Who Should Pay for Climate Disasters?

Sonali Kolhatkar

March 3, 2025
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Storm ravaged house, coastal Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Rebuilding from California’s recent wildfires will cost more than a quarter of a trillion dollars — an unprecedented amount. The estimated damage from Hurricane Helene in the Southeast is almost as much, on the order of $250 billion.

Who will pay for that damage? It’s a question plaguing localities around the country as climate change makes these disasters increasingly common.

Some states are landing on a straightforward answer: fossil fuel companies.

The idea is inspired by the “superfunds” used to clean up industrial accidents and toxic waste. The Superfund program goes back to 1980, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). The law fined polluters to finance the clean up of toxic spills.

Thanks to the hard work of groups such as the Vermont Public Interest Research Group and Vermont Natural Resources Council, Vermont recently became the first state to establish a climate superfund in May 2024.

Months later, New York followed suit, again in response to pressure from environmental groups. Both bills require oil and gas companies to pay billions into a fund designated for climate-related cleanup and rebuilding.

Now California is considering a similar law in the wake of its disastrous wildfires. Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey may take up the idea as well.

It’s an idea whose time has come, especially now that states are less able to rely on the federal government. The Trump administration is disabling government agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with major cuts and putting conditions on other aid.

At the recent Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference, Trump aide Ric Grenell unabashedly endorsed “squeezing” California’s federal funds unless they “get rid of the California Coastal Commission.” (Trump apparently hates the commission, the Fresno Bee explains, because it prevents “wealthy people from turning public beaches into private enclaves.”)

Fossil fuel companies — the lead perpetrators of climate disasters — spent more than $450 million to elect their favored candidates, including Trump. In return, Trump has promised to speed up oil and gas permits and stacked his cabinet with oil-friendly executives.

Why should taxpayers have to foot the bill to clean up the destruction wrought by this industry, one of the most profitable the world has ever known? As a spokesperson for New York Governor Kathy Hochul said, “corporate polluters should pay for the wreckage caused by the climate crisis — not every day New Yorkers.”

Not surprisingly, 22 Republican-led states disagree. They’ve sued to block New York’s law and protect oil and gas profits at the expense of ordinary people. They have no answer for the question of who pays for recovery from climate disasters or helps people reeling from one disaster after another.

Fossil fuel companies can think of paying into a climate superfund as the cost of doing business. If they’re in the business of extracting and selling a fuel that destroys the planet, it’s only fair they pay to clean up the damage.

And the public agrees. Data For Progress found more than 80 percent of voters support holding fossil fuel companies responsible for the impact of carbon emissions.

To be fair, a climate superfund is a “downstream” solution to the climate crisis, one that seeks to raise the costs to perpetrators. A climate superfund can pay to rebuild homes, but it cannot replace priceless family heirlooms or undo the trauma of surviving a disaster. Most of all, it cannot bring back lives lost. It is only one tool in a multi-pronged tool box to end the climate crisis.

Upstream solutions centering the prevention of climate change — that is, reducing carbon emissions at their source — must be at the center of our fight if humanity is to survive. But in the meantime, fossil fuel polluters should pay.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. 

 

The left’s dilemma amid a crumbling world order: Prepare to fight or let others determine the outcome?

By Oleksandr Kyselov

Published 3 March, 2025

With a madman in the White House, all pretences have fallen away and raw power again reigns supreme. Trade wars, huge aid cuts, explicit demands to annex Greenland and depopulate Gaza — every new day brings forth another crisis that throws into question internationally recognised collective and individual rights and undermines global institutions that supposedly exist to defend them. Is this genuinely the world we were hoping for when we criticised the hypocrisy of the West? Is the internationalist left simply going to accept this new state of affairs?

Negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, so desired by many commentators, now seem closer than ever — even if Ukraine currently has little say in the matter. What kind of deal are the great powers preparing for us? A gentleman’s agreement to give Russian President Vladimir Putin a slice of our land and a veto over our future in return for US President Donald Trump receiving 50% of our natural wealth? Of course, there is also no room in such talks for the pleas of the Russian anti-war opposition. But who cares about nuance when “peace” is on the table?

An armistice may very well be needed — for Ukraine to catch its breath. Prolonged war has not made us stronger, and this is even more true for the left which has barely survived. However, to avoid wasting time before a potential new round of fighting resumes — whether in Ukraine or on a larger scale — we must soberly assess the new environment and identify its pressure points. Moral appeals only work when someone can be made to feel shame, which is clearly not the case anymore. A credible left response needs to be rooted in reality, respond to material conditions and leverage political openings, rather than cling onto eternal truths.

Instability is growing and, as a result, smaller nations are increasingly vulnerable — especially when strategic locations, resources or trade corridors are at stake. Therefore, when dealing with defense matters, the left’s approach should not focus on exploiting and spreading fear but rather on how to avoid becoming easy prey for imperialistic predators. Given this, there are several key points worth keeping in mind when it comes to security.

First, insisting on having the means to defend oneself is not warmongering. Without these means, diplomacy is reduced to little more than pleading for mercy. Rather than hiding away in a bubble, the left must take an active role in deciding how weapons are procured, produced, distributed and used. This cannot be left to lobbyists, oligarchs, arms dealers and foreign powers.

Second, crisis preparedness is a significant asset. In war, natural disaster or even revolution, those who are best organised and know what to do determine the outcome. Speaking from our own bitter experience, the left, which has been largely confined to safe spaces in universities, NGOs or social media, has been sidelined. In crisis situations, practical skills, resoluteness, access to useful social networks, and the ability to mobilise resources make one indispensable. In Ukraine, too often, it was the right who could provide these.

Third, social infrastructure is critical for resilience. As has become evident in Ukraine, a country at war needs functioning railways, hospitals and energy systems, as well as an adequate housing stock and qualified personnel to run all those. Whatever is unreliable in peacetime will surely fail once a crisis breaks out. Weakening social investments under the pretext of defence or fiscal austerity, as well as loosening state controls and coordination for the sake of freedom of competition, are acts of sabotage and must be called out as such. The sooner individual voices consolidate into a single loud voice, the greater the likelihood of putting these issues on the agenda and giving the neoliberals a good fight.

Fourth, regardless of what munitions are at our disposal, wars are ultimately fought by people. Strong military defence depends on popular participation and willingness, neither of which are permanent. No amount of coercion can completely replace consent. It is enough to recall the story of the French-trained Anne of Kyiv brigade [which was disbanded due to mass desertions]. A conscription-based army with a large reserve force is not the only affordable and realistic way to guarantee self-determination. But it is important to understand that this creates a structural dependency, which necessitates ensuring the legitimacy of actions and that people’s trust is won.

Finally, no one can survive alone. Pooling resources, sharing knowledge, leveraging economies of scale, and even entering into a common defence agreement can all contribute to mutual security and saving costs. While cooperation is crucial for countries, it is even more critical at the grassroots level, where solidarity and joint efforts are essential for effectively organising on a global scale and delivering results. Simply listening and hearing each other would be a vital first step.

One could, of course, say that instead of seeking to influence decision-making, the left should identify mounting frustrations, amplify them and channel them toward systemic subversion. Yet even if we believe the left’s odds of winning amid this chaos as good, unless the global situation changes drastically, similar questions about guaranteeing security and peace will continue to reappear.

Ruling elites face a looming legitimacy crisis due to their incapacity to respond to a growing number of external threats and the rise of extreme right forces at home — both of which are the fruits of the neoliberal turn these same elites orchestrated. This vulnerability provides an opening that the left can seize to reshape the debate and win, at least, some of our key demands.

Acting in a quick and determined manner now can help give peace a chance. Even where collapse is imminent, the left can best position itself by joining the battle to strengthen the power resources of the working class today, rather than wait until the only remaining option is underground resistance to a fascist dictatorship, whether home-grown or imposed from outside.

