IS HE JUST MAD OR IS THERE A STRATEGY?
More and more people think that the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize is suffering from serious mental degradation. They call him crazy, insane, nuts, flipped, deranged, disturbed, bonkers, lunatic, utterly mad and much more. But could it be that his rantings and obsessions hide a rational strategy?
Lately, the owner of Maria Machado’s Nobel Prize medal has shown even more symptoms of dementia than usual. No need to list examples: you’ve undoubtedly seen plenty of them on different media, moments that made you shake your head and wonder how such an idiot could become the most powerful person in the world.
But whatever you may think about the mental health of the self-proclaimed “acting president of Venezuela”, he is not an absolute monarch, even though he would like to be one. His power is not simply the result of his election victory in 2024; he owes it to the continued support of the majority in Congress and, above all, the capital markets. If they considered him a dangerous madman, his throne would quickly falter. When the stock and bond markets feel he’s sowing too much uncertainty and show their disapproval Trump tends to listen immediately. A sharp drop in US stock markets was enough to make his threat of a military invasion of Greenland disappear. So if the capital markets did not react earlier, it must be because they did not consider his bluster to be so damaging for their interests.
The most obvious common thread that runs through all the main policies of the Trump government, from the raid in Venezuela, the military threats against various countries and the claim of Greenland to the terror campaign of ICE, to name but some recent examples, is that they all sow fear and are designed to do so. So the question is, for what purpose?
Sowing fear abroad
Assuming there is no difference between Trump’s public persona and the man behind the scenes, he seems to live in his own irrational world of which he is the glorious center, impervious to reasonable arguments but sometimes easily persuaded by flattery and subservience. “A chimpanzee with a hand grenade,” “a spoiled toddler who throws a fit when he doesn’t get his way”—is how he is sometimes described in the media. And what do you do with a toddler who has so much power, with a monkey who can cause so much mischief? You handle him very carefully. You seek de-escalation. You make concessions to the toddler to calm him down, you try to distract the monkey so that he leaves the grenade alone. Out of fear that he might do something catastrophic like raise his tariffs again or invade Greenland, you humour him, you give him something that he wants. That seems to be the tactic that America’s allies/vassals have used in dealing with Trump. Or, seen from another angle, that is the excuse Trump gave them to do what they wanted to do anyway.
Suppose there is indeed a difference between the boorish bully we see in public and the man behind closed doors, surrounded by his strategists. I’m not suggesting that Trump himself is a smart geopolitical strategist, nor that his advisers are always on the same page, yet the hypothesis that there is a long term strategy behind the main domestic and foreign actions of the US government does not appear unlikely. What then, was the strategy behind Trump’s seemingly crazy desire to annex Greenland?
Was the goal to establish American military bases in Greenland? Nothing prevented the US from doing that already; a 1951 treaty with Denmark gives it the right to set up as many bases on the island as it wants.
Was the goal to grab Greenland’s raw materials? Those raw materials are now the property of the semi-autonomous Greenlandic state. In the event of annexation, they would become the property of the US federal government, so that could be a possible motive. But for now, that would only be a small gain. There is currently only one active mine in the whole of Greenland. Mining companies are not eager to gain access due to the extreme logistical challenges. These may become less extreme as a result of global warming, but the outlook is uncertain. In any case, the profits would be insignificant compared to the loss that such a disruption of the NATO alliance would represent.
