WeeklyWorker

20.02.2025
Making America even greater

Notes on the war

Three years since the launch of the ‘special military operation’, the post-World War II order is being shredded by America. Trump is a revolutionary counterrevolutionary, says Jack Conrad

There are those on the left who insist on treating Donald Trump as “ignorant”, “stupid” and a “fascist”.1 A claim which in its own right is “ignorant” and “stupid”. Trump may have a short attention span, he is certainly no book worm.2 However, he has a mercurial intelligence and sixth sense for the public square. Above all, though, out of pure self-interest, and doubtless to feed an already inflated ego, Trump has willingly become the deep right’s “synthesis of monster and a superman”.3 He makes the perfect avatar.

Meanwhile, the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation has fed Trump with ideas by the batchload, vetted and trained bright young staffers and provided him with a multifaceted strategy for restoring America’s imperial glory. And since assuming office on January 20 Trump has performed exactly according to its Project 2025 playbook: defeat the ‘enemy within’; shred the ‘rules-based’ post-World War II global order.

At home that means using the already considerable powers of the presidency to launch a counter-revolution against environmental protection, established working conditions, women’s reproductive health, sexual deviants, migrants and civil rights era gains. Government employees have also been retired en masse. A frontal assault on the Democrats and their rainbow coalition that will leave in its wake countless human victims. Once again states will be able to ride roughshod over ‘diversity, equality, inclusion and accessibility’. Nothing, but nothing, is to be allowed to interfere with capital accumulation.

Trump, stating the obvious, has absolutely no need for non-state fighting formations here. A defining marker of fascism qua fascism. The totally botched January 6 2021 attempted self-coup with its Proud Boys and boogaloos was a different matter. Today he has executive orders, a thoroughly purged state apparatus, majorities in both houses of congress, the supreme court … hell, he’s even got a spaceforce. There is, moreover, no unresolved revolutionary situation. The working class poses not the least threat, neither to the ruling class nor the constitution.

Trump is not attempting “to recreate the imperial presidency that was buried in the mid-1970s after Richard Nixon’s resignation”.4 A somewhat cosy establishment claim, approvingly echoed by the SWP’s Alex Callinicos.5 No, he is intent on going way beyond that. He aspires to be America’s Boss (yes, with a capital ‘B’). A combination of a start-up CEO and a Roman Caesar who exercises absolute power. Yes, Trump wants to stampede America into becoming a Christian, nationalist autocracy, to start with by issuing an unstoppable barrage of executive orders. Project 2025, note, advocated just that: there is an “existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch”.6

On a roll, entitled, utterly brazen, tech billionaires - eg, Peter Thiel and deep right thinkers, such as Curtis Yarvin - do nothing whatsoever to disguise their admiration of autocracy and contempt for democracy. In fact there is an open acceptance of what we have long argued: “capitalist democracy” is an “oxymoron”.7 Let us add, for the sake of clarity, that it is Trump, not Elon Musk, who is in charge8 … and will be for the next four years, maybe more.9 Despite his unequalled wealth Musk could be fired in an instant and probably will be at some point.

51st state

Abroad, Trump’s revolutionary counterrevolution has seen him threatening to close the Mexican border, offering to buy Greenland, promising to take back the Panama canal and incorporate Canada as the 51st state.

With the Cold War won and long gone, America has no need to cover its imperialism with cant about freedom, justice and democracy. It can afford to arrogantly parade its power and even its naked greed. America no longer asks the world to love it, instead the world is expected to fear it. Liberals are mortified. Often reduced to spluttering incoherence. And most of the left miserably tails liberal opinion. To save the old order we have entirely hollow demands for a “general strike”10 and equally vacuous calls for “determined and courageous resistance”.11

But here is Trump’s Greater America. And it makes a grisly fit with ‘manifest destiny’. Beginning as 13 seaward orientated former British colonies, the United States expanded westwards and southwards through genocide and seizing native lands, wars of anti-colonial colonial conquest and cash buy-outs. Alaska was bought from tsarist Russia for a paltry $7.2 million in 1867. The Louisiana and Florida purchases served as the model. And throughout there were intermittent claims over British Columbia, Quebec and the whole of Canada.

