this is the toxic mix out of which Trump's particular contempt for constitutional norms emerges.
In July, as Trump was formally nominated as the candidate of the Republican Party at the Republican National Convention, the WSWS noted that "Trump's particular fascistic personality was forged not in the beer halls of Munich and the trenches of World War I, but in the real estate market of New York City. With his casinos, his fictional universities and his endless stream of failed businesses, this personification of corporate fraud could hardly be a more fitting symbol for the state of American capitalism."
There are sharp and bitter divisions within the American ruling class, but these divisions are over tactics, not basic class policy. It will not take much for Trump to bring on board many of his present critics within the political establishment and media, or, for that matter, more privileged sections of the upper middle class.
It is not from such forces that enduring opposition to the new administration will develop, but from the working class, in the United States and internationally. Trump's absurd posturing as a defender of the "forgotten man" will, sooner rather than later, give rise to bitter class conflict as the impact of the new administration's policy are felt. It is to the broad mass of the working class that socialists must now turn, and, through systematic organization and education, forge a political leadership to prepare for the struggles on the horizon.
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