But maybe the goal was to blow up NATO? That is an hypothesis which has been heavily promoted by the media and politicians. Even Starmer and Macron have implied it. Canadian prime minister Carney claimed that a rupture is occurring in geopolitical relations: the allies of the US can no longer count on its military support and must band together. Pundits tell us that Trump wants to take the world back to the 19th century, when the great powers of back then carved up the globe, each ruling over its own ‘sphere of influence’ and respecting each other’s (a debatable interpretation of history). The US military intervention in Venezuela was seen as proof of this trend: Trump proclaimed the “Donroe doctrine”, updating the warning of the sixth president of the US to other powers to stay out of its backyard. In contemporary terms that would mean that the American continent would be the exclusive playground of the US, and that the US would accept that China and Russia would demarcate a similar exclusive domain in their own respective regions. But it would be foolish to mistake the tightening of the US’s grip on Latin America for a withdrawal from the rest of the world. The opposite is true. Whether in Europe, the Middle East or South Asia, the inter-imperialist rivalry between the great powers is increasing. In all these regions, US capital is seeking to counter the advances of its enemies. It would be shooting itself in the foot if it would be abandoning NATO at the same time. That the Trump government is openly contemptuous of its Europeans counterparts is an established fact. It’s even explicit in its Strategic Directive published last December. Some of it is theater, some is heartfelt right wing ideology. But none of it implies an intention to end the transatlantic military alliance. That would be stupid, even on a merely transactional level: members are required to make their arsenals conform to NATO standards which in practice more often than not means that they must buy American weapons. So the more NATO escalates its war preparation, the bigger the market for the American military industrial complex.
A new Strategy
A quick reminder of the context: capitalism, the global system, is in a deep crisis from which there’s no way out. The many trillions of dollars, yens, euros and yuan that have been created since 2008 have shored up capitalists at the expense of everyone else by giving them an ever larger size of the total buying power (money). Money to spend, to invest, to send stock prices through the roof, to become more money for a while (bitcoin and other schemes) and so on. So the Economist may ask: crisis, what crisis? And yes, on the surface, that may sound right, depending on what is measured (and how it is measured: unemployment for instance, is grossly undercounted in the US and many other countries). But scratch that surface and you’ll see that the rot in the foundations has spread further. You’ll see that the current growth, to the limited extent that it expresses productive investment, has been spearheaded by technology aimed at reducing the part of human labor in the production of commodities even further. The robots are taking over as never before and they yield their masters surplus profits, at the expense of competitors who have no robots or only older models. Until the robots are everywhere and deflation (or it may be inflation, depending on the policies) asks the question: where is the surplus value?
The robots above are meant literally but also metaphorically as stand-ins for the whole IT-centered economy. Actually, AI chips might be the better stand-in, since that is what the capitalist hopes are pinned on. When I wrote above that capitalism is in a deep crisis, I did not mean that there is a global recession right now (though it seems to be coming). I meant that capitalism is facing conditions in which its very foundation, the collective belief that value equals wealth, is under threat. Since 2008 the focus of the managers of capitalism has been on preventing a contagious collapse of the value of capital. This has implied policies which inevitably widened the income gap and made the growth of capitalism more and more incompatible with the reproduction of the global working class. This article is not the place to delve more deeply into capitalism’s systemic crisis, there are other articles on this site on that subject and one on the impact of AI will be published shortly. The point here is that the worsening systemic crisis is the background of the heightened competition and growing tensions between nations, the economic warfare with tariffs and sanctions and the military incursions that remind us of the breakdowns in the international order that preceded the previous world wars.
Furthermore, within that framework of systemic crisis, the economic balance of power has shifted. The US, while still holding an edge in high tech and finances, has steadily lost ground in industrial production to China. But the latter country’s manufacturing capacity increasingly outpaces global demand.
Latin America is a good example of the growing economic power of China at the expense of the US. Twenty years ago China had barely a foot on the ground there but in 2024 the trade between them exceeded 500 billion dollars. Both as a market for Chinese commodities (including infrastructure), and as a source of raw materials (oil from Venezuela, soy from Brazil, copper from Chile and Peru, lithium from Argentina and so on) Latin America became ever more important for China. And vice versa. For ten of the twelve South-American countries China is now a larger trade partner than the US. China does not only export goods to Latin America, it also exports capital, behaving no different than other capitalist powers in a similar position. Since 2014, it has lent three times as much to Latin America as the US. These loans allow those countries to buy Chinese commodities. One of China’s greatest debtors is Venezuela which paid in oil. Lately, more than two thirds of Venezuela’s oil production went to China. Not anymore.
