By Sara Flounders
March 6, 2025

Donald Trump is facing a crisis. How to get out of a war that is already totally lost in order to prepare for the next war, to prepare for a confrontation with China.

Trump blamed everyone else but the U.S. policy for the failure: the Kiev regime in Ukraine itself; the Biden administration; the NATO military alliance, which is still commanded by Washington; and the European Union. Everything that successive U.S. administrations have built up to reconquer Russia has thoroughly failed.

Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Feb. 28 White House press conference: “You don’t have the cards! You are not winning.” That’s true for Kiev. But it’s also true for U.S. imperialism.

The pressure is on Trump to create a new deal. That infamous news conference was a media spectacle. Trump bluntly told Zelensky, “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out, and I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.”

Zelensky, whose role as Ukraine’s president has been dependent from the start on U.S. imperialist backing, has followed a script for years that Washington wrote: Refuse to negotiate, keep the war going. Billions of dollars will flow, with no accounting and endless corruption. Washington assured him it would back the war against Russia “as long as it takes.”

Trump: ‘You’re fired’

It did not take long. Now that the script has changed, Zelensky has become disposable. Trump said Feb. 28, “I gave you the Javelins and $350 billion, and you couldn’t do it.” In Trumpspeak, that means, “You’re fired!” The comment was straight out of Trump’s TV show “The Apprentice.” Trump excels at diplomacy — gangster style, which is like much imperialist diplomacy, but he does it on television.

This harsh public treatment of Zelensky created an immediate crisis among NATO-member countries. These include England and every country in the European Union, which had all been tied to the U.S. war chariot. The NATO military alliance failed at the task for which U.S. imperialism directed it in the 1990s — to march eastward and in the end dismember Russia.

Now the U.S. billionaires who have lined up with Trump are desperate to get out of the failed war in Ukraine, wrap it up quickly and take on China, which has become a real competitor for the U.S. imperialist economy.

Trump is betting he can make a direct deal with Russia. Offer to end sanctions, restore diplomatic relations and assert a direct U.S. stake in Ukraine’s hypothetical, wholly undeveloped rare earth minerals.

Can Washington split Moscow and Beijing?

The difficulty Trump has in planting a wedge between Russia and China is that
Russia now has far greater, more accessible trade with the Global South, especially with China and the BRICS+ countries, than it does with the U.S. (BRICS’ founders were Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa; they have been joined by Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia as of January 2025. Nine “partner countries” are Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan.)

China-Russia annual trade was $244 billion in 2024. U.S.-Russia annual trade was only $3.5 billion that same year. China was the world’s largest exporter at $3.4 trillion in 2024. U.S. exports meanwhile have fallen far behind and had dropped to $2.1 trillion last year.

While the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars on wars and given giant grants to privately owned military corporations, China has focused on vast infrastructure development, trade and cooperation. China is now the largest trading partner of the overwhelming majority of countries in the world — 120 countries and growing. U.S. trade dominance is over.

Trump and the MAGA billionaires’ unsolvable problem is that U.S. imperialism is decaying and has less and less to offer. China — based on socialist planning and by spurring the development and trade potential of the Global South — offers much more.

End the war – the first step

Of course, Moscow may want to normalize relations with U.S. imperialism, if that is possible. It’s in Russia’s interest to bring an end to this extremely dangerous confrontation.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s government has now been through many rounds of NATO’s aggressive expansion in the last three administrations, including Trump’s first term. Russian ministers have expressed few if any illusions about U.S. diplomacy, which is filled with promises made and then broken, temporary ceasefires and false “re-starts.” At this time Russia’s economic interests appear to be anchored to the growing trade alliances of the Global South.

It is also in China’s interest to find a resolution to the war in Ukraine, and China has consistently offered diplomatic assistance.

U.S. power: the global danger

Even with a declining economy, U.S. power is a danger to the planet. Washington repeatedly threatens to use nuclear weapons, has over 800 military bases on foreign soil, flaunts naval power in every ocean and has military alliances with other imperialists and client states. The dollar is still the major world currency. Washington’s subsidized “independent” media is a blanket of fake news.