No less to the point, what is to stop the US unilaterally annexing Greenland? Indian forces overran the Portuguese colony of Goa in just 36 hours in 1961. The 626,000 population were not consulted till 1967, when a referendum was held: the question was, should Goa be a separate state within the Indian Union? - that or should it merge with the nextdoor Indian state of Maharashtra? Why do liberals assume that Greenland’s 57,000 population should be given a say? Were they consulted when Denmark first incorporated Greenland after the Danish and Norwegian kingdoms separated in 1814? Does anyone really expect Denmark to fight if American forces based in Greenland stroll in to occupy Nuuk? Will Greenland’s indigenous population launch a winnable war of national liberation? Unlikely.

Not that we communists are indifferent. On the contrary, we favour the voluntary union of peoples. But that does not prevent us from recognising the role of brute force in the past ... and in the future.

The same goes for Panama. Will it fight an American takeover of the canal zone? Again unlikely. The odds are overwhelmingly against such a scenario. True, Canada is a different matter. It has a population of over 40 million and would be no pushover. No wonder Trump talks of persuading Canada to join the United States … in return for the lifting of the 25% tariffs.

Pan-Americanism has, though, little purchase in Canada, not least because of Trump.12 Pierre Poilievre, leader of its Conservative Party - endorsed by people close to Trump - has made his position abundantly clear: “We will never be the 51st state.”13 So America has to find, or create, a unionist party and bring around at least a section of the electorate. Not impossible. England did something like that with Scotland in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Custom tariffs were imposed, Scotland’s Darien colonial adventure was wrecked and bribes were liberally doled out. Union of the parliaments in 1707 saw an end to tariffs, compensation paid to the elite for Darien and an economic boom in Scotland.

When it comes to the rest of the world, Project 2025 still envisages America’s main energies being directed to countering the “existential threat” of China.14 However, that does not mean continuity. JD Vance spelt out the new reality at the 61st Munich Security Conference on February 14.

Breaking with the normal diplomatic conventions, the vice-president berated European mainstream politicians for their liberal intolerance and apparent indifference to mass migration. Hence, he described the greatest dangers in Europe being “internal”, rather than from the external challenges of Russia or China. Adding insult to injury, he subsequently met with AfD leader Alice Weidel. Not chancellor Olaf Scholz, not the CDU’s would-be chancellor, Friedrich Merz.

Weidel and Vance discussed the war in Ukraine. Weidel and Vance discussed German domestic politics. Weidel and Vance agreed that the so-called Brandmauer, or ‘firewall’, that bars the AfD from joining governing coalitions in Germany, was an outrage that should immediately be extinguished. Those who do not, or cannot understand the significance of this change in US policy and its impact, and not only in Germany, understand nothing.

What about Ukraine? Instead of Joe Biden’s ironclad insistence of Ukraine getting everything back and seeing the back of every Russian soldier, there will be bilateral negotiations. Vance bluntly announced that neither Europe nor Ukraine have a seat at the table.

As is well known now, Trump wants an agreement with Russia, freezing the whole of the 800-mile front line and then, immediately after, establishing a buffer zone - Sir Keir Starmer has already volunteered British “troops on the ground”.15 Baltic, Polish, Netherlands and Nordic contingents are also expected. Nato peacekeepers can, of course, easily become Nato peacemakers: ie, 100,000 active combatants. Hence, outraged objections from Sergei Lavrov in Riyadh.

Trump is ready to allow Russia to keep what it has got: ie, around 20% of pre-2014 Ukrainian territory. Doubtless, if negotiations continue, there will be haggling over Kursk and other such thorny issues. But Vladimir Putin can claim a victory. He has already won a firm commitment that there will be no Ukrainian membership of Nato for the foreseeable future. Russia will too once again be able to base its warships in Crimea’s Sevastopol and thereby secure free access to the warm waters of the Mediterranean.

Leave aside Nato troops stationed along Russia’s new border (perhaps defended by US air cover). One might guess that what remains of Ukraine will be armed to the teeth and provided with various security guarantees. A sort of Israel, but much, much bigger. Either way, Trump has discarded Biden’s goal of regime change in Moscow ... for now. Remember, however, that Trump comes not only bearing an olive branch: he carries a big stick too. If the Putin-FSB regime rejects his peace deal, there is the threat of “increased American support for Ukraine”.16 Perhaps Trump would dust off Zelensky’s now almost totally forgotten victory plan … and then add some more. In other words, though Trump is seeking some kind of accommodation with Russia, failing that, there is the “phasing into World War III” he once warned about.

Stab in the back

As things stand, Zelensky is highly vulnerable. His spectacular political career looks like ending in inevitable failure … soon. Trump himself has been talking about holding those much delayed presidential elections and even before that there is the distinct danger of Zelensky being ousted by some kind of Azov putsch.

