The US ruling class is now forcefully pushing to remove any opposition to its endless ambition to accumulate more capital. It knows that if this expansion falters, its market economy will stumble and the US itself will fall into social chaos. Its actions demonstrate once again the nature of this imperialist epoch – private capital must either continue to accumulate or collapse.
At the annual World Economic Forum in Davos in January, US President Donald Trump forcefully repeated his demand for US ownership of non-EU member Greenland. This was not new. In 2019 Trump announced he wanted the US to buy Greenland, resurrecting an earlier US offer in 1946. In 2025 he restated this and added his October ‘Corollary’ to the Monroe doctrine, claiming US political control of all the Americas. On 3 January 2026 the US military abducted Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro, to ensure access to the country’s rich resource base and deny these to competitors.
US imperialism wants these countries’ political independence removed. This has nothing to do with Trump’s ‘mercurial’ character. On the contrary his aggressiveness, his open racism, his irrational view of the climate crisis, his ‘white’ chauvinism, his attack on the formalities of US democracy, on international institutions and treaties, on hard won human rights, his lies, personal vindictiveness, all offensively expressed, reflect the profound contradictions tearing at the US state and challenging its ruling class.*
FRFI has explained the deepening crisis within US imperialism as its businesses consume more resources but lack the capacity to create a correspondingly adequate profit out of them. To maintain its rates of industrial and commercial consumption without extracting sufficient surpluses to maintain capital growth, it has fallen deeper into debt, forcing its businesses to demand global resources at lower prices. At the same time its businesses struggle against competitors in other states vying for the same resources. Increasingly aggressive action by its state machinery has thus been chosen by the US ruling class, internationally and domestically.
Plentiful resources are fundamental to capital accumulation. With strong global economic growth during the 1990s, and again between 2003 and 2008, the question of access to resources and markets again becomes serious. Open assaults upon Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, and Iran, the hate filled campaign against Cuba, all aimed at destroying any political independence from US imperialism. Funding the Zionist colonial state of Israel to impose its barbaric war on Palestine, is part of the same ruthless process.
Trump’s Greenland gambit is typical of his ‘maximiser’ strategy, to use shock tactics, to disorientate the victim. He openly boasted of the technique in his Art of the Deal (1987). It consists of ‘thinking big, maximizing options, using leverage through extreme, public, and often combative positions, and being prepared to walk away’. This approach is well known and of no real surprise to other governments, it has simply never been used on this scale between Europe and the US. The problem for other states is that Trump has concentrated such authority in his hands – legal, economic and military – that caution and concession has been the watchword. Greenland is a ‘self-governing territory’ or colony of the state of Denmark, it is included in NATO’s security framework. No NATO country may attack another and Trump knew that constitutionally the US military would have to reject such action. It already has military base agreements there. Trump’s longer-term aim is to force, in whatever ways suitable, the whole of North and South America’s materials and population into the hands of US business. This is why Canada and Panama were thrown into Trump’s speeches.
Europe v America
In response to Trump’s rambling address at Davos, Mark Carney, prime minister of Canada, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU, and Friedrich Merz, Chancellor of Germany, robustly revealed their anticipation and preparedness for the dramatic change in the US’s strategy towards Europe. The fight over Trump’s uni-lateral imposition of shocking tariffs on imports had provoked this preparation. They declared a distinct and separate interest in abandoning their reliance on the US military. New trade deals with China, South America’s Mercosur and India were all, at that moment, in the process of being completed, sometimes after years of haggling. Von der Leyen boasted of a massive growth in military spending to establish EU independence from the US and boost its capability to confront Russia, a vast treasure house of tempting materials.
Frustrated by the US’s ambivalence over Ukraine, and forced into expanding its military spending for NATO, the Europeans are now moving at great pace to create an independent defence and fighting capacity. They are determined to take as much of Ukraine as possible for their own union. The drive towards a self-sufficient defence industry is well underway. The Economist wrote ‘Europeans should preserve what they can of NATO but prepare for a world without it’ (23 January 2026). In 2025 Europe spent about $560bn on defence, double that of 2015. By 2035 this spending will be 80% of the Pentagon’s, up from less than 30% in 2019. To replace current US military equipment and personnel in Europe would cost around $1trn. The EU can already produce more naval ships, submarines, artillery shells, tanks and some armoured vehicles than the US. It is fragmented, national production, but it will catch up in other areas, and this will depress US exports. Europe presently provides up to 10% of American defence manufacturers’ revenues and will remain dependent on the US for another ten years in a range of vital defence and assault equipment.
US workers fight back
To prepare for its more aggressive foreign ventures, the ruling class in the US has launched an attack on its own working class, to remove any democratic constraints on its actions, and to safeguard its rear. This is the culmination of a long-term project to change the Republican party into a far more determined anti-state spending party, matching the needs of the ruling class. It started by the formation of the Tea Party caucus within it in 2007, campaigning to build the reactionary taxpayers’ march on the Capitol in Washington DC in 2009 and subsequently capturing the House of Representatives in 2010. This converted the Republican Party into a centralising, authoritarian force determined to cut US state spending, and by 2016 Trump was leading the party.
Trump has used his ‘maximising’ technique not only internationally but domestically across all policy fields. In his first term (2017-21) he packed the Supreme Court and appointed hundreds of judges sympathetic to his views across the country. His second term has forcefully attacked the working class by cutting social spending of all sorts and targeting the migrant population. The creation of a huge armed paramilitary force in ICE was the latest step in the ruling class’s assault on the working class.
Now an unprecedented and determined working-class fightback against Trump’s anti-immigration drive is in full swing. Its vigour has shocked some of the long compliant Democratic party politicians into taking nominal anti-Trump positions, and Trump is having to manoeuvre his way around this fightback. The fundamental reality is that the US federal budget deficit, along with deficits on its current international payment accounts, has created debts that can no longer be paid simply by issuing more dollars. More real, and so foreign capital, must be made to flow into the US to offset the debts. This challenge places objective limits on political action. The current vile attack on sections of the working class, to try to divide it, is meeting a courageous and determined fightback by working class communities, the real basis for a socialist movement.
* See US heads towards civil war, FRFI 278