Oleksandr Kyselov is a Board Member of Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement).

India: Mass Struggle vs. Rape Culture

Sunday 2 March 2025, by Jhelum Roy



On August 14, 2024 at 11:55 pm, the streets of Bengal, usually deserted by this hour, were packed with Indian women claiming their half of the sky. At the approach of the country’s 77th “Independence Day” celebration they made the night their own by demanding an end to the rape culture that undercuts any notion of independence.

The Struggle Erupts

Almost every nook and corner was occupied by women — working women from different sectors facing sexual harassment in their workplace; students across schools, colleges and universities who have to fight for every inch of space to assert themselves on their campuses; women who are otherwise shackled by the everyday drudgery of housework; doctors, nurses, teachers and domestic workers all taking to the streets in protest.

Five nights earlier a resident doctor had been raped and murdered in a seminar room during her night shift. Her parents were informed that she had “committed suicide” and were made to wait for three hours before being allowed inside the room.

Rumors were spread questioning her psychological health. In fact, the principal of RG Kar Medical College made a reckless remark, asking “what was the girl doing so late” in the seminar room. Yet the autopsy report revealed that she had been raped and sexually assaulted before being strangulated.

The principal’s comment sparked a mass outrage. A call for a Take Back the Night event on the eve of “Independence Day” in India spread like wildfire, igniting a huge mass movement that the country had not seen in a decade. In West Bengal alone there were around 250 protest sites across cities, district towns and villages as women, trans and queer people defied societal curfews to occupy streets clamoring for justice.

The night of August 14 turned out to be historic. This was not the first time that the Take Back the Night Campaign was being organized to protest sexual harassment in the country. This was also not the first time that women in India were coming out in such massive numbers in solidarity and rage to claim justice against rape, against sexual harassment.

This was also not the first time that such a brutal crime had been committed in India. In the India of today, where the powers that be nurture rape culture regime after regime, what happened at RG Kar is not an exception. In the India of today, headed by a fascist rightwing regime whose leaders have been openly misogynist, who have used rape as a political weapon to curb dissent and silence women, the murder at RG Kar and the gross miscarriage of justice attempted by officials has become rather the norm.

Yet what was so historic about the protest was the spontaneous outburst of women. In different parts of West Bengal women had organized protests to claim the night, to demand justice for the victim, to demand safe public transport for women, to demand public toilets, to demand a functional Internal Complaints Committee in every workplace, to claim basic labor rights for women in organized and unorganized sectors.

For many of these women this was their first protest. For many this was also their first night under the sky. For many this was their first time raising slogans.

For many this was also their first experience in political organizing. There were women gig workers in their work uniforms sharing experiences of harassment faced at work. There were women nurses from private and public hospitals speaking about not having the infrastructural support to safely perform their duties at night. There were theater performers speaking about the harassment they faced in their work.

There were women, queer and trans people who had travelled two-to-three hours in order to reach protest sites. When they found public transportation lacking, women formed groups to organize their own transport and travelled together.

There were women from nearby slums sharing experiences of harassment, violence at home or at work. Mothers came with their daughters. Sisters came together. At the rallies old friends connected. It was a carnival of resistance.

Strangers opened up their homes all night to let protesters use their washrooms. Market cooperatives in the area kept their places open for women. Students from nearby public University campuses negotiated with their authorities to keep the campus gates and women’s hostels unlocked. There were women who had ventured out of their house, unaccompanied by men at night, determined to lay claim to a public space of their own, to organize protests in their neighborhoods.
“Azaadi”

Shouting “Azaadi” (“Freedom”), women claimed freedom from rape, from domestic violence, from workplace harassment, from moral policing, from the drugdery of housework, from discriminatory wages at work, from the patronizing remarks of fathers and brothers, from this brahmanical patriarchal capitalist system. There were women waving the red flag high in the air, while queer and trans people came with rainbow flags.