U.S. industrial capacity today, however, is hollowed out by the endless capitalist drive to extract the greatest rate of profit. This has led to employing and exploiting labor for the lowest wages outside the United States.

Militarism, weapons production, constant wars and regime change operations to conquer new markets are immediately profitable for billionaire investors. But they are deadly to the planet, the infrastructure — and they have resulted in weakening imperialism with respect to the Global South and especially to China.

Russia hit by heaviest sanctions yet

At the beginning of the February 2022 “Special Military Operation,” Russia’s trade was still with the West. Its gas, oil, grains and fertilizer went to Western markets.

Led by the U.S., the imperialist states imposed enormous sanctions on Russia. The harsh new sanctions closed off every trade possibility. When the German government wavered about buying Russian gas, a commando operation blew up the Nord Stream pipeline that delivered the gas.

Russia has survived and even thrived despite the heaviest collective sanctions ever imposed on any country by all the G-7 imperialist countries in February 2022. Within six months, 300 global companies exited the Russian market, and another 700 halted new investments. (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, Aug. 14, 2022)

Four provinces that were formerly part of eastern Ukraine — Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbas region and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — voted overwhelmingly in a historic referendum in October 2022 to formally join the Russian Federation.

Belt and Road alternative to IMF

In the past, U.S. imperialism — through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank loans and the power of private banks — could use the leverage provided by the loans to pressure countries to privatize industries or sell them cheaply to pay interest on the loans. Developing countries seeking to modernize had no alternative to obtain loans.

Today, however, there are alternatives to debt bondage aimed at guaranteeing profits to finance capital.

Socialist China’s planned economy is an engine driving global infrastructure development. Its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) now involves 150 countries and develops road, rail, port, energy, health and digital infrastructure. BRI is improving regional integration, increasing trade and stimulating economic growth.

Both Republican and Democratic administrations have agreed that China is the great threat to U.S. dominance. They voted together to approve every military appropriations budget item, much of it directed at China. It was the Barack Obama presidency that introduced the Pivot to Asia military plan to surround China with 400 U.S. military bases and aircraft carriers.

Trump’s presidency veered from inviting China’s President Xi Jinping to Mar-a-Lago and announcing a 10-part agreement to expand trade — to announcing within a year sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports of steel, technology and electronics, even shoes and clothing. Biden’s presidency left all those tariffs in place and added more restrictions on trade with China.

On March 4, the Trump administration announced higher tariffs on Chinese imports to the United States — also on Mexican and Canadian imports. Beijing has already announced that China will impose tariffs on selected U.S. imports. These steps escalate the trade war that the U.S. has provoked.

Will G7 become G8 again?

Before the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine that replaced a government that had friendly relations with Russia with a hostile regime, Russia was taking part as the eighth member of the G8, then made up of the United States, England, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan — and Russia. In 2014, Russia was expelled from the G8 and was cut off from the imperialist-controlled infrastructure of banking, investment and global extraction of profits. The pretext for the expulsion was Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The Trump administration clearly wants to try to pull Russia back and away from China and the BRICS group. Trump proposed on Feb. 13 that Russia be invited back to the G7 group of countries, which would again make it the G8.

Dmitry Peskov, press secretary for Russian President Vladimir Putin, downplayed the invitation: “We have repeatedly said that the group which is now called the G7 has lost much of its relevance. It no longer unites the world’s fastest growing economies. … Centers of growth have moved to other regions of the globe.” (Reuters, Feb. 14)

China’s ability to compete with the imperialist-led economy is why U.S. imperialism is so determined to focus on Beijing as an enemy. What is more threatening to billionaires who are plundering the planet than a future of cooperation among the countries they plundered?

Russia may negotiate to end a threatening war and might choose to accept many invitations. But Moscow is unlikely to act against the interests of the Russian state or the Russian economy.