In one of the scariest moments in modern history, we're doing our best at ScheerPost to pierce the fog of lies that conceal it but we need some help to pay our writers and staff. Please consider a tax-deductible donation.
By Charles Derber
Trump’s foreign policy is coming into clearer focus, as his attacks on Venezuela and his threats against Colombia, Mexico, Cuba and Greenland, as well as Iran, have escalated. Despite his recent claim that he won’t use force against Greenland, Trump is pursuing wars that he promised US workers that he would reject as part of his populist agenda. His real political and economic agenda intertwines wars against enemies at home and abroad, both called criminals and terrorists. The current liberal Democratic and mainstream critique lacks the genuine populist perspective essential to critiquing and defeating these twin wars, failing to prevent horrific deaths from Minneapolis to Caracas.
Most critics argue that Trump’s foreign war policies are wrong because they break the US commitment to the “rules-based international order” since World War II that kept the peace among great powers. Mainstream and liberal Democrats, as well as many neoconservatives, repeatedly make this argument, usually with a defense of NATO. It disregards the real causes of US militarism operating both in foreign and domestic policy.
The liberal and broader mainstream US critique belies the entire story of the international order after World War II, reinforcing the hegemonic ideology that the US was committed to international rules keeping the world safe and democratic. The alleged rules in place provided the veneer of secure international order, while masking the reality of a US-dominated world order. The US engaged in endless interventions in Central and Latin America, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, all in the name of deterrence and democracy protection against the Soviet Union or Islamic terrorism. But no international rules governed or curbed these interventions; instead, the US pursued its own interests -whether in Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, El Salvador or Afghanistan – that were mainly economic, buttressed by support from NATO allies and unopposed by Western leaders preaching the rules of the international order.
True, no hot wars broke out between the US and the Soviet Union or the US and China; this is touted as the aim and success of the US rules. But the 1962 Cuban missile crisis almost became a nuclear war between the US and the Soviets, as did the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. The avoidance of Great Power war was more a result of luck than any rules of the system. The system encouraged economically-driven US interventions that always came with the risk of escalation to bigger wars pitting Big Powers directly against each other.
US bipartisan leaders from LBJ to Ronald Reagan were enforcing the real rules, which were the right to exercise any American power that US leaders declared was necessary to defeat Communists, dictators, and terrorists. Underneath this “rule-based” order were US political and economic interests to secure power and corporate profits.
Trump’s sin has been to be more honest about the real rules of the game. He blatantly pronounces that his aim is to expand US power to take the oil or the minerals. He openly declares that he makes the rules but this is hardly new. US hegemonic rule, while weakening in recent years, has been the reality since World War II; Trump is simply removing the democratic veneer that created the perception of an international “rules-based” order. He is also threatening NATO, another key to the illusion of a rules-based order enforced not by one nation but by the “free world.”
We need a critique that exposes the lie of a rules-based order, making clear it has long been a system designed to serve the intertwined goals of US power and profits of corporate oligarchs. The anti-Trump opposition should speak truth about US foreign policy prior to and during his rule – which Trump’s indelicate rhetoric has begun to broadcast to the world. The resistance needs to join the rest of the world – especially in Latin America and the Global South – in moving toward a rejection of US militarism and imperialism. This means not only opposing Trump but forcefully rejecting neo-colonialism in all its forms before and after Trump. And it means being clear-eyed about the history of NATO in helping sponsor US hegemony and sustain a view of Russia as the essential enemy.
The resistance and larger US public, including the Democratic Party, must develop two other closely related critiques of Trump’s wars. One is to be clear that fascism is a politics that unites war abroad with war at home. Critique of Trump’s wars needs to tell the public how these two militarisms facilitate and fuel each other.
Fascism arising in capitalist societies creates a racialized alien enemy at home to prevent working people in very hard times from turning against ruling elites. In the US, it provides a way to unite white workers and corporate elites in a common war against immigrants and people of color; workers are taught to blame aliens rather than US corporations for their dire economic problems. Fascism emerges in large part to prevent populist class struggle at home while repressing populist struggles abroad.
Fascism militarizes Trumpist policing of the alien enemy at home by linking the war at home with wars abroad. Trump ties the immigrant blood-threat in the US to their home countries abroad. Venezuelan immigrants who are allegedly trafficking drugs in the US are part of a broader national security “narco-terrorist” threat of Venezuelan drug cartels abroad, run by the President of Venezuela, whom Trump kidnapped in a militarized coup. Seeking to gin up threats against Venezuela is integral to the fascist strategy of ratcheting up support for militarizing law and order in Chicago or Minneapolis. Fascism unleashes and legitimates horrifying US security operations to take out “terrorists” such as Renee Good and Alex Pretti opposing occupation of Minneapolis, equating them with “terrorist” activists abroad opposing US military occupations of their countries. The federal war against Minneapolis – with thousands of heavily armed and massively funded US military taking over local law enforcement and patrolling the streets, shutting schools, defunding services, and detaining children – is increasingly indistinguishable from US wars overseas; the intent and effect are to blur, intensify and justify invasions, occupations, and militarized policing at home and abroad.