Women carried pictures of women revolutionaries, reminding people of the legacy of female resistance. A huge red flag with a portrait of the martyred Indian revolutionary Pritilata Waddedar flew high, watching over people who saw themselves as her comrades. [1]

There were handmade posters written by unpracticed hands, slogans raised by those who were conditioned to never raise their voices. There were songs, performances, sharing of experiences as women spent the night under the sky chatting, shouting, listening, leaning on each other.

Yet as the night unfolded, news began pouring in about an attack on the strike doctors were carrying out at RG Kar. A group of goons had entered the premises of the ongoing sit-in demonstration, dismantled the site, beat up protesting doctors, and attempted to destroy the crime scene. It was clear that their intent was to tamper with evidence and threaten the protestors. Meanwhile on-duty police officers were ordered to look away.

What had begun as a protest event was transformed into a full-fledged movement that witnessed the participation of people who had so far been indifferent to blood on the streets. It was a movement that understood the dignity of women’s safety was connected to the right to a system of public health that provides care for ordinary people. Instead the system had been crumbling as corruption took over, even endangering the lives of patients.
Culture of Impunity, Privatization and the Neoliberal State

The impunity and blatant display of power, deliberately showcased to send a message through the vandalizing of the protest site at RG Kar, broke the dams of a rage that had been simmering in the country over the past decade. Those of us who had been students during the 2012 Delhi rape case — where a young middle-class woman who was brutally gang raped and tortured later died — had witnessed thousands of women students and middle-class women occupying the streets to claim justice.

The protests then had initiated heated discussions on gender violence. Later a judicial committee reported that inadequate infrastructure and failures on the part of the government and police were the root cause behind crimes against women. This outcry led to a change in rape laws in India. Yet a decade later, as we take to the streets again, we are still challenged by a culture of impunity.

Almost every political party — from the parliamentary left to the centrists to the right — has time and again shielded rapists and nurtured rape culture to cement their hold in electoral politics. The rise of Hindutva fascism has followed with an explosion in gruesome gender violence. Rape has often been used as a political weapon to suppress protests and assert authority over minorities.

This culture of impunity, nurtured through coddling rapists, tampering with evidence and blatantly using state machinery to shield them, had set precedents that every ruling party could follow. That the ruling party in West Bengal used all its machinery to stand guard over the perpetrators in the RG Kar crime, therefore, was hardly surprising. Yet this time it fuelled the rage of people who seemed to have had enough.

Perhaps the RG Kar rape and murder triggered such widespread outrage because the victim was a doctor, a woman in an “honorable” white-collar job, assaulted while she was on duty in a public hospital. It meant women were nowhere safe. It also exposed how unequal our work spaces are, how they are designed to make working women, trans and queer people vulnerable. Working women from organized and unorganized sectors flocked to the rallies.

There were rallies organized by anganwadi (rural childcare) workers, midday meal workers, ICDS (child health) workers, domestic workers, IT workers, gig workers. The clamor for justice and dignity also made its way to workplaces. They demanded employer accountability to ensure the safety of women, trans, and queer workers, establishing just who would address gender violence.

While such outrage had been missing in previous cases of gender violence — where rape has been used as part of state repression to suppress movements in the hinterlands, where gender violence has been used to perpetuate caste atrocity, or to intensify occupation — the protests around the RG Kar incident opened up possibilities for conversations around the implications of all these silences.

The “reclaim the night” movement initiated a conversation on gender justice, exposing the failure of institutional mechanisms to ensure safety and dignity of women in their workplaces and in public spaces. This fight against impunity also strengthened the voices of healthcare workers raising their concerns over the corruption infesting public hospitals.

Narratives from different public hospitals began to pour out, exposing a larger system that was designed to make healthcare more inaccessible for the marginalized. These narratives laid bare a frail system with overworked workers gasping for breath, a system deliberately made to be dysfunctional through syndicates pushing the healthcare system towards privatization.

