Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, was said to be committed to “common sense.” The White House declared him to be someone Trump can “work together” with “very closely.”

What a world of difference from just a few months ago when a different U.S. president called Zelensky a “courageous and determined” defender of democracy and denounced Putin as a “war criminal.”

This dramatic turnaround is just the latest example of the about-face that’s happened in U.S. foreign policy over the last several weeks—a change that’s sparked confusion and bewilderment as 80 years of U.S. imperial strategy is seemingly being thrown overboard.

In Europe, Vice President J.D. Vance recently trashed political leaders there for not working together with fascists and initiated what one commentator called “the opening salvo in a trans-Atlantic divorce proceeding.” Snubbing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Trump’s V.P. met with Alice Weidel, leader of the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party, instead.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, speaking in Munich last week, signalled a retreat from NATO, “the greatest military alliance in history,” according to Foreign Policy magazine, giving “China and Russia what they’ve long sought: a multipolar world.” (As if that was something to be given by U.S. officials.)

All of this on top of the tariff war threats against some of the U.S.’ closest trading partners, declarations that Canada and Greenland will be annexed, and the squeeze put on Panama and other Latin American nations to cut ties with China, or else.

If you listen to some Democratic officials and liberal commentators in the corporate media, it’s like 2016 all over again.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has revived her accusation that Trump is “Putin’s puppet.” Obama’s former NATO ambassador Ivo Daalder argues the president has “adopted Putin’s talking points” and is “making Russia great again.”

The worst in this milieu continue to peddle simplistic hot takes centred on Trump’s admiration for strongmen or conspiratorial allegations that hinge on Russian blackmail and compromising material.

But this is not just a Democrats vs. Republicans storyline when it comes to interpreting events. Neocons in the GOP—who’ve been just as committed to the U.S.-dominated global order as any Democrat—are dazed by the administration’s foreign policy revolution and unsure at times how to respond. It’s all a sign of Trump’s still ongoing remake of his party.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., a Trump loyalist when it comes to nearly every Project 2025 priority domestically, expressed disagreement with his leader’s stance on Ukraine. He declared Putin “has got Stalin’s taste for blood” and expressed skepticism about negotiations. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., returning this week from what he called a mass grave in Ukraine, said any resolution that lets Putin “feel like he won…is a bad idea.”

Others—including hawks like Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Joni Ernst, R-Iowa—have refused to respond to media questions at all, apparently stunned from the case of whiplash inflicted on them by Trump.

Ideological confusion reigns among the anti-Trump liberal and progressive grassroots, as well, with some of the same people who usually criticize U.S. foreign policy coming to the defense of the old imperial order.

Demonstrators at one anti-MAGA protest this week, for instance, resurrected Cold War anti-Communist tropes, carrying signs plastered with “Deport Comrade Trump” and “Deport Comrade Musk.”

This writer encountered Facebook posts by a pair of erstwhile socialist activists Thursday declaring “Go back to Russia, Donald,” and “He’s Putin’s agent.” One of the two even wrote: “You have to prefer NATO hegemony to the spectacular destabilizing destructive danger” of Trump and company.

How should peace activists and opponents of U.S. imperialism interpret this seemingly sideways world? There is great pressure to conclude that things are just so chaotic and unpredictable that the only thing to do is wait it out and see what happens; it’s all just a mess created by a madman in the White House.

Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton, for instance, told the Wall Street Journal Thursday that Trump has no coherent ideology, certainly not one capable of dismantling the global order as it has existed. Bolton is a neocon of the Iraq War variety and has turned against his old boss. “This is just one man’s view,” he said of Trump’s attacks on the unipolar world. “Just grit your teeth” and bear it until he’s gone.

But a deeper analysis of the ideological universe in which the Trump administration operates suggests that the foreign policy shifts now underway—much like the trade war—are not patternless, nor are they proof the president is a Russian agent. They are evidence of a split within the U.S. ruling class which has exploded into the open.

At the heart of that split are differences over how to resolve the long-term crisis of U.S. capitalism and confront China’s rise to prominence in the world economy.

When it comes to the immediate case at hand—Trump’s shift toward rapprochement with Russia—it’s plausible to argue that a reverse Kissinger strategy is unfolding: a “Trump goes to Russia” version of “Nixon goes to China.”

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, watched the divisions between the Soviet Union and China, the world’s two biggest socialist powers, very closely. Ideological disagreements, border disputes, and other issues had raised tensions between the allies.

If the USSR and China were ever able to patch up their differences, Kissinger recognized they would pose a serious threat to capitalism’s dominance over the global economy, especially in the developing world, and constitute an even stronger bulwark against U.S. military power. Preventing that possibility became the major foreign policy goal of the Nixon administration.

Seeking to hammer a wedge between its two adversaries, the U.S. government opened secret talks with the Chinese state. The behind-the-scenes negotiations resulted in Nixon visiting Mao, the U.S. switching diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, the declaration by the U.S. that Taiwan is a part of China (the “One China” principle), cooperation in various Third World military misadventures, and eventually opened the way to massively increased trade.