Imagine for a moment (not hard to do), that Zelensky is forced into accepting Trump’s deal. Russia secures 20% of Ukraine’s pre-2014 territory and the country is effectively dismembered. The far right accuses him of national betrayal - of serving his fellow Jews, not Ukraine. Led by Mykyta Nadtochiy, Azov units march on Kyiv to much popular acclaim. The central demand is for Zelensky’s resignation and fresh presidential and parliamentary elections.

What Donald Trump would make of such a blatant violation of Ukraine’s constitution is beyond me. He might condemn it, he might welcome it. But, as with Zelensky, an Azov regime would still have to come to terms with the changed global realities brought about by Trump … that or fight an asymmetrical war with Russia in the east and south, and risk defeat and the incorporation of the whole of Ukraine into Putin’s neo-tsarist empire.

Meanwhile, Trump’s deal essentially mirrors what was discussed between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Minsk, Antalya and Istanbul back in March and April 2022. Those talks ultimately failed, supposedly because Kyiv refused to budge on rescinding anti-Russian language laws and agreeing to neutrality. But it was the Biden administration which really scuppered things. Boris Johnston, a loyal US satrap, was dispatched to Kyiv to relay Washington’s instructions: ‘Fight, fight and fight again’.

Despite that many Ukrainians will blame Zelensky, not Johnson, not Biden, for three years of unnecessary war and tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths - to achieve what? Essentially the same deal that was on offer in 2022. That is why he is already yesterday’s man.

Conditions are certainly ripe for a Ukrainian version of the ‘stab in the back legend’ (Dolchstoßlegende). Germany’s far right, crucially the high command, insisted that they had not suffered defeat on the battlefields of 1914-18. No, instead they had been betrayed on the home front by communists and social democrats. Almost instantly, the idea was given an anti-Semitic twist, not least by Adolf Hitler and his chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg. The death of the Weimar republic was already in sight.

There are precious few communists and social democrats in Ukraine today, but Zelensky is Jewish, its army has resisted successfully for three years, the country is set to concede 20% of its territory and Trump is demanding a $500 billion slice of its critical minerals as “payback” (a higher share of Ukrainian GDP than the “reparations imposed on Germany” by the Versailles Treaty17). Absurd conspiracy theories will surely flourish and produce their toxic fruit.

Ukraine, note, has a long, horrible and deeply ingrained history of anti-Semitism. During tsarist time there were frequent pogroms. The whites slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews in the 1918-21 civil war. And, to this day, Stepan Bandera, a fascist and in the early 1940s a Nazi collaborator, is venerated as a hero, especially in western Ukraine. His anti-Semitism combined with anti-Bolshevism: “The Jews are the most faithful prop of the Bolshevik regime and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine.”18 There are statues of him, streets, bridges and squares named after him, postage stamps bear his image … in other words Banderaism is the ideal ideological vehicle for a reactionary national revolution in Ukraine.

While parallels with Weimar are easy enough to draw, Ukraine cannot, of course, give birth to its version of the Third Reich. Empire, national independence, even neutrality are all chimeric. Small and medium countries are dependent countries. Switzerland and Ireland are dependent on the EU; Belarus is dependent on Russia and Brexit Britain is dependent on the USA. Without powerful outside backers a post-Zelensky regime can do nothing serious militarily, that is for sure. Ukraine lacks an independent arms industry. Eg, though Ukraine can upgrade Soviet-era T-72 ‘coffins’, it is overwhelmingly reliant on western supplies of military hardware.19

So once again imagine - this time that Zelensky defies Trump and orders his army to keep fighting. The flow of arms, money and technical assistance instantly dries up. Without real-time satellite information, SAM missiles, military instructors, artillery shells and a constant supply of spare parts, Ukraine’s fighting capacity would thereby rapidly degrade. Well before that, plummeting morale could easily see troops deserting front-line trenches en masse.

Will Germany ride to Ukraine’s rescue? I doubt it. There are elections on February 23 and everyone knows the days of Olaf Scholz as chancellor are numbered. Moreover, Emmanuel Macron’s emergency summit on Ukraine ended in total disarray. Sir Keir decided to placate Trump with his ‘troops on the ground’ offer and Scholz walked off in a huff. So the chances of Zelensky getting a European army to end the stalemate and sending the Russians packing are nil. It will simply not happen.