The deplorable condition of the public healthcare system in India was already exposed during the pandemic. These sparked conversations around structural adjustment policies imposed as debt conditions at the behest of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund during the 1980s. This paved the way for privatization, thereby relieving the government of its duty as the primary guarantor and enabler of health services.

The rape and murder of the resident doctor in a public hospital exposed the state’s indifference to public healthcare workers. They are expected to work more intensely as the system rapidly collapses around them. Indeed, the murder has sparked a larger movement, headed by junior doctors in the 22 medical colleges throughout Bengal, to demand a better and safer public healthcare system.

Protesting doctors called for an indefinite strike and began a sit-in-demonstration at the Health Ministry. While the government attempted to douse the fire by promising to ensure safety in public hospitals through deploying security forces within hospital premises, protestors rejected the idea. They responded that their safety would only be ensured through democratizing the workspace and through building infrastructure to end corruption and help repair the deteriorating system.

The demands of the movement resonated particularly with middle-class and working-class people who are the primary beneficiaries of the public healthcare system. They have borne firsthand the costs of the privatized health sector.

Opposition political parties tried their best to hijack the movement for their electoral benefits, but were rejected by the larger protesting masses who had by now seen almost every parliamentary political party working to maintain the status quo. In the face of huge public outrage, the government was forced to transfer the Commissioner of Police who had looked the other way and facilitated the tampering of evidence in the RG Kar case.

The protesting doctors lifted their strike, only to be forced to begin a hunger strike in the face of a government that refused to budge on their other demands. However, following a meeting with the Chief Minister who promised to consider their demands the strike was called off.
A Verdict and the Battle Onwards…

The trial court verdict has sentenced a civic volunteer working for the Kolkata Police to a life sentence for the rape and brutal murder of the 31-year-old resident doctor at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. The verdict has further fuelled protests as the entire trial seemed to hide the complicity of the state in protecting the murderer and absolving hospital authorities of their responsibility to safeguard the dignity and safety of their employees.

As Bengal gears up to put another fight challenging the loopholes in the verdict, the state clamors for capital punishment of the perpetrator. Yet it has been the ruling party that first shielded the accused and is known to be hand-in-glove with syndicates running various corruption rackets.

Interestingly, though, the demand for capital punishment had not emerged from the junior doctors’ movement nor from the reclaim-the-night movements. The struggle for gender justice in India had historically campaigned against capital punishment, exposing it to be a tool of state repression that bestowed the state with a monopoly on violence. The state seeks to purge an individual while abdicating its responsibility for initiating any systemic change.

The verdict came out just a few days after the death of a pregnant adivasi (Indigenous tribal) woman in another public hospital in a district town in Bengal.

She died after being administered a toxic saline that had been banned in other states. Yet pressured by a pharmaceutical company, Bengal’s public hospitals, with little concern for the lives of marginalized women, still use it. Once again, her death has exposed the fault lines of the public healthcare system as the state-and-capital nexus spares little thought for the lives of women or marginalized people.
The Role of a Mass Feminist Movement

It is significant that the feminist movement in India around workplace sexual harassment began with the gang rape of a grassroot community worker who was running an state awareness program in her village against child marriage.

That movement in the early 1990s fought to make the state accountable as an employer. It was able to legally assert that sexism and sexual harassment at the workplace makes for a hostile work environment. It is the duty of the employer to ensure the safety and dignity of their workers.

Thirty years later, our work spaces still remain designed to make women, trans, queer people vulnerable as workers whose labor is supposed to come cheap. Furthermore, the percentage of female workforce participation is declining in the organized sector as the informalization of women’s labor grows.

Yet in the informal sector employers are neither held responsible for providing safe working conditions nor have any duty to abide by any regulations protecting workers’ rights. In fact, we can say that the battle for workplace dignity is not only about asserting women’s identity as workers, but also about the valuation of the work itself.

