Ukraine
We are not actually in World War III, yet, but with the serious and convulsive nature of the crises the world is facing today, anyone could be excused from wondering if a world conflict was imminent. We have a major proxy war in Ukraine where NATO military personnel, working nominally for the Ukrainian government, have fired US ballistic missiles such as ATACMS and the Anglo-French cruise missile Storm Shadow, into Russia. Trump was recently threatening to allow Ukraine to fire the even more threatening US Tomahawk cruise missile into Russia. In response, a year ago, Russia tested the super-hypersonic multi-warheaded Oreshnik (Hazel) missile on a huge Ukrainian arms complex near Dnipro, comprehensively wiping it out with purely conventional explosives that Ukraine had zero chance of stopping.
In response to Trump’s bragging threats to hand over Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, Russia then announced that it had tested Burevestnik or Storm Petrel (a kind of seabird), a low flying, nuclear powered cruise missile with virtually unlimited range, capable of carrying nuclear or conventional warheads. Soon after this announcement, Trump announce that he would not be giving Tomahawks to Ukraine, supposedly because of a limited supply of these weapons. Instead, Trump announced that the US would be resuming nuclear testing, in effect junking the Test Ban Treaty, which has never formally come into force, but had generally been observed since the 1990s. However, it was not clarified if the testing envisaged was actual nuclear explosions, or something less, and Russia and other countries also made it clear that such an action would have consequences. While the direction of motion is clear, exactly what may take place is not.
The whole reason why such fulminations and risk-taking are going on over Ukraine is because the US and its proxies are clearly losing. More strategic towns are being taken in the areas of the semi-liberated oblasts in South-East Ukraine, particularly Donetsk and Zaporozhe. And Odessa was recently convulsed with rioting as the Russian-speaking population rebelled against conscription. One of the key differences between Trump and his predecessor Biden is that Trump recognises that the US is failing in its proxy war in Ukraine. Various figures in the West whom it is quite appropriate to call “Azov liberals” fulminate against Trump supposedly for being some sort of supporter or tool of Vladimir Putin for his preference for sporadic peace summits with Russian leaders, and his refusal to commit to virtually unlimited funds and arms to Zelensky’s far right Ukrainian regime.
But the real explanation for Trump’s (relative) rationality over Ukraine is that it is the flipside of his activities as a tool of the Israel lobby. Trump’s three Presidential election campaigns, as is well documented, were paid for by the Likudnik Adelson dynasty, the last in 2024 to the tune of $100 million from Mirian Adelson. It is a well-known fact that the most vehemently pro-Zionist regime in Europe, East or West, is that of Victor Orban in Hungary, which openly defied the arrest warrant against Netanyahu from the International Criminal Court recently – and yet is hostile to the war drive against Ukraine. One key reason for this hostility is that there is a strong school of thought among Zionists that the financial and military aid that the Western powers are spending trying to vainly defeat Russia, would be better spent on Israel itself. That is one expression of a latent contradiction between the interests of the Zionist lobby, and US imperialism, where as is well known, the Biden administration was gung-ho about war in Ukraine to the point of pushing the conflict to the brink in the ‘lame duck’ last weeks of his presidency, something that Putin was able to deter by the demonstrative use of the devastating non-nuclear Oreshnik, undoubtedly the most dangerous and dramatic point in the Ukraine conflict.
China
Which brings us briefly to China. The US’s crusade against China has largely run into the ground. Their strategy of provoking China into taking control of Taiwan as a trigger for a Ukraine-style war, by using Taiwan’s advanced NVIDIA chip manufacturing facilities, and embargoes and/or sanctions to starve China of access to such technology, has run into the ground. The unveiling of DeepSeek, the Chinese open source AI feature, in 2024, was a huge blow to this, as it appears that despite such embargoes, China is close to drawing ahead of the West, including Taiwan (as in reality a US/Japanese proxy) in developing advanced chips for use in AI and other advanced applications. Not only that, but it appears that China’s new chips are less prone to gobble up enormous amounts of energy at those the West are using. Which is something of a blow, as it is now possible to envisage that China will in the next decade or so completely surpass the West in terms of high technology without needing Taiwan’s vaunted advanced semiconductor facilities. So, Trump has been blowing hot and cold with sanctions, tariffs and threats against China and yet looking increasingly impotent and ineffective.
