By Manuel Raposo
March 7, 2025

The author is a Portuguese Marxist and editor of the web magazine jornalmudardevida.net, where this article was published on March 4, 2025. Translation by John Catalinotto.

The European politicians who bet everything on the war in Ukraine, piggybacking on the U.S., have been thrown into complete disarray by the turnaround personified by Donald Trump. Heads of government and commentators on duty insinuate that a kind of madness has struck the new U.S. administration, not excluding some — among the most baffled, of course — the desperate hypothesis that Trump is an agent of Putin.

The bewilderment is understandable. So we — they tell themselves — who showed ourselves to be faithful followers of Biden’s plans, who believed that Russia would be defeated sooner or later, who agreed to pay three times more for energy, who drained our savings and risked the fury of the voters, who saw the Nord Stream being demolished, who subjected ourselves to paying more for NATO, who trusted in the U.S.’s protective wing — are now being treated as useless by the new management in Washington?!

Astonished, the European leadership clique, especially those in Brussels, are led to believe that this will just be a four-year interregnum and that perhaps it’s worth standing up to the bumbling Trump in the hope that another Biden II team will get the train back on track — in other words, to continue on the path of eternal war, as long as it takes.

Imperialism lost the war

The turnaround in the U.S. is obviously due not to a personal aberration, for the simple reason that the policy of an imperialist power like the U.S. changes only if new, very strong objective data forces it to do so. The new U.S. leadership team expresses the position of sectors of the U.S. ruling classes that imperialism must be saved from the mess it has gotten itself into.

The dead end is the war in Ukraine — to which must be added the colossal debt that the state is accumulating unceasingly, the threats to the hegemony of the dollar, the continuing loss of U.S. influence all over the world — trends that the war has accelerated rather than halted.

Everything becomes easier to understand once we admit the following: Imperialism has lost the war in Ukraine. All the widely heralded aims of the Biden team that the European leaders blindly followed — to wear Russia down militarily, to ruin it economically, to isolate it from the rest of the world, to overthrow the regime in order to open the door to a second Yeltsin era — have failed.

None of these targets were hit. But it was more than that. The U.S. and Europe ended up militarily defeated, to the point where NATO’s very existence is now in question. The economic meltdown has hit Europe above all, but also the U.S., which is struggling with a colossal debt that frightens the U.S. elite itself. It is the West that has become isolated, as collaborative ties and alliances between Russia and China and the so-called Global South have strengthened.

The power of the Russian regime has been strengthened internally and the mirages of dividing Russia into zones have fallen apart, while the European Union is falling apart, and the U.S. is splitting into two irreconcilable factions.

Change of strategy

It is the intimate recognition of this failure, despite the bluster of the political players, that has led U.S. leaders to change strategy. Their aim is to as soon as possible get the U.S. out of the quagmire that the policy of confrontation with Russia has gotten them into. To avoid greater setbacks, Trump wants to end the war while he can.

This is not out of any desire for peace and concord, but because prolonging the conflict will only give Russia, China and the BRICS greater advantages than they have already achieved and, conversely, will limit imperialism’s political choices.

The sudden turnaround that Trump’s government has had to make is the result of the realization — on the part of a majority bloc of the U.S. political elite and economic oligarchy — that if the situation today is bad, by tomorrow it could be desperate. Looking at the big picture, U.S. imperialism is attempting, with Trump in office, to withdraw from a battlefront that has already been lost in order to save its strength and refocus its objectives.

The move, however, seems to come too late. The strategic shift that imperialism has been planning since Obama, to shift attention and resources to East Asia and the Pacific in order to contain China, has been compromised. The plan to defeat Russia in order to then more easily defeat China has failed across the board: Russia has won the battle [in Ukraine]; China has continued to strengthen its economic, technological and military capacity; the ties of cooperation between the two have been consolidated; and both have expanded their support in the world of peripheral countries.

With what forces, with what allies, with what policies will the U.S. defeat this front that is forging itself in hostility to imperialism? This is the focus of current U.S. concerns.

Europeans stunned

Why don’t European rulers recognize the defeat that the U.S. rulers are already trying to digest?

For the Americans, it’s easy to turn the tables, because they can say, very “democratically,” that Trump has nothing to do with the policy of the Biden administration.

(Not so with the massacre in Palestine, where Trump is unabashedly pursuing Biden’s policy, which shows the duplicity of imperialism’s maneuver: Withdraw from the defeated Ukraine, continue the offensive in West Asia where it calculates it can make gains).

The case is different for European leaders. All of them (those who went along with Biden) were committed to the war to the end and worked hard to forge a brainwashed public opinion that would consider this war to be an unquestionable necessity. All imposed huge material sacrifices on the population, banned media outlets because they “belonged to the enemy,” accused anyone who didn’t accept the war path of committing treason and being “pro-Putin,” and called the countries that refused to go along “Trojan horses” inside NATO. After that, flipping the disk [180-degree policy flip] would mean losing their masks and creating the conditions for being ousted from power.

Without excluding a large dose of opportunism, narrowness and stupidity in all this, there is something more substantial shaping the attitudes of Europe’s ruling cliques.