At a time when the neoliberal policies enable the state to wash its hands of public services, when labor codes are rewritten to criminalize unionization and extend working hours to fill the coffers of the owners, when factory closures and privatizing of public service units are enabling the informalization of labor, when the rightwing fascist state is normalizing violence with each passing day, the battle for bread and roses seems likely to be a long haul. That battle would require further organizing of working people in fields and factories, in homes and hospitals, in schools and streets, to claim every inch of safe space, every night, every day.

Against the Current 28 February 2025

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Footnotes


[1] Pritilata Waddedar (1911–1932), a member of the Indian Republican Army, led 15 others in an armed attack on a European club. Shot in the leg, she took cyanide poisoning to avoid being captured by the colonial police. Anticipating possible death, she carried a letter in her pocket, “Inquilab Zindebad” (Long Live Revolution), which has inspired other women ever since. Pritilata is Bengal’s first woman martyr and is considered a revolutionary icon.


Jhelum Roy

Jhelum Roy is a PhD student at Jadavpur University and a member of Feminists in Resistance, Kolkata.



International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.

Trump and Vance Bully, Zelenskyy Leaves the Room, the War Drags On

Ron Jacobs

 March 3, 2025
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Youtube screenshot.

Ukraine is back on the front page again. One of the most pointless wars in US history may be coming to an end. US liberals and some leftists are joining various governments in Europe demanding the war continue. Indeed, some members of some European governments are ready to ramp it up again, as if the idea of peace negotiations is morally wrong when in fact it’s their expanding war industry that is the morally questionable endeavor. Ukraine’s Zelenskyy continues his shtick, unwilling to acknowledge that the military element of the war he staked his political life on may be over sooner rather than later. His best move right now might be to get Ukraine into the peace negotiations even if its presence means little to the final outcome. After all, the land which bore the brunt of the military conflict should be involved in deciding its future. Although some argue that it’s Kyiv’s own fault for this situation, the truth is Kyiv’s tragedy has been a Washington-funded and directed production since before the curtain went up in February 2022. It’s past time the curtain went down. The drama has become a tragic farce. The televised argument on February 28, 2025 between Zelenskyy, Trump and Vance made this very clear. US pundits called the spectacle embarrassing. I have a feeling such things between rulers occur behind closed doors more often than most people think. Rulers, after all, seem to have very big and very tender egos. Although no one knows what the effects of that Oval Office clash of egos will mean, Trump and Vance’s actions seem likely to encourage more aggressive involvement from Germany, Britain and other European nations, extending the killing rather than ending it.

Looking at history, it seems clear that if Europe had stuck to its guns and worked on enforcing the existing peace and security agreements, the war that began in 2022 would probably never have happened. Instead, Europe went along with a US-UK plan which virtually guaranteed there would eventually be armed conflict, given the nature of Moscow’s concern. Now, a peace agreement most likely means that Ukraine will have to give up something—most likely territory in the east it currently considers its own. Agreements before 2022 called for removal of all Ukrainian, Russian and other military forces from those territories with the residents of those provinces eventually voting on their future. Although a vote did occur that called for regional autonomy, neither Russia or Ukraine followed through on its results. In the wake of Kyiv’s authoritarian edicts banning the Russian language, Russian religion, Russian books, etc., many in the provinces are going to want some serious security promises to protect them from further repression.

If there was a punch line to something that is not a joke, we could laugh at UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s stated opposition to the trumpist plan because it doesn’t guarantee that Russia won’t attack again. Sometimes, one has to truly wonder if today’s so-called leaders understand the nature of international relations; no treaty or peace agreement can guarantee that war will not start again. Lasting peace is the hope of such agreements, but it’s what governments do after the agreement is signed that make long-term peace a reality. Russia will also have no guarantee that Europe, Washington or Kyiv will not attack in the future.

