On November 5 Donald Trump became President-elect of the USA. A case could be made that it was the persistent inflation taking place in the United States that helped defeat Kamala Harris. One recent article by journalist Arun Gupta traces US Presidential elections going back to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, arguing a correlation between the perceived economic well-being of the average voter and the results of these elections. He argues that the today’s massive sanctions the US has imposed upon Russia have backfired and have caused immense economic hardship in Europe and the US. Outrage at the billions spent on these wars instead of on internal economic health of the US, the increasing threat of poverty, and the ongoing significant inflation in food and gasoline prices led voters to prefer Trump over more of the Biden-Harris regime.

The Biden-Harris administration squandered some $138 billion dollars on supporting the criminal war against Russia in the Ukraine, a war that has as its (real and stated) goal to weaken and dismember Russia and remove its President Vladimir Putin from power. In addition, since the beginnings of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, October 7, 2023, the US has supplied Israel with some 17.9 billion dollars in military aid along with the pitiful public rationale that “the US will not abandon its allies as they defend themselves from enemy attacks.” The idea that genocide of a civilian population can be “self-defense” by any stretch of the imagination is mind-bending. However, US foreign policy is dominated by ideological slogans and dogmas and has very little concern with actual realities in the world. The above-mentioned article on the reasons for Trump’s victory cites the following as consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

The United States currently targets more than thirty countries with sanctions, pushing hundreds of millions of people into desperation. Even the American Conservative calls sanctions “weapons of financial destruction.” Two weeks after Russia invaded, it presciently warned that the West has “thrown a wrench into the gears of important sectors of the world economy. They are badly underestimating the fallout. Remarkably, they did this against the backdrop of a worldwide crisis in supply chains. That is about to get a lot worse.”

It did get a lot worse. The war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia have devastated the economies of both Europe and the United States while also having a significant negative impact on many African and other countries where Ukrainian grain used to be shipped. In Europe, the US blew up the Nord Stream II pipeline to ensure that cheap Russian gas could not reach Europe, forcing many businesses to close and Europeans to pay a much higher price for fuels. Russia’s economy, meanwhile, after some adjustments, has regained momentum and has prospered through vigorous trade with China, India, Iran, North Korea and other far East nations.

Will it be better under Donald Trump? While campaigning for President, Trump declared that: “They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done—I’ll have that done in 24 hours.” Something like this may well be possible since during his first term as President, Trump spoke of his admiration for Vladimir Putin and his positive relationship with him (which is very much the opposite of Biden’s stated goal of removing Putin from power). On the other hand, Trump also has affirmed his absolute loyalty to Netanyahu and the Israeli Zionist Project, making it unlikely that he will end the genocidal effort to depopulate Gaza of all Palestinians.

The Trump transition team is planning to make major changes in the US government by placing vastly more power in the hands of the President (one person) and removing the independence of government agencies (like the FBI) as well as weakening the role of the Legislative Branch that now provides at least the semblance of a check on presidential power. Many people in the US, who fear the loss of whatever democracy may have existed up to the present, are asking how to prepare during the next two months to protect the freedom and the checks and balances of US institutions as much as possible. However, the Biden administration is not focusing on this crucial task. They want to defeat Trump’s intentions primarily in the foreign policy area. They want to make sure that Trump is limited in his ability to make peace in Ukraine.

Rather than recognizing the failure of their war-policies, through which Russia has not been weakened, and with which Putin has not lost popularity with the people, and under which Ukraine is rapidly being defeated as Russia steadily moves the front-line westward consolidating ever more territory under its rule, Biden is escalating the war, making possible attacks on Russian soil, and putting the entire world at risk of nuclear war. The bizarre plan appears to be to try to force Ukraine into NATO through intensifying the NATO war against Russia to the point where Trump’s hands will be tied once he takes power on January 20th, perhaps because we will then be in World War III with NATO against Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.

During the Vietnam War in 1967, a US Senator named J. William Fulbright wrote a book called The Arrogance of Power. There is (and has been) so much arrogance in Washington (an attitude that will not be mitigated when Trump takes power) that, like Napoleon in the first decades of the 19th century, or like Hitler in the mid-20th century, thoughtful awareness of the real world and its issues bears little weight in the minds of the megalomaniacs who believe Washington DC is the actual center of the world.

While the presidential campaign was taking place, and the Democrats were worried that their war in Ukraine was hurting their chances for reelection, Biden consistently refused to give into Zelensky’s demands for long-range missiles that could penetrate far into Russia itself. All sides know perfectly well that such missiles cannot be fired independently by Ukrainian forces but require US military personnel on the ground in Ukraine to load the secret codes and target data into these missiles. This is true of not only US ATACMS missiles but also British Storm-Shadow missiles, both now being sent to Ukraine. Hence use of these long-range weapons clearly means direct attacks on Russia by the US or British governments, genuine acts of war.

Now that Harris and Biden have no more need for campaigning, they are opening the flood-gates for all out war on Russia by the West. The world has never been closer to nuclear war. What nations are raising their voices against this madness? Where is the outrage by the peoples of Europe or Asia or Africa? Nuclear war means that we all die, and the US is intentionally pushing Russia closer and closer to that breaking point. They think Russia is bluffing are willing to risk thermonuclear war in this stupid game of bluff.

Russia’s stated goals in their original invasion of Ukraine were very simple: (1) to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and receiving long range missiles that would be positioned right at the Russian border, (2) to stop the Ukrainian military attacks on the Russian-speaking sectors of Ukraine (that has been going on since 2014), and to affect the de-Nazification of Ukraine. Today, after all the blood and sacrifice that the soldiers of Russia have given to achieve control over Eastern Ukrainian lands, it is unlikely that Russia would be willing to end the war without claiming possession of these new territories.

Nevertheless, the goal remains to prevent Ukraine from becoming part of NATO and to denazify whatever government remains once the war is ended. Is it really worth risking the sacrifice of the entire future of humanity and our precious planet to prevent this from happening and to prevent Trump from making peace? It is not that Trump will be any less arrogant or demented in his foreign policy. But it may be that he could make peace in Ukraine and reduce the threat of nuclear war that is being escalated by the Biden Administration.

At the risk of sounding desperate, or being accused of repeating myself, I want to shout: Where is the global outcry against this madness?

Yet what lasting good would a global outcry do other than perhaps to avoid nuclear holocaust this time? Under this world system of militarized sovereign nation-states there will always be a next time. War historian Gwynne Dyer observes that “people told themselves each time that the war was about something specific…. It was really the system itself that produced the wars.” Our outrage must lead us to transformative action to change this insane system that will inevitably result in nuclear holocaust sooner or later.

One movement of people committed to change this absurd world-system is called the World Democracy Campaign in which specific steps are being taken to establish a democratic Earth Federation that ends war, ensures human rights, and protects our planetary environment. Our vision and action must become one of planetary unity in diversity rather than nationalistic and parochial. The world system must become holistic rather than fragmented. We must actualize one, integral, human civilization if we want a future for our children and all future generations.