Hopes that Trump might rein back on the US’s wars will be dashed, while Ukraine approach collapse, and Israel’s aggression threaten catastrophe, argues Chris Bambery

In his victory speech, Donald Trump declared, ‘I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.’ His Vice President-elect, JD Vance, called Trump the ‘candidate of peace’.

Trump carried Michigan, held by the Democrats for 24 years, and home to the largest concentration of Muslim voters in America. Foreign Policy spoke to nineteen-year-old Yemeni American Ali Aljahmi, a member of the family which owns Sheeba, a popular Yemeni restaurant in Dearborn, who told them: ‘I met Mr. Trump briefly along with his team. … They promised to stop the genocide [in] Gaza and what’s happening in Lebanon. Trump wants peace.’

Ali’s hopes must have been dashed as the names were announced of who will form his cabinet when he takes office in January. In Britain, we are living with a government which is a re-heat of Tony Blair’s back in 1997. America faces a new administration stuffed full of neo-conservatives who are a re-tread of George W. Bush’s in 2000.

Warmongers’ cabinet

Marco Rubio, the senator of Florida, is the president-elect’s choice for Secretary of State, replacing the hapless Anthony Blinken. In May after a visit to Israel he stated:

‘Israel’s enemies are also our enemies. The Iranian regime and its proxies … seek Israel’s destruction as part of a multi-stage plan to dominate the Middle East and destabilize the West. The Jewish state is on the front lines of this conflict, fighting with many shared American-Israeli lives … Israel has a right to defend itself, and the United States must support its effort to destroy Hamas as a terrorist threat. We also must support Israel against Iran-backed Hezbollah to Israel’s north …”

Florida Representative Mike Waltz, a former special-forces soldier, will be national-security adviser. He has long argued that the United States should be threatening to bomb Iran. Last month, he begged President Joe Biden to go ahead and ‘punch Iran in the nose’ in response to Iraqi guerrilla attacks.

Both Rubio and Waltz are hawks in regard to China. Rubio called for the US to create a new industrial policy to stop China from ‘eclipsing the United States entirely in the decade that follows.’ He added:

‘The bottom line is that U.S. policymakers cannot afford to be complacent about the largest, most advanced adversary America has ever faced.’ Both men are fully committed to supporting Taiwan all the way against China.

The new Secretary of Defense will be Pete Hegseth, a Fox News TV presenter who still defends the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The new US ambassador to the United Nations will be New York Representative Elise Stefanik, a former George W. Bush administration official and fervent supporter of Israel. The U.S. ambassador to the Israel will be Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and evangelical Christian supporter of West Bank settlements. Correction, he doesn’t use the word ‘settlements’. He stated in 2017: ‘There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighbourhoods, they’re cities. There is no such thing as occupation.’ Accordingly, the Palestinians must be ethnically cleansed.

Among many Trump supporters, there is a real sense of despair that he has picked these characters because they expected him to deliver on his promise to end America’s involvement in the wars in Ukraine, Palestine and Lebanon.

On Ukraine, it looks like the new administration will pull American military and financial support for Ukraine. Even Marco Rubio has switched from demanding more and more of that support to saying peace talks are inevitable.

He voted against Biden’s $6 billion military aid package for Ukraine earlier this year. Earlier this month, he said: ‘I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong in standing up to Russia, but at the end of the day, what we are funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion, or that country is going to be set back 100 years.’

Ukraine’s defeat looms

The reason for this volte face is simple. Ukraine faces defeat. Indeed, speculation is mounting that its defence lines are about to collapse. Russia has lost enormous numbers of people: US officials say the total is around 615,000, while UK intelligence says the numbers are increasing at a rate of more than 1000 daily. Ukraine is estimated to have lost half that number, but its population is around a quarter of Russia’s.

Kyiv has extended conscription to men of 25-60, and many thousands more have joined up consequently, but an unknown number are dodging the draft. Almost half of Ukrainian men not currently in the military said they are unwilling to fight. James Meek reported from Kharkiv this week where he described ‘an intensified trawling of the streets for army recruits’ thus:

‘The Ukrainian army is chronically short of soldiers to hold back the steady, creeping Russian advance across eastern Ukraine. Checkpoints and patrols, supposedly intended to ensure that people’s military details are up to date in the national conscription database, are widely believed, against the letter of the law, to be taking men straight to medicals, and from there to military training and despatch to the front. As much as they may admire the courage of their army, the men of Kharkiv fear, and in many cases actively avoid, having to serve in it.’

The consequence of such a manpower shortage in a war of attrition, like a mini World War One, are obvious. Ukrainian Major General Dmytro Marchenko said last month that the eastern front was ‘crumbling’ owing to shortages of ammunition and manpower. ‘People are very exhausted. They simply cannot hold the fronts they are on.’

In the same report, the Financial Times said this week that Russia has stepped up its attacks in advance of Trump’s accession: ‘Moscow has ramped up attacks in recent months and Ukraine’s forces have been unable to hold the line in the east, where Russian troops are now advancing at a faster rate than at any point since 2022. Ukrainian officials have admitted that their defences are “crumbling” amid manpower shortages. Kyiv expects the offensive to gather pace ….’

Now the Russian army is seven kilometres from Pokrovsk, has almost come close to Kurakhove, Toretsk and Chasiv Yar. The offensive on Zaporizhzhia will begin in the coming days. The situation is particularly dire around Kupiansk, a northeastern city, which the Ukrainians re-took in September 2022 following more than six months under Russian occupation.

