Lindsey German on POTUS in the last chance saloon  

Joe Biden looks like he intends to end his failed presidency with a bang. The danger is that he will take a lot of people with him. That’s the meaning of his decision to allow Ukraine to fire US long range missiles directly into Russian territory. It’s a major escalation of the Ukraine war, which is a proxy war between Nato and Russia. It means the direct provision of targeting information, and the authorisation of each firing, by US personnel.

At present, Biden is stipulating that the missiles can only be used in the Russian province of Kursk, which Ukraine invaded in the summer and which is now seeing a counter offensive from Russian and north Korean troops. The latter are given as the reason for Biden’s escalation. But Russia having North Korean troops in their own country is hardly sign of escalation on their side. And US troops are present in large numbers in Germany, the UK and throughout the Middle East, something which is regarded as perfectly normal.

We can’t assume that this limited use will remain or that the UK and France won’t also authorise the use of Storm Shadow missiles in the same way. In fact, Keir Starmer travelled to Paris to join Emmanuel Macron on Armistice Day in order to pledge that they would both stick with Ukraine ‘to the end’. The danger of these pledges leading to open conflict between nuclear powers are real, yet they are dismissed as scaremongering by those desperate to supply ever more weapons and to escalate this war still further.

Yet they know that this war is being lost by Ukraine and that some sort of peace talks and a settlement are looming. So this is about giving Ukraine as much strategic advantage in those talks and trying to inflict as much damage to Russia as possible. It’s also Biden’s last gasp, as Trump succeeds him in January and may well reverse this order.  Trump did after all gain many votes from proclaiming himself the man who could make peace in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Whatever the fantasy involved in this, the war is electorally unpopular in the US and across much of Europe.

How exactly Trump’s policy is going to play out is less certain however. While he wants to end the Ukraine war, the better to focus on military rivalry with China in the Pacific, and to reboot the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, we should have no illusions that he will be a peacemaker or that he will mark a decisive break with his predecessor in protecting the interests of US imperialism.

Last week Biden welcomed Trump to the White House to ensure a smooth transition of the presidency for when the new president is inaugurated in January. Biden is on the record as designating Trump extremely dangerous. Some of Biden and Harris’s supporters would describe him as a fascist- a term also used in the past by British foreign secretary David Lammy, who now brushes it off as old news.

Seeing Biden and Trump engaged in a cosy fireside chat might seem surprising, therefore. But of course it’s business as usual. Just as the British newsreels referred to the fascist dictator with a respectful ‘Herr Hitler’ right up till the outbreak of the Second World War, any sense of distaste or disgust at Trump’s politics are hidden. Indeed his politics will be legitimised by his election because the most important thing for US capitalism is continuity. And despite Trump’s claims to be an outsider and anti-establishment, he is part of that same capitalist class.

This is worth remembering when we look at the development of US politics in the coming months. There will certainly be breaks with Biden’s policies but a lot of similarity as well. That’s because both parties are wedded to the success of US capitalism and its imperialist project, whatever their differences about how to achieve this.

However it is hard to see how some of Trump’s appointments will necessarily make this easier. There are the obvious no-nos whose qualification for the job seems to be friendship with Trump rather than any wider experience or understanding. This applies to Matt Gaetz, appointed Attorney General with virtually no legal experience, and to the former soldier and Fox News presenter, Pete Hegseth, who becomes Defence Secretary. Both are also being investigated over allegations of sexual misconduct, which even for Trump may be too much of a problem.

But we are also talking about his nomination for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who refers to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria and supports the illegal settlers, and billionaire Elon Musk who is tasked with improving ‘efficiency in government’. The proposed Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is a hawk on China.

Trump is deliberately signalling that he is in a strong position and can do whatever he wants he wants having won a second term. But it will lead to all sorts of complications and contradictions in the months ahead.

The right-wing settlers in the West Bank have already greeted these appointments as helping their cause – and who can disagree with them? But this also aligns Trump with an agenda which is on course to even greater war in the Middle East. The situation in Gaza remains horrific, with Netanyahu given a green light for whatever he wants. War with Iran may well come closer under Trump. Any settlement between Ukraine and Russia will not bring lasting peace but will mean a highly militarised border area and tensions throughout Eastern and Central Europe. Trump is promising punitive trade tariffs on China, and the US is building military alliances throughout the Pacific.   

At the same time, Trump is demanding of European members of Nato that they spend more on defence – a demand happily complied with by Starmer and Germany’s Sholz as they prioritise guns over butter, war over pensions, all at the expense of their own populations. Many of the European leaders don’t like Trump, and some want to build up a European defence force separate from the US. But they are very deeply wedded to US imperialism and its Nato arm, none more so than Keir Starmer.

Meanwhile the wars continue. It was great to discuss all this at Stop the War’s Anti-War Convention, where hundreds of people attended sessions on a range of subjects from the Middle East to Nato, the role of the media and state repression. The anti-war movement has been central to campaigning over Gaza, but these wars are now spreading, and – like the warmongers – we need to fight on all fronts.

This week: I am speaking at a Lewisham meeting on Tuesday, then various Stop the War meetings. I hope to catch up with a new documentary called Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which is the story of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, set against the black civil rights movement in the US, and how they connected, all with a jazz soundtrack.