As Donald Trump assumes the presidency, the world is bracing for shifts in international relations and policy. From Israel’s genocide in Gaza to the war in Ukraine, the US’ strategic rivalry with China, and the challenges facing Europe, Trump’s administration is poised to leave a significant mark.
What should we expect in the coming months on these critical issues? How might Trump’s foreign policy reshape Europe and its role in the world?
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I never thought that the elevation of Donald Trump for a second time to the White House would leave me almost neutral regarding Palestine because, let’s face it, what worse could he have done than Genocide Joe? In his first term, Donald Trump did more for Netanyahu and the fascist right in Israel than any American president. He gave him everything: the recognition of Jerusalem, the recognition of the annexation of the Golan Heights. He engineered the very successful—from their point of view—Abraham Accords, essentially three or four important Arab countries agreeing to make peace with Israel and begin formal trade with Israel without a single mention of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, the two-state solution, or anything like that.
So, he gave him everything. And yet, it’s hard to be sad that Biden is out from the Palestinian perspective, from the perspective of humanism regarding the genocide of Palestinians, because, as I said, Trump could not have done worse than Biden. Now, of course, he can try, and he’s been trying. One of the first things he did—he did quite a few things on the first day in Washington, DC—was, of course, to drop the sanctions on the fascist elements in the occupied territories. The sanctions were the very few decent sanctions that Biden had introduced on settlers in the West Bank.
But allow me, because this is much bigger, of course, than merely Palestine—even though Palestine is stigmatizing our generation because it is a genocide happening on our watch.
I will now just take a broader perspective. It was around 20 years ago that I decided to get out of my very cushy academic job—this is a personal statement I’m making. It was around 20 years ago that I decided I didn’t have the moral right to remain in my ivory tower in academia, to write my own little mathematical models, and only be a political animal part-time. The reason I did that 20 years ago is because—talking about now—it was around 2004-2005. I could see that our generation was very soon going to have its 1929 moment, which, of course, took place in 2007-2008 with the collapse of Wall Street.
The reason I’m referring to that as a 1929 moment of our generation is because, think of 1929, it marked the collapse of the financialized, globalized, monopolistic capitalism of the first 20-30 years of the 20th century. The collapse of the illusion that you could have perpetual growth and essentially eradicate poverty through the stock exchange, free markets, trade, finance, and big business.
Immediately after 1929, you had a whole system of liberal democracy that was rattled. They fell into the abyss of austerity for the majority of the people, bringing about The Grapes of Wrath—to remember Steinbeck—and at the very same time doing everything in order to save the business and the ruling class. The result of that was that liberalism went pear-shaped and essentially handed over power to the fascists.
So, in 2005-2006, I could see this coming. I could see that Wall Street could not maintain the breakneck speed at which it was minting private money out of thin air. I could see that the left—us—we were not ready, as we were not ready in 1929. We were not ready in 2008 to step in and provide people with an alternative blueprint of a world that is rational and, because it is rational, is also just.
I could therefore also see—not because I was a prophet but because it was really straightforward to see this—that the failure of the left following a Wall Street collapse of the magnitude of 1929, taking place in 2008 as it did after Lehman’s collapse, would bring about fascism.
The only reason why you know me, and our audience knows me to some extent, is because I got involved in politics, seeing that fascist tsunami coming to us. DM25, our movement, and our various political representations—whether that was Syriza when I joined the government (it was actually 10 years to this week)—and everything we’ve tried was an attempt to stem this tsunami of misogyny, racism, fascism, and even Nazism. Of course, we failed, but we’re still at it.
Yesterday, we had the inauguration of Donald Trump. We saw the broligarchs gather in Washington. It was a great moment for them—their victory. Their victory set alight their ambition for these broligarchs, big tech, and big finance together to bring about a renaissance of misanthropy. To take what Ronald Reagan had started—a virulent class war against the many in the United States, against women, against minorities—and turbocharge it.
We see it through Elon Musk. We see the men who have risen to exorbitant power, to inconceivable reaches, on the coattails of big tech, cloud capital, fossil fuels, and Wall Street. You can tell, just looking at them at that inauguration, how confident they feel to declare a series of victories.
You have their triumph over the rest of the United States economy and society. The triumph of America’s supremacy over every other country, including Canada, Greenland, and Panama. Their conquest of space because they know that, in the end, due to their activities, this planet will probably become uninhabitable. But their solution is simply to migrate to Mars, which is, of course, utter folly.
Their perceived victories—their list of perceived victories—is very real and a clear and present danger to humanity. At the same time, so as not to fall prey to our own pessimism and sadness at what we’re observing, it is important to always home in on the contradictions of the enemy. And their contradictions are gigantic. We better take account of those contradictions and try to exploit them.
I will say a few things about those contradictions and finish on a hopeful note, because we have a duty to do that. We have to extract from their contradictions a strategy so that we can counter their menace and find hope in having that strategy.
