Of mice and men

Neo-con American hawk John Bolton is hitting the headlines again railing against his old boss and saying that Donald Trump’s  behaviour is “erratic, irrational and unconstrained” and that Trump will likely take the US out of NATO if he wins the presidential race in 2024. If only it were true...

Bolton is a career politician. Trump, on the other hand, is a property tycoon. Trump was quite happy to do the bidding of the American Establishment whose views he generally went along with. He didn’t realise that he was just a pawn of the reactionary circles who had propelled him to the White House in the first place. 

When Trump branched out on his own – arguing for cuts in the global US military presence and working for a rapprochement with Democratic Korea – his plans were sabotaged by his own senior advisers.

When Trump sacked them – and that’s something the president can still do – another stepped in to fill the gap.  Men like John Bolton, appointed Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2018 and sacked in 2019. Bolton has long been a tool of the “deep state”  –  the hidden hand of the most aggressive sections of the American ruling class that want war and “regime change” in countries that dare to stand up to American imperialism.

Bolton said that when Trump was in the Oval Office he undermined Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. E says Trump would betray Ukraine if again returned to the White House.

In the Republican camp some, like Bolton, are trying to derail Trump’s comeback campaign. They don’t particularly favour the others seeking nomination on the Republican ticket. But they clearly see Trump as a troublesome maverick, an unreliable element whose private life and dubious business ethics are an embarrassment even by American standards. They’re working to ensure the re-election of  the Democratic candidate. And Joe Biden is clearly a tool of the deep state. 

At the end of the day it makes no difference who wins the US presidential elections. Bourgeois elections are held so that the smallest number of people  can manipulate the largest number of votes. There can only be one winner in that sort of race…

For whom the bell tolls…

 Last weekend millions in Japan and throughout the world paused to remember those who died in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last days of the Second World War. On 6th August 1945 Hiroshima was destroyed by an American atom bomb. Nagasaki was hit three days later. Some 250,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed instantly in the atomic blasts. Many more would later perish from flash burns and radiation sickness.

The claim that the atom bombs forced Japan to surrender is an enduring myth of the Second World War. The Americans say they had to use the atom bomb to force Japan to surrender and bring the global conflict to an end. But the Japanese were begging for an armistice as their armies folded under the hammer blows of communist-led guerrillas  and the Red Army. 

But two Japanese cities were still wiped out to show the world, and the Soviet Union in particular, what US imperialism was capable of doing.

The fight for peace is inexorably linked to the struggle for justice. The campaign must inevitably challenge world imperialism, the greatest threat to peace. and present an alternative to the capitalism that is the root cause of all conflicts in the world today.

Bye Bye Bolton

 US President Donald Trump sacked his national security adviser, John Bolton, this week as “his services are no longer needed at the White House”. No one’s going to miss Bolton, least of all the Iranians who claim credit for the dismissal saying it was the result of their steadfast resistance to American economic warfare that led to the wretched old warmonger’s downfall.

            Without going into details Trump simply said: "I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore I asked John for his resignation,”.

Some say that Bolton’s blinkered Cold War stance, which nearly led to open war with Venezuela and undermined Trump’s efforts to reach a rapprochement with Democratic Korea, was at odds with Trump’s thinking. Others believe that the last straw was Bolton’s opposition to secret peace talks between American, Afghan government and Taliban officials at the presidential retreat of Camp David that was called off at the last minute following a Taliban bomb attack in Kabul that killed an American soldier and a dozen others last week.

Bolton was a die-hard member of the “Deep State” that represents the most reactionary and aggressive circles within the American ruling class. This Establishment operates inside the Democratic and Republican parties within the corridors of power as a “war party” that has openly clamoured for US hegemony since the end of the Cold War.  They want to rule the world in the name of the “New World Order” or “globalisation” and they don’t care how much it costs or how many die in their drive to fulfil their American Dream.

Trump is something different. Trump represents American capitalist circles who want to cut back US military expenditure in Europe, Afghanistan and south Korea so that they can concentrate on controlling the global energy market by taking over the entire Middle East and restoring US imperialism’s hegemony over south America.

The Democrat opposition portray him as some sort of mad, one-man band – a vulgar, corrupt racist unfit to hold public office. But he is so much more than that. The property tycoon turned president represents those who no longer want to pay for wars they cannot win – which has been virtually all of them since the Second World War. They too want American hegemony over the world but they believe it can be won through trade wars and unequal treaties which was the preferred form of US overseas expansion in the 19^th century. This is what Trump means when he says he wants to “Make America Great Again”.

Trump is turning the economic screws on Cuba, Russia and People’s China and he clearly supports the crippling sanctions regime against Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Trump has destroyed all hopes for peace in the Middle East with his “deal of the century” that gives the Zionists everything they want. And his government continues to support the feudal Saudi king’s war in Yemen that has cost tens of thousands of lives and brought the country to the brink of the worst famine it’s seen in 100 years.

Bolton’s departure will hopefully lead to the resumption of realistic negotiations between US imperialism and Democratic Korea. But only time can tell whether this marks a genuine turning point for the Trump administration.