The same goes for Mark Rutte, Nato general secretary, and his generous offer, made in Davos, that the EU could foot the bill for US arms deliveries. It begs exactly the same question: American arms for euros is going to happen only if Trump wants it to happen ... and he is determined to get a deal.

Back in the third century CE the Chinese imperial chancellor, Zhuge Liang, orchestrated a conflict between the Han state in the north and the Chu state in the south, allowing the state in the west to rise to dominance.20 It became known as the ‘Three kingdoms’ strategy. The US pursued just such a course in World War I and World War II. It stayed aloof from the struggle to begin with, profited hugely from the fire sales of assets, granted loans and sold arms … and then came in late to tip the military balance.

Grand manoeuvres

As we have argued, such grand manoeuvres are doubtless being contemplated once again in the Oval office.

Europe, it seems, is to be radically subordinated by a resurgent US. Ideas of an “ever closer” EU have been well and truly scuppered by the Ukraine war. Blowing up Nord Stream 1 and  2 in September 2022 amounted to rubbing Europe’s face in the dirt. Now we have Trump demanding increases in ‘defence spending’ from below 2% of GDP, to 2.5%, to 5%. It amounts to extracting tribute. A good slice of any such expenditure will, after all, go to US arms makers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, RTX and Northrop-Grumman. Combined with tariffs, that means stagnation, possibly the “threat of complete economic decay” in Europe” that Trotsky prematurely warned about in 1923.21

Given the absence of European unity, Trump recognises only three great powers: the US, China and Russia. I have already speculated about him offering Russia entry into the lower ranks of the imperialist club. In other words, revive the G8.22 Indeed that very offer has now been made.23 In return for such a welcome in from the cold, Russia would presumably be expected to break its ‘no limits’ alliance with China - a Mao-Nixon rapprochement in reverse. Probably that is what Trump’s peace plan is designed to achieve. But, let’s be honest, we really don’t know.

Geoff Raby, former Australian ambassador in Beijing, argues that China is expanding in central Asia at Russia’s expense, that Russia is losing more in Asia than it could ever gain in Europe. Still, if Raby is correct and Putin sees it this way, a rapprochement with the US would, therefore, include Russia regaining influence in its central Asian near abroad.24

But Raby might easily be wrong. Does the Putin-FSB regime really resent China’s growing eastern influence? Or does Moscow think it is getting a good bargain with ‘Chussia’? After all, China imports all that oil and gas, which keeps the Russian economy afloat and on a war footing. Officially, the two countries are committed to developing cooperation in Eurasia, especially in central Asia, which will allow them to build what they call a fairer economic model - certainly compared to western neoliberalism. Either way, they surely have mutual or partially overlapping interests.

Leave aside Russia’s relations with Xi Jinping, things point towards some kind of deal in Ukraine. Russia would at the very least see an end to western sanctions and gain some internationally recognised territory under Trump’s peace plan. On the other hand, if Trump took up Zelensky’s victory plan, Putin might not survive in office and the FSB regime could easily go down to a colour revolution that ends in the break-up of the Russian Federation. Unless, of course, China intervened.

China is, however, already subject to swingeing US tariffs on its commodities - and an additional 10% with Trump. That promises not just extra tax revenues flowing into Washington’s coffers, but, in China, the prospect of something resembling Japan’s three lost decades (slow or negative growth rates). Moreover, a US-Russia grand deal would see China surrounded at a stroke and either forced into accepting the status of a US neocolony, having its arms industry dramatically scaled down, its big banks and companies bought up for a song, etc - that or face strangulation and potential state collapse. Understandably, with the historic experience of the ‘century of humiliation’ (1839-1949) seared onto its collective consciousness, China might well choose to resist any such outcome, using whatever means it has at its disposal.

Then again, strategists in Moscow and Beijing will be looking for ways to stop MAGA. Exacerbating cracks, tensions and divisions between the US and the EU has long been a Russian stratagem. There will doubtless be further Russian attempts to cleave Turkey, Hungary and Slovakia away from what is now a thoroughly discombobulated US-European alliance.

Paradoxically, an AfD government in Berlin would represent a massive boost for both Trumpists in American and Putinists in Russia (not that this will happen on February 23: a role as a junior partner in a CDU government is the best that the AfD can possibly hope for). Trumpists would see an opportunity to reduce the EU to a deregulated common market and the chance of picking up all manner of German companies at bargain basement prices. For Putin/FSB there would, of course, be the prospect of renewing lucrative oil and gas deliveries.

