No illusions: Trump and his friends will violate international law and all established rules!

Drawing by Sonia Mitralia

Yorgos Mitralias writes: When, at the beginning of the century, the great American writer Philip Roth rewrote the history of his country with his extraordinary novel The Plot against America, by having the legendary pro-Nazi aviator Charles Lindbergh elected President of the United States instead of Franklin Roosevelt, he probably could not have imagined that the political reality of today’s America would bear more than similarities to the one described in his book. A book of political fiction, yet described as “nightmarish”, set 85 years earlier, in 1940! Roth’s novel is indeed prophetic when it has Lindbergh, who like Trump, promises peace, get elected. Or when, once in power, this same Lindbergh hastens to do what Trump is doing with Putin: conclude a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler… while he takes as his jack-of-all-trades minister a notorious Nazi, the great capitalist car manufacturer Henry Ford, where Trump has taken another capitalist who also makes cars, Elon Musk…
It is as if the demons of a past we thought had been buried continue to haunt our present. And this is not only thanks to the brilliant insights of Philip Roth. But also and above all because of the past and ideological background of those who are both the brains and the close protection detail of Trump: the triumvirate of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks as well as their protégé, Vice-President J.D. Vance. Less well known than Musk, David Sacks has been appointed by Trump as “czar in charge of Artificial Intelligence and cryptocurrencies”, i.e. two of the most critical sectors of his administration, while Peter Thiel, who can boast of having “discovered” and sensed Trump’s potential first, ideologically trained, financed and propelled J.D. Vance onto the political scene, before imposing him as Trump’s vice-president.

Obviously, the content of the professions of faith and actions of these gentlemen would be more than enough to qualify them as neo-Nazis. Moreover, they themselves strive to pose as convinced racists and supremacists and as supporters and propagandists of everything that is neo-fascist and especially neo-Nazi throughout the world. However, it is their shared past as white South Africans, enthusiastic supporters of apartheid and raised in circles openly nostalgic for the Third Reich, that sheds light on something much more important than Trump’s punitive sanctions against South Africa, due to very timid measures in lieu of the land reform that its successive governments never undertook after the fall of apartheid. (1) In reality, it illuminates the depth and strength of their neo-Nazi convictions. For example, Peter Thiel, the most politically educated and influential of the three, grew up in Swakopmund, a small town in present-day Namibia, populated by whites of German origin, who until recently celebrated… Hitler’s birthday every year and greeted each other in the streets with unabashed… Heil Hitler!

So, having said that, we can only conclude that we are dealing with Trump’s close protection detail, which stands out for its clearly Nazi references, and not at all with simple “provocateurs” and other “madmen” and “crackpots” or even “billionaires with confused ideas”, as claimed by our media, which still cannot solve the alleged “mystery” of Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes! This observation is not without terribly significant and… frightening consequences. Firstly, it sheds light on the present and future actions, allegedly “chaotic” and “incomprehensible” of Trump himself, giving them a meaning that remains hidden as long as we try to interpret them as simple extremist variants of neoliberal and authoritarian policies that we have known in the past. And then he measures the deadly threat to humanity posed by the plans and ambitions of the Trump-Vance tandem and the evil trio of their close associates!

For the moment, one thing is certain: after the major upheavals of the first two months of Trump’s second presidency, the United States of America is no longer the country the world has known since the end of the First World War in 1918! And given that for more than a century, the United States has been calling the shots for the whole world, it is this world that is waking up today radically changed, metamorphosed and deeply anxious about the now indecipherable future!

There is no point in trying to understand the logic of these “great upheavals” of Trump’s second presidency using the usual analytical tools. What gives meaning to the current process of destruction of the great North American (bourgeois) democracy, as well as the avalanche of more or less “incomprehensible” and disconcerting presidential decrees that accompany it, is that they all serve a project that couldn’t care less about the rules established by laws, constitutions or international law. So, the sooner our left-wing parties understand this fundamental truth, the better it will be for them and for the whole world…

Thus, what brings together and even unites parties or political leaders who at first glance are quite different, such as Trump, Putin or Netanyahu, is not necessarily and primarily the community of their geostrategic, imperialist and other interests. It is above all the community of their profoundly anti-democratic, racist, obscurantist, supremacist, militarist and violent projects. And this ideological community brings together not only the big but also the “small” authoritarian and anti-democratic leaders such as, for example, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, a Putin loyalist, who has become a major arms supplier to Israel for his friend Netanyahu. His Serbia has just increased its arms exports to Israel, accused of genocide in Gaza, by… 3000% in 2024 (2).

But beware. The ideological community of projects and ambitions of Trump, Putin, Modi or Netanyahu does not at all mean that these leaders and their regimes are “condemned” to coexist peacefully, to make peace by sharing the world between them. In reality, it is quite the opposite. Regimes such as those of Trump or Putin and their ideological clones sooner or later lead to war, including among themselves. To “fratricidal” wars such as, for example, the one that was narrowly avoided at the last moment in 1934 between Italian fascism and German Nazism, when Mussolini urgently sent 200,000 of his soldiers to the Austrian border to prevent his friend Hitler from annexing Austria, which was under Italian influence at the time!

So, let us first and foremost assess the extreme gravity of the situation, and act accordingly. Because the essential condition for effectively fighting your enemy is to know what he is and what he intends to do to you…

Notes

1. See our article When the new South Africa of the betrayed expectations, also betrays its hero Dimitri Tsafendas ! : https://www.cadtm.org/When-the-new-South-Africa-of-the-betrayed-expectations-also-betrays-its-hero

2. See Haaretz: Israel-Serbia Ties Intensify: Arms Sales From Belgrade to IDF Shoot Up by 3,000%  https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2025-01-28/ty-