But a few more words before I get to that—bridging what happened in 2008 with what is happening in 2025. Let’s be clear about one thing: Trump is the result of Barack Obama. Barack Obama, immediately after Lehman collapsed—contemporaneously, actually—became prominent. He won the election in 2008 under the slogan “Yes, we can.”
And what was it that we can do? What he was explicitly promising was that he would put the financial genie back into the bottle. He would punish the ones who had created the circumstances for that collapse—Wall Street. And he would look after the many through some kind of Rooseveltian New Deal.
He did none of that. He did exactly the opposite.
The first thing he did, in the same way that Trump signed all these executive orders yesterday explicitly looking after his own, was not look after his own—assuming, of course, that he considered the many, the majority, to be his own.
The first thing Obama did was take Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, two gentlemen who, under Bill Clinton, had effectively unleashed Wall Street by allowing it to be unshackled from all the restraints that the New Deal, the Bretton Woods system, and LBJ had imposed on the bankers. These two gentlemen dismantled those shackles, and the result was the eventual collapse in 2008.
Obama then took these same two men and placed them back in the Treasury with a writ to bail out the bankers at the expense of the majority, while imposing harsh, stringent austerity on the many. Is it any wonder that discontent began brewing after the crisis? People lost their homes, as well as the illusion that, although their wages had stagnated since the mid-70s, at least their house prices were increasing. That illusion disappeared too.
And now they lost the illusion that a Black Democrat president would look after them. Instead, they saw Obama serving, through Summers and Geithner, the very people who had thrown them into the black hole of the 2008 Great Recession. It was inevitable that someone like Trump would rise up—and he did.
Now Trump 2.0 is the result of Biden. Biden has eradicated not only the Bernie Sanderses and AOCs of the Democratic Party but, through his cynical politicking, has left no opposition. Even the Republicans lack a figure like John McCain, who was instrumental in stopping Trump 1.0’s efforts to dismantle policies like Obamacare.
Now, none of that opposition exists. Essentially, there is no resistance to the steamroller that is Donald Trump.
But I promised to highlight the great contradictions within the Trump-Musk-Bezos-Zuckerberg project—the “Nationalist International,” or “Alteration International,” which now dominates the United States and most of Europe. Look at Meloni, Le Pen, and even Macron, who essentially copies Le Pen.
What are these contradictions? Let me give you one example:
Trump promises the American working class that he will bring jobs back through his tariffs and eliminate the trade deficit. Two questions arise: Can the tariffs achieve this? I doubt it, but let’s assume they do. If Trump’s tariffs on Chinese and European imports succeed in eliminating the trade deficit, it would deliver a major blow to his own tribe of financiers and realtors.
Why? Since the 1970s, the American trade deficit has been expanding. This deficit has acted like a gigantic vacuum cleaner, sucking into the United States the net exports of German, Japanese, and Chinese factories. These capitalists—whether in China, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, or Saudi Arabia—earn dollars they cannot spend domestically. So, what do they do with that money? They send it back to New York.
What happens to that money? Washington does not allow them to buy significant U.S. companies like Google. You saw recently how Biden vetoed the purchase of U.S. Steel by a Japanese-friendly steel corporation. These foreign capitalists are left with two options:
1. Buy U.S. Treasuries: This finances the American federal government and its military.
2. Invest in U.S. Real Estate: Foreign money floods into American real estate markets.
Which means, if I’m right—and I think I am right—that the American trade deficit, through this loop, comes back to the United States in the form of financing the government, the federal government, the Army, and so on, while also pushing up real estate prices.
If Trump succeeds in eliminating the U.S. trade deficit through his tariffs—which is what he has promised the American working class to do, so that jobs can come back to the Midwest and so on—then this tsunami of capital that maintains the financial health of the financial sector and the real estate sector will dry up. This means that Trump will face a critical choice:
Does he betray the American working class?
Or does he betray his tribe—the financiers and the realtors?
I have no doubt that he will betray the American working class.
That betrayal is our opportunity—the opening for the left, for progressives, to drive a wedge between Trump, Musk, Bezos, and the oligarchs of the world on one side, and the American working class, which has astonishingly been co-opted by them, on the other.
Aneurin Bevan, the Welsh socialist leader of the 1940s and 1950s, once put it beautifully. He said:
“The great conundrum, the great puzzle, about the world we live in is this: how does wealth convince poverty to utilize its political liberty to keep wealth in power?”
This is exactly what is happening. The Trumps and their allies, aided and abetted by the Democrats and the radical center, have succeeded in getting American poverty to keep them in power. We need to drive a wedge between them.
We must understand that the key to driving this wedge is the inherent contradiction within the Trumpist project. This contradiction will eventually bring their project crashing down. But it’s not enough for the system to collapse.
When this exploitative system inevitably falls, the left must be ready to take advantage of the moment. A system collapse alone does not necessarily bring good things—it only creates a vacuum. We must be prepared to fill it with something better, something just.