Objectively Germany has a pressing interest in achieving peace in Ukraine - one of the reasons behind the rise of the AfD (that and opposition to migrants and migration). Germany has, after all, become the “sick man of Europe” - no, not because the country abandoned nuclear power (an extraordinarily daft idea). It is the Ukraine war which has left it at the bottom of the G7 performance table: “Germany’s terms of trade deteriorated hugely after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as the price of natural gas soared,” writes the FT’s Martin Wolf.25

The lurid picture painted by Germany’s political mainstream - social democratic, green, liberal and conservative - of Putin just itching to attack Nato’s eastern flank, before heading all the way to Berlin, is simply not credible. War in Ukraine, against a third-rate army, with no air cover worth talking about, has exposed Russia’s armed forces as decidedly second-rate. Triggering a war with Nato, even just Poland and Germany, by invading one of the Baltic republics would surely end in failure and state collapse. So such a suicide mission is an extraordinary remote possibility.

However, besides peace, Germany also has an objective interest in uniting around itself a Kerneuropa (core Europe) and again becoming an imperial player in its own right. A fourth Reich! Its industries require friendshoring in neighbouring countries when it comes to auxiliary production facilities and the protection of markets that only a militarily strong state can provide. Otherwise there is a risk of deindustrialisation and absolute decline.

Sleepwalk

Expect geostrategic shifts in the coming period. True, the Brics+ have nothing in common - apart, that is, from chaffing against US hegemony. But this does give Russia allies, or at least a sympathetic hearing, amongst what it calls the “global majority”. Amongst those who have, want to, or have been invited to join are Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Aukus has already been established, and Japan and South Korea bolted on. This has broken Australia from its natural trading partner, China, and secured it firmly in the US-UK camp. The US can perhaps rely on India to be antagonistic to China, but not Russia. There is, moreover, the danger of the three great powers being dragged into conflicts over Iran, Israel, Korea, Taiwan, etc, etc, with all manner of untended consequences.

Bear in mind, in this context, the long ‘sleepwalk’ towards World War I.26 Enemies became friends and friends became enemies. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 transformed Germany from being the fragmented and weak centre of Europe into its most dangerous power. Soundly beaten, resentful and fearful, republican France sought allies to contain the newly formed German Reich - the most obvious partner being tsarist Russia.

Their 1894 alliance committed each side to mutual aid. True, this meant that in the event of war Germany would have to fight on two fronts. The alliance, however, was just as much directed against Britain. France and Britain were, of course, old enemies and there were bitter rivalries between Britain and Russia over Afghanistan, Persia, China and the Turkish Straits. Russia longed to gain unfettered access to the Mediterranean by getting its hands on Constantinople.

And it was fear of Russia that took Britain into alliance with Japan in 1902. A few years later, in 1904, the Japanese-Russian war began and ended in unexpected defeat for Russia. British-built and British-designed Japanese battleships featured prominently - a global shock and a trigger for the 1905 revolution in Russia.

Against the Franco-Russian alliance Germany responded by tying Austria-Hungary ever more closely to itself. Because Austria-Hungary and Russia were fierce competitors in the Balkans, this committed Germany to a war with Russia that it really did not want. Germany also started an ill-judged naval race with Britain. Germanophobic scare stories were regularly promoted in the Daily Mail and The Times and featured in popular novels, such as Erskine Childers’ The riddle of the sands (1903). The German Reich came to be seen as Britain’s most deadly global rival by elite and middle class opinion alike.

As Britain just managed ‘a near-run victory’ in the second Boer War, it felt compelled to abandon its ‘splendid isolation’ from continental European concerns and instead embraced its old enemy, France - an arrangement cemented in 1904 with the Entente Cordiale. France’s alliance with tsarist Russia became, in due course, a triple alliance between Britain, France and Russia. Historic rivalry, pitting Russia against Britain over southern Asia, ended with various robber-deals, including dividing Persia into two zones of interest.

Such realignments readied the conditions needed for defeating the central powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. True, the US eventually entered the war and guaranteed the outcome, and Russia was taken out of the imperial system altogether by the October 1917 revolution.

Yet, while between 15 and 22 million died, in the end, Germany was much reduced territorially, stripped of colonies and saddled with crippling reparation payments. As for the Austro-Hungarian empire, it was fragmented into a series of small, often rival, states. That left Austria as little more than a pocket-sized territory with a grand imperial capital. And, apart from Turkey itself - ‘liberated’ by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk - Anglo-French imperialism neatly sliced and diced the Ottoman empire into colonial or semi-colonial administrative units.