Change in imperialist relations

The first factor is the change in the relationship between the U.S. and Europe within the imperialist triad (U.S., Europe, Japan) formed in the wake of World War II. In the new path being tested by U.S. imperialism, Europe cannot be a competitor of the U.S. — in this, Trump once again equals Biden. Europe will have to be a subordinate with no will of its own, serving the U.S.’s designs without any objection. Hegemony becomes dictatorship, allies become serfs.

Any semblance of a union among the countries of Europe fails to serve this goal of U.S. imperialism. Europe must be a mere collection of tame countries whose political power and capital is no match for that of the U.S. The invitation from U.S. leaders for European companies to relocate production to the U.S. and the open support for far-right political forces against the powers that be in Germany, France and Britain leave no doubt about U.S. goals.

The ambitions of European big business to establish itself as a power with some will of its own — which was the mainspring of the European Union — are doomed to failure in the face of the new plans of U.S. imperialism.

Example 1: Ukraine’s natural resources, both mineral and agricultural, which the EU wanted to get its hands on, are at stake in the face of the exclusive protectorate that the U.S. wants to exercise over what remains of Ukraine.

Example 2: The wealth from the reconstruction of devastated Ukraine may not be enough to satisfy the gluttony of the U.S. monopolies.

Example 3: The U.S.-Israeli genocidal offensive in the Middle East leaves Europeans out of any political or material gain.

The failure of the EU

A second factor is the political failure of the EU. Every day, the political union reveals itself to be an empty shell, fed and maintained by the major powers and managed by a bureaucracy that is oblivious to the real needs of the European peoples. Taking sides in the war, and above all the realization that it was lost from a certain point on, has caused serious divisions that have paralyzed the action of EU institutions and accentuated mistrust between member countries. The lack of a unified foreign policy reflects the EU’s inability to assert itself as a power equivalent to serve the ambitions of its capital.

The insistence of the main European leaders still in power (now with the helpful collaboration of the British deserters!) on feeding the fiction of the Russian danger has all the hallmarks of the old “external enemy” pretext. In doing so, the EU is trying to maintain a herd-like enthusiasm among the member states that it can’t achieve with politically valid arguments.

A third factor lies in the EU’s economic decline, which, moreover, goes hand in hand with the general decline of the imperialist West. It has still not fully recovered from the economic crisis unleashed in 2008 followed by the epidemic crisis of 2020. Europe has fallen behind the U.S., and both are losing out to the progress of the emerging powers.

Once again, the war [in Ukraine] acted as a catalyst: the policy of sanctions on Russia accelerated Europe’s decline, hitting its biggest economic powers hard and making the EU a project on the brink of bankruptcy.

The “re-industrialization” plans drawn up by the European summits, giving priority to the military industry, are a desperate response to the economic doldrums. Here too, the “external enemy” thesis and the eternal character of the war climate (or the “war mentality,” to use the Nazi-sounding expression of NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte) are merely instrumental arguments.

The European ruling classes must convince people that there is a danger of death just around the corner if they want to extort the billions of euros needed for an arms race — as they know that these billions will inevitably come from wages, pensions and social support.

Europe demands ‘guarantees’

The Trump administration’s rush to end the war does not suit unprepared Europe, which feels sidelined.

That Trump has opted for direct talks with the Russian leadership is recognition that the confrontation in Ukraine has always been, from the outset, a dispute between the U.S. and Russia, to which Europe has been mobilized as a mere auxiliary. There is no guarantee that the understanding that emerges from the negotiations — both on Ukraine and on other bilateral issues relating to a new balance between powers — will take European interests into account.

The EU’s unusual coalition with Britain and others to counter Trump, on the pretext of achieving a “just and lasting” peace, is nothing more than a haggle by Biden’s followers to see if they can have a say in the changes that are being prepared.

The “security guarantees” that European leaders are now calling for in order to counter Trump’s plans are presented as military security guarantees to be given by the U.S. against a supposed Russian threat (which nobody really believes in). But these “guarantees” have a second, diplomatically hidden meaning that goes beyond the military aspect.

What the European leaders aim for, once again using Zelensky and the Ukrainians as instruments, is a guarantee that the U.S. will agree to continue sharing with European capital the benefits it has enjoyed all over the world for having been imperialism’s faithful partner until now — in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America. Once again, no consideration for Ukraine or the European peoples is at stake here.

The costs of a war economy

This European haggling would be laughable if it didn’t put the well-being and lives of millions of Europeans, including Ukrainians and Russians, at stake. But it is precisely with European living conditions and lives — first and foremost those of the workers, as is always the case in such considerations — that European leaders are shamelessly gambling.

The colossal military spending they are planning (800 billion euros, according to the proposal put forward by Ursula von der Leyen), the insistence on sending troops to Ukraine and the reintroduction of compulsory military service are nothing more than attempts to give muscle to the European monopolies.

The workers and peoples of Europe, dragged unwillingly into the war, worn down by three years of slaughter, impoverished by the economic meltdown, are faced with a new challenge: to sabotage the European plans to set up a criminal war economy at their expense.