Those who call Trump’s demand that Ukraine pay for the US military support provided over the last few years as extortion are at best, being somewhat naive. One of the reasons the US assisted the overthrow of the elected government in 2014, convinced Zelenskyy to ignore signed peace accords, refused to let Europe make its own decisions regarding Ukraine, insisted on those nations imposing sanctions (which have upended their economies), and told Kyiv to reject the Istanbul peace accords after Russia invaded is to gain access to these minerals. Biden and his people might not have been as brutally obvious as the trumpists, but they certainly expected a good deal on accessing these resources as well. One need only look at how the privatization of Ukraine’s state-owned enterprises intensified after the invasion, with many of those enterprises being purchased by US and European financial interests. In addition, since its independence Kyiv’s debt has gone from zero to over $115 billion, with much of that debt accrued in the last three years. Although Washington has provided most of its aid in grants, most of Europe’s aid is in the form of loans. The IMF and World Bank have also lent billions.^[1] In other words, Washington has always expected payment, albeit through international financing institutions it dominates. Trump’s demands are of course considerably more boorish and aggressive, but all elements of the US empire expected to come out ahead after the war ended. Succinctly stated, US imperialism now wants the minerals without a Kyiv victory. It used to want the minerals and troops on Russia’s border with a Kyiv victory.

Trump’s demand is an opening salvo. His performance on national television was intentional. Truth to be told, nobody owes the United States anything for that war. Indeed, most of the billions spent on the war went into the bank accounts of the US war industry. We’ll see how the negotiations go. While Kyiv should certainly be involved in them, the fact it hasn’t been invited tends to strengthen the argument that this war was always understood by most governments to be between Washington and Moscow.

I am reminded of some other peace negotiations conducted by the United States that took place a little more than fifty years ago. The war was in Vietnam. In 1972, peace talks between the North Vietnamese, the National Liberation Forces in the south (NLF), the Saigon regime and Washington had been going on since 1967. Much like the Trump administration wants to keep Zelenskyy and Kyiv in the backseat during its negotiations to end the conflict in Ukraine, the Nixon administration (with Kissinger in the front) pushed the Saigon negotiating team to the sidelines. Nixon was ready for the war to end. Saigon wanted the war to continue at least until South Vietnam was guaranteed a future existence. South Vietnam’s President Thieu hoped that its supporters in the US Congress would get US troops back in action. These pro-war politicians in Congress decried Nixon and Kissinger’s “betrayal” of Saigon, much like the pro-war politicians in today’s Congress are criticizing Trump’s willingness to trade some land for peace in Ukraine as a betrayal. A primary difference between then and now is that the pro-war politicians in the early 1970s were mostly Republicans; today they are mostly Democrats.

At its core, NATO is a neocolonial arrangement. Washington’s recent conflict with Russia is also about reasserting control over Europe by subverting the economies of Germany and other economic powerhouses. The Trump administration has reopened the conversation regarding the future of NATO. The trumpists issue contradictory statements regarding the military pact’s future; most Democrats together with many Republicans cannot see a world without it. That being said, it seems fairly clear that the Trump agenda may mean an end to NATO, but only to give the trumpist sector room to create a more unilateral approach to Washington hegemony. Indeed, Trump’s crude demand for Kyiv to repay Washington for the war is actually a demand for a tribute, much like the European empires of old demanded from their subjects as a sign of submission.

In other words, the imperial goal of the trumpist axis is a world where Washington is in complete control—no grand coalitions to fight its wars, just pure unadulterated US power. George Dubya Bush and his administration sought something similar in its wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. Teddy Roosevelt is their inspiration. His dreams of a “manly” empire begun on the isles of the Caribbean lives on in the fantasies of many twenty-first century white men and their financiers.

NOTES

1. Eric Toussaint, Ukraine’s Debt: an instrument of pressure and spoliation in the hands of creditors; International Viewpoint: 1/26/2025. https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article8826 ↑

Ron Jacobs is the author of several books, including Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest book, titled Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation, is now available. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com