Clearly there is more than a whiff of pre-World War I about the current situation - ie, great-power military conflict seems all too possible - but with the added danger of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. However, tragically, what is lacking is a viable socialist alternative.

Today the general secretaries of the countless confessional sects hold out the promise to their little band of followers that they are on the cusp of another October. The comforting myth is that the Bolsheviks went from nothing to everything in the eight short months between February and October 1917. Absolute and total nonsense, of course. From 1905 onwards, despite periods of severe repression, the Bolsheviks were, in fact, the majority party of the working class - proved by newspaper circulation figures, workplace donations, duma, trade union and, from the summer of 1917 onwards, soviet elections in Petrograd, Moscow and other major towns and cities.

No, we must do away with sect delusions - along with broad-frontism and left Labourism - and get down to the serious business of uniting in the common struggle to build a mass Communist Party here in Britain and internationally. That remains the main, the key, the abiding task.

  1. Claureen Ryan, ‘A general strike to stop Trump’ Solidarity February 12 2025.↩︎

  2. Michael Wolff claimed in his Fire and fury (2018) that “Trump doesn’t like to read at all”. Nor does he “process information in any conventional sense”. In some ways, he is “postliterate - total television”. But that does not make him “ignorant” or “stupid”.↩︎

  3. F Nietzsche The genealogy of morals: a polemic London 1913, p56.↩︎

  4. E Luce, ‘Trump’s imperial emporium’ Financial Times February 5 2025.↩︎

  5. Socialist Worker February 12 2025.↩︎

  6. R Vought, ‘Executive office of the president of the United States’ in P Dans and S Groves (eds) Project 2025: mandate for leadership Washington DC 2023, p44.↩︎

  7. P Thiel, ‘The education of a libertarian’ Cato Unbound April 13 2009.↩︎

  8. A daft claim upheld by The Guardian’s US columnist, Moira Dunegan: “… it is Musk who controls government operations and federal spending, and so it is Musk who is running the country.” See ‘It is Elon Musk who is now running the United States. Not Donald Trump’ The Guardian February 6 2025.↩︎

  9. A third term would be possible, despite the constitution, if, say, in 2028, Trump and Vance ran on a joint ticket with Trump as vice-president nominee and Vance as the presidential nominee, but with Vance committed to stand down in favour of Trump in the event of victory. However, age will some time catch up with Trump. He is already 78.↩︎

  10. Claureen Ryan, ‘A general strike to stop Trump’ Solidarity February 12 2025.↩︎

  11. A Callinicos Socialist Worker February 12 2025.↩︎

  12. Trotsky’s 1926 claim that “Most Canadians consider themselves Americans, with the exception, ironically enough, of the French section of the population, which considers itself profoundly English” was badly misinformed on both counts (www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1926/02/europe.htm). Historically most Canadians do not identify themselves as being American. In fact, beginning with the influx of empire loyalists after the American revolution, a key part of Canadian national identity has meant actively distinguishing themselves from Americans. Mistaking a Canadian for an American - easy for a Brit like myself - can cause offence. As for the Québécois being “profoundly English”, please, let’s get real. That’s never been the case.↩︎

  13. The Independent February 17 2025.↩︎

  14. P Navarro, ‘The case for fair trade’ in P Dans and S Groves (eds) Project 2025: mandate for leadership Washington DC 2023, p766.↩︎

  15. The Daily Telegraph February 16 2025.↩︎

  16. The Independent June 25 2024.↩︎

  17. The Daily Telegraph February 17 2025.↩︎

  18. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_of_Ukrainian_Nationalists.↩︎

  19. mil.in.ua/en/articles/can-ukraine-produce-tanks.↩︎

  20. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuge Liang.↩︎

  21. L Trotsky The first five years of the Communist International Vol 2, London 1974, p342.↩︎

  22. J Conrad ‘Notes on the war’ Weekly Worker November 14 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1515/notes-on-the-war).↩︎

  23. www.reuters.com/world/trump-says-russia-should-be-readmitted-g7-2025-02-13.↩︎

  24. www.afr.com/world/asia/xi-is-thumping-putin-in-the-great-game-20241016-p5kipx.↩︎

  25. Financial Times July 16 2024.↩︎

  26. See C Clark The sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914 London 2013.↩︎