Gaza and Zionist Crisis
Then we have Gaza. The conflict supposedly over the Israeli hostages taken on 7th October was a feeble alibi indeed for the genocide, and the fake ceasefire brokered by Trump shows that quite clearly. The genocide continues, albeit at a slightly slower pace in Gaza, but an accelerating rate of killing and repression in the West Bank more than makes up for that. Gaza is still being starved, very little aid is getting though compared to what was mooted by Trump and so, and preparations are being made to split Gaza into two zones, partly administered by Gaza’s projected new overlord, the Iraq war criminal Tony Blair. And yet there is no agreement with the Palestine resistance forces who reluctantly refused to outright oppose Trump’s fake ceasefire, which was a way of saving Netanyahu’s neck more than anything, as at the end of the more than two years of genocidal bombing and starving, its forces were still undefeated and had steadily recruited and maintained their popular support.
They took the risk of going along with the fake ceasefire to try to get the Palestinian population some relief from the slaughter, not to save their own forces. Israel still bombs daily, the situation is grim indeed, but Israel is also exposed and in Europe and the US popular hatred for the genocidal regime is becoming an avalanche, causing a major crisis in the US, with the fragmentation of Trump’s MAGA base over their attitude to Zionism, which many say is ‘Israel first’, not ‘America First’. The issue of Jeffrey Epstein, and his relationship with Trump, is crucial, and it is not just a squalid child-sex scandal but is increasingly widely suspected to be something connected to outsized Israeli influence over US politics, which is clearly true. Which puts Trump in a very precarious position.
It has had its impact in Europe too, and sharply in Britain, both with the stripping of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor of his former princely royal titles because of his deep involvement, documented in Virginia Guiffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, with Epstein and sex-trafficking of underage girls. A major blow to the diminishing prestige of the British Monarchy. This is, as indicated, linked intimately to the Israel lobby and its influence over Western politics. Labour’s Zionist monster Peter Mandelson was earlier forced out as British Ambassador to the US over this; the fact that he was ever appointed at all is startling, given his long-known close relations with Epstein. But Starmer, as he noted when becoming Labour leader, supports Zionism “without qualification”. The British body politic is in deep crisis because of the Israel lobby and its hold over politicians, as shown by the crisis over the proscription for supposed ‘terrorism’ of Palestine Action, which Britain’s own intelligence services have said quite clearly (though known intermediaries) that they find counter-productive and impossible to justify. The judicial review of this ban is due in the courts in late November.
And then there is the ludicrous affair of the Europa League football match between Aston Villa and Macabee Tel Aviv on 6th November. West Midlands Police were denounced as anti-Semitic by all four major Zionist-influenced parties: Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and Reform, because they acted to ban Macabees away supporters from attending the Villa match, citing their earlier outrageous rioting in Amsterdam as justification. Then after the pro-Zionist parties had so denounced the police, and the local Independent MP, Ayoub Khan, for initiating the ban, another major riot of these ‘fans’ forced a local ‘derby’ in Tel Aviv itself to be called off. Making the leaders of all four of these parties look like idiots. All of these, combined with the impact of the livestreamed genocide itself, have plunged the Zionist lobby, and those political forces in hock to it, into deep crisis here also.
Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere
One way or another, the US has been forced to somewhat retreat from some overt interventions in the Middle East and Ukraine. Its involvement in the 12-day war against Iran in June 2025 only delivered a severe blow to Israel. The US had to desperately broker a ceasefire for Israel because the Zionists were taking a hammering from Iran’s formidable arsenal of ballistic missiles. A repeat of that attack looks even less promising, as Iran is both better armed and better prepared than in June. So, as Trump mooted with earlier ‘ambitious’ demands for Anschluss with Canada, or to annex Greenland, the US under his command is now seeking to retrench in the Western Hemisphere. Hence the outrageous threats to Venezuela, the murder-attacks on fishing boats pretending they are narcotics smugglers, the $50 million price on President Maduro’s head, and the Nobel Peace Prize for the fascist US puppet María Corina Machado, who wants the US to invade Venezuela so she can hand over literally trillions of dollars of its oil reserves to the US.
The US belligerence against Venezuela is part of Trump’s reconsolidation of the US in the Western Hemisphere, with a view to later expansion. It involves the reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, that the whole of the Americas belongs to the US. An invasion of Venezuela is entirely possible, the threats against Colombia’s leftist president Gustavo Petro show it goes further than that. Cuba is also under threat, as still the only workers state in the Americas – Venezuela for all its deep-going social reforms and collectivism is still in terms of many of its economic resources privately owned, and the bourgeois class has not been expropriated. Maybe an all-out conflict with US imperialism would bring a tipping point where the Bolivarian Revolution night further radicalise and the working masses move to expropriate the bourgeoisie. A Yankee invasion of Venezuela, a huge country, would enrage the masses in all Latin America and would generate huge resistance and likely a revolutionary wave. So, to conclude this survey of the state of the world at this point, the braggadocio of Trump in the Western Hemisphere could easily be a trap for US imperialism, and could turn the apparent pre-war situation right now, which at times looks very threatening indeed, into a pre-revolutionary situation.