Kupiansk is at the crossroads of two major supply roads and the Oskil river, which forms a major defensive feature in the area. If the Russians take Kupiansk they would be on the verge of pushing westwards into the Kharkiv region. That would in turn put further pressure on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city which has been under attack by Russian drones and missiles on a daily basis. Russian state news agency Tass reported on Friday that Russian troops entered the outskirts of Kupiansk, although Ukrainian officials insist they maintain full control of the city.

Further south, Ukrainian forces are struggling to hold back Russian advances further around the city of Kurakhove, which has been surrounded from three sides for months. Last week, Zelensky called the situation around Kurakhove ‘the most difficult area’ of the frontline.

In the Kursk region, which Ukraine invaded drawing valuable troops away from the crucial easter front, Russia is rushing to take back the city of Sudzha. A report based on interviews with senior Ukrainian officers reveals other problems. A Brigade Headquarters officer says:

‘Every day, along the entire front line, in small groups on motorcycles, buggies or on foot, they look for weak points in our defense. They send 3-10 people on a trial assault. If they managed to advance, the Russians realize that there is a hole in the defense — and they send 30-50 people there in a stream. During this time, we should come up with and scale countermeasures. Because usually as soon as the Russians jump into our trench [in the section held by the problematic unit], our guys jump out and run away. Not because they are cowards, but because they do not have sufficient training, and most importantly, they do not understand whether artillery will protect them. Because if the enemy has approached you within 50 meters, and your artillery is silent and your drones are not flying, it seems that you are left alone, without any support.’

Another officer with experience of interaction with the General Staff pointed to new Russian tactics:

‘The new Russian tactic looks like this: they infiltrate in small groups, take our weak positions at points, accumulate there and complicate the defense of neighbouring positions, force them to leave — this is a very old but effective tactic from the World War II. At the operational level, the Russians quickly create new groups and can concentrate them for an offensive. At the strategic level, they decided to wage a war of attrition.’

Trump is a businessman who can represent a bad investment when it’s staring him in the face. Those like Marco Rubio argue the Europeans, particularly Britain and France, were capable of backing Ukraine without US support. Ignoring the fact that London and Paris don’t have weaponry, finance or military to do that, a fracture is opening up in Europe in any case.

Germany’s dilemma

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz urged Russian President Vladimir Putin in a conversation Friday to ‘end’ his war on Ukraine and to ‘withdraw troops’. Scholz talked to Putin over the phone for an hour, the first direct exchange between the two leaders in nearly two years. A German government spokesperson said in a statement: ‘The Federal Chancellor urged Russia to be prepared to negotiate with Ukraine with the aim of achieving a just and lasting peace.’

Putin told Scholz that any potential agreements on Ukraine should be based on the ‘new territorial realities and address the root causes of the conflict.’ Putin reiterated Russia’s peace terms; Ukraine would have to drop its plans to join Nato and withdraw all its troops from all the territory of four regions claimed by Russia. These are now largely in Russian hands.

Scholz had also spoken to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy beforehand and was planning to do so again after the call. That did not stop Zelensky making it clear he had cautioned Scholz against speaking to Putin, saying it would reduce the Russian leader’s isolation and keep the war going. Afterwards, he said Scholz’s call opened a ‘Pandora’s box’ by undermining efforts to isolate the Russian leader.

Scholz has, over recent months, been pushing for a second conference on peace in Ukraine which would include Russia. Germany will hold a snap election on 23 February after the collapse of the coalition government Scholz led. Germany is the second biggest backer of Ukraine after the US. Germany faces concerns that it will be left to take on a far bigger share of the war effort if Trump carries out his threat to reduce support for Kyiv. That is unpopular given the high levels of poverty and the pressure on infrastructure and welfare services Germans already face.

Scholz’s main opponent, conservative leader Friedrich Merz, who leads the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), who has taken a more hawkish stance on military support for Ukraine, criticised Scholz for refusing to deliver long-range missiles to Ukraine – as the US, UK and France have.

Scholz is attempting to portray himself as a safer choice than Merz.  Polls put Scholz’s centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) in third place with 16%, just behind the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which criticises German support for Ukraine.

Ukraine cannot re-take the territory it has lost in the east and may be facing defeat. Also note that the Western media have been hysterical in reporting the presence of North Korean troops in eastern Ukraine. No-one wants an escalation of this war, started by Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, but what the Western media does not say is that because of his full support for Zelensky and Netanyahu, Joe Biden’s greatest achievement will have been to draw China, Russia, Iran and North Korea ever closer in the face of US aggression. A decade ago, Beijing and Moscow opposed Iran getting nuclear weapons and backed Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Teheran (torn up by Trump). Similarly, both powers treated North Korea with something approaching disdain.

Today, both China and Russia are prepared to see Iran developing nuclear weapons. Russia has provided Iran with sophisticated air-defence systems, which seem to have foiled Israel bombing Teheran. North Korea has come in from the cold. Undeterred, Netanyahu keeps up the genocide in Gaza, bombards civilian targets relentlessly in Lebanon and is bombing Syria, a Russian ally and where it has troops deployed and a naval base.

Inside the incoming Trump administration are those like Rubio who would like America to join Israel in a war with Iran. Leaving aside the disaster that looms there, they seem unaware that both Russia and China are allies of Tehran. Its unlikely either would intervene directly in such a war, but they would aid Iran, especially Russia.

Trump, the supposed ‘candidate of peace’, will enter the White House faced with Ukraine losing the war and Israel desperately trying to ignite a regional war. How will he react? His choice of Cabinet members suggests badly.