From the perspective of U.S. imperialism, the strategy of befriending China to isolate the USSR was a huge success. Sino-Soviet ties weakened further, the need to “contain” China was no longer so pressing, and the U.S. was able to focus more of its militaristic aggressiveness toward its main target, the Soviet Union.

Today, over 50 years later, the Trump administration is doing a re-run of that operation, this time making overtures to Russia with the goal of pulling it away from China—which everyone in the capitalist class knows is the true competitor to U.S. monopoly dominance.

It’s a sharp break from a Washington foreign policy establishment that spent years trying to weaken Russia militarily and economically via the eastward expansion of NATO, the fomentation of “colour revolutions” on its border, support for a provocative and costly war in Ukraine, and punitive sanctions. They thought this was the way to cripple China’s biggest potential ally. Suffering from a Cold War 1.0 hangover, this group—which directed foreign policy during the Biden years—continues to see the further extension of U.S. power in Europe as an important milestone along the road to dealing with China.

The Trump administration and the far-right section of capital that backs him, however, have opted for the Kissinger approach. No longer viewing Russia as a real economic or security threat to either the U.S. or Western Europe, they want to focus on China, the real competitor to U.S. power. And they want to do it right now, not later on. Taking confrontation with Russia off the table, in their view, relieves U.S. imperialism of an expensive distraction from that task.

This faction of capital accepts the premise, as put forward by an anonymous “former government official” in a much-hyped paper published by the Atlantic Council in 2021, that “allowing Russia to drift fully into China’s strategic embrace” would be the “single greatest geostrategic error” U.S. imperialism could make.

Marxist political economist David McNally this week described the thinking of the Trump faction in a post on social media: “It is about a concerted pivot to targeting China—its real global rival—and weaking the latter’s ties to states like Russia. Throwing Ukraine under the bus in order to make a deal with Putin makes imperial sense if weaking China is the objective.”

They’re prepared to let Russia have its restricted sphere of influence if it results in a pulling away from China and the denial of Russian resources for the Chinese economy. Getting U.S. corporate hands on $500 billion worth of Ukrainian minerals along the way, as Trump is demanding of Zelensky, is of course is a hefty bonus.

The Trump faction of the capitalist class accepts that a multipolar world is already a reality and believes U.S. imperial policy needs to catch up to that fact. It sees the world being partitioned into competing blocs, with the U.S. and China as the major powers and all others, like Russia and the EU, as supporting players.

The effort to force Canada, Mexico, and Latin America into a tighter embrace with the U.S. economy is a reflection of this view. If China is building an economic bloc through its Belt-and-Road Initiative, then the U.S. has to consolidate its own bloc and erect tariff walls and trade bans to enforce it. The world is being divided up, the Trump faction believes, and clinging to notions that the U.S. can continue being the enforcer of a unipolar order is fantasy.

A look at changing global trade patterns over the past quarter-century suggests they’re not wrong. In 2000, just after the destruction of the Soviet Union and when China’s economic reform was still in its early stages, the U.S. was the top trading partner of the vast majority of the world’s nations. U.S. corporate power spanned the globe, with no serious challengers.

Fast forward to 2024, and the map shifts completely. From Asia to Africa to a big chunk of Europe and almost all of South America, China has knocked the U.S. out of top spot when it comes to trade ties.

Only in North America, Central America, and Western Europe does U.S. capitalism still occupy the #1 rank. But even in these places, monopoly interests are under threat. A look at even just one major company, Elon Musk’s Tesla, makes the point.

The Chinese EV brand BYD (Build Your Dream) is never seen on roads in the U.S. due to tariffs and other trade barriers, but it dominates Asian markets, and in January 2025—just last month—it overtook Tesla in a number of European nations for the first time. Plus, the company is eyeballing construction of a manufacturing plant in Mexico.

While the administration is rolling out its changes to U.S. imperialism’s orientation in a sudden blitzkrieg fashion, the outlines of Trump’s strategy were actually put down on paper years ago. What’s changed is not the ideas, but the ability to execute them.

Looking at the criticisms that the ideologues around Trump have made—of the old imperial order, of NATO, of past U.S. foreign policy, of the free trade system, and of globalizing Wall Street financiers—there is much that would leave even Marxists nodding in agreement.

Neoliberal globalization and the unipolar imperial system dominated by U.S. capitalism brought unprecedented inequality to the nations of the world, destroyed high-paying jobs in the advanced economies, provoked an endless parade of wars, and caused millions of deaths. It’s tempting to say good riddance and be done with it.

But what does the U.S. president and the faction of the ruling class which backs him hope to replace it with? A new Cold War against China, the carving up of the world into blocs on behalf of big corporations, more destruction in the Middle East, and the ditching of democracy at home—along with all the things that entails, like labour laws, women’s rights, racial equality, and more.

There should be no illusions about the new order Trump hopes to construct in place of what he’s tearing down. It’s still going to be for the capitalists, not for us. (People’s World — IPA Service)