Hitler demonstrated the broader ways and reasons that classical fascism ties militarism abroad to the war at home. As Hitler began to purge Jews, the gypsy Roma, and undocumented immigrants in the mid-1930s, he announced his policy of expanding the “Lebensraum,” areas neighboring Germany to the East that rightfully belonged to Germany and had to be conquered. By 1938, Hitler had annexed Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia, the first stages of conquest of land for the “Lebensraum.” These wars served to build national pride and power, as well as deliver land and resources for Aryan Germans, while deporting non-Aryans first into concentration camps within the conquered territories and then killing them or driving them further away.
Trump’s announcement of his new “Donroe” policy made all of the Americas his “Lebensraum” of a greater territory whose people and resources he controlled. Trump could embrace the Monroe Doctrine to argue, correctly, that militarized dominance of the continent had been the policy of the US since 1823, when President Monroe announced the US would be the “protector” of Latin America. Again, war in the Americas reinforces the real rules governing US relation to other nations, with brown people in Venezuela or Cuba increasingly subject to militarized control that Trump wields against brown people in Los Angeles and Chicago.
Finally, the populist critique we need of Trump’s wars must deepen emerging public understanding of Trump’s betrayal of his populist campaign promises. Trump ran against the globalizing elite who were outsourcing manufacturing jobs; he pledged a new regime that would radically shake up the US “globalist” Establishment and return the US to its working people. This was part of a long history of US Far-Right populists – including 1930s America Firsters whose name and pro-Nazi policies Trump appropriated; they critiqued international banks and foreigners and rhetorically denounced, as Trump did, US corporate elites selling out US workers.
The reality is that Trump’s wars abroad and at home consolidate his mutually beneficial pact with the US corporate oligarchy. The wars are not just diverting billions of dollars to the military from workers at home. They are at the heart of an openly corrupt political governing alliance between Trump and corporate elites, with the wealthiest new Robber Barons in Silicon Valley, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, heavily invested in the military in space, satellites and the Golden Dome as well as high-tech armaments on land and sea. Meanwhile, all big corporations, civilian as well as military, profit from the US seizing resources and foreign markets, whether in Venezuela or Greenland or anywhere else in the world.
Trump asked Big Oil to donate $1 billion dollars and promised he would pay them back in spades. Venezuela is part of the payback; it exposes Trump’s naked embrace of Chevron and all his corporate oligarchs. The same corporate interests underpin Trump’s plans for likely future attacks on Cuba, Mexico and Colombia -as well as his mad push to take over Greenland as climate change makes Greenland easier terrain to mine and exploit its vast store of vital minerals.
While the message should be obvious, the long failure of the Democratic Party to embrace a positive populism- a politics that links democracy at home with democracy abroad – helps explain why the critique we need is not coming from Democratic Party leaders. Positive populism universalizes a class politics uniting all working people against the corporations running America. When the Democrats abandoned the New Deal, and began under Clinton to prioritize siloed identity politics over class politics, they laid the foundation for their failure to deliver a resounding populist anti-war critique. US militarism was always bi-partisan, and Democrats have long embraced interventionist wars to satisfy their own corporate donors and lobbyists. This effectively tied them to an anti-democratic agenda abroad linked to their embrace of corporate rule at home.
US progressives and the Left do have their own history of positive populism, which at its best challenged corporate power both abroad and at home. But it has been largely suppressed and forgotten -whether the anti-war socialist movements of Eugene Debs before World War I or the 1960s New Left “participatory democracy” and anti -Vietnam war movements against militarized capitalism. These movements recognized that democracy at home is indivisible from democracy abroad. It is finally time for the anti-Trump resistance and for Democrats to lead with a robust positive populism promoting democracy in domestic and foreign policy.
Such a shift is not idle fantasy. Bernie Sanders and AOC built Fight Oligarchy tours that have drawn tens of thousands of people across the country into the anti-Trump resistance, calling to fight both corporate oligarchic rule in the US and imperial forever wars in the Middle East and the Global South. Moreover, a growing number of Democrats in the Progressive Caucus and beyond are beginning to recognize that economic populism is central to defeating Trump in 2026 and beyond. Senators like Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Jeff Merkley of Oregon have all begun to take up a more class-based positive populism, trying democracy at home with an anti-war commitment to democracy abroad. The horror of Minneapolis – in the same moment as Trump is pledging attacks against Venezuela, Cuba and Greenland – is awakening a more organized and forceful resistance to fascism’s twin wars.
Trump’s wars are clarifying the indivisibility of democracy. If the resistance can seize this moment to unite Americans against the corporate oligarchy militarily controlling people abroad as well as at home, it will not only help progressive Democrats win elections but truly change the course of history.
Charles Derber’s latest book is Fighting Oligarchy: How Positive Populism Can Reclaim America.
For our podcast with Professor Charlie Derber and Robert Scheer, titled “Navigating Sociocide: The Contradictions of American Society.
Click to subscribe on: Apple / Spotify / Amazon / YouTube /