Of course, the decapitation of the government of Venezuela had nothing to do with stopping drugs, saving democracy, or fighting (non-existing) socialism. The main purpose was to push back against China’s growing presence in Latin America. It was no coincidence that the American commandos kidnapped Maduro only hours after he had received a high-ranking Chinese delegation at his palace. The timing was meant as a smack in the face. The raid was followed by threats against Colombia and Cuba. Direct American pressure helped mini-Trumps come to power in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama. The latter country was pressured to annul the contracts held by a Chinese company which operated port facilities on opposite ends of the Panama Canal. The American intervention in Venezuela has made it clear to all rulers in Latin America that the US Special Forces can pay them a visit any time they dare to displease Washington.
The deeper the crisis becomes, the greater the incentive for the US to use its military power to compensate for the ground it lost economically and to blackmail weaker nations into submission. The deeper the crisis becomes, the more difficult it becomes for China to find markets large enough to keep its outsized productive apparatus profitable. Economic competition was never merely economic but under the pressure of the systemic crisis it tends to shift more and more to military competition. Global military expenditures have climbed every year since 2015. Wars have multiplied. The nuclear arms race is starting up again with China taking the lead and several non-nuclear nations considering to go nuclear as well, given the increased threats.
A telltale sign of the acceleration of capitalism’s war tendency is the erosion of the international order established after the last world war. The UN’s loss of influence reminds how the League of Nations became irrelevant in the years preceding that war. For Trump the old world order’s ideology and rules hinder the exertion of American power. So forget about ‘international law’, ‘human rights’, the Geneva convention, ‘spreading democracy’, etc. That old ideology is worn out anyway. Stephen Miller, Trump’s influential adviser who is said to be an architect of both the campaign against immigrants and the moves on Venezuela and Greenland, called it “a straitjacket”. In reality, so he explained to a CNN reporter, the world is governed “by iron laws”, “by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” So there you have it. The wolf who tells the sheep he’s going to eat them, gets praise for his honesty. Trump, who lies as he breaths, likes honesty too, if it’s fear-inspiring. So the Department of Defense is now the Department of War. And to Venezuela he says: We’re not here to liberate you. We’re here for your oil.
And he means that. The US has extorted a ransom from Venezuela in the form of 50 million barrels of oil, to be sold for profit, plus control over Venezuela’s oil export generally and indefinitely. The US’ interest in Venezuela’s oil may seem curious, given the current oversupply on the global oil market and the relative low quality (high refinery cost) of Venezuelan oil. But in light of the US’s long term strategy of war preparation it is not strange at all. If there is to be another global war, it will pit the US against China. In such a conflict, China’s Achilles heel could be its dependence on imported oil. In recent years the US, with the help of its junior partner Israel, has tightened its military grip on the Middle East and may be in the process of bringing Iran, the main challenger to its dominance there, to its knees. The Venezuela intervention makes clear that China has no reliable source of oil on the American continent either.
The great powers are preparing for a great conflict. Not an imminent war, there are still many obstacles for that to happen. i The US strategy aims to prevent the consolidation of a hostile bloc around China and Russia. Its goal is therefore not to repel allies but to force them to make greater efforts for the joint war preparation. Trump has played this game before. By insinuating that the famous Article 5 of the NATO treaty (“an attack on one is an attack on all”) no longer counts and by questioning the alliance in all sorts of ways, he forced the European NATO-members to pledge a 150% increase in military spending over the next decade, at the expense of the social wage. NATO secretary-general Rutte and other European leaders have openly thanked him for this (and while they did so, you could see them thinking: without your help, we never would have been able to sell this to our public). And now he has done it again: by threatening to annex Greenland, he created the appearance that the US is not only no longer an ally but also a potential enemy! Now European countries have to arm themselves even faster in view of a possible war against the US! And so they have to buy even more American weapons! It’s absurd, but that is the story the European governments are telling their subjects. And with some success: European nationalist fever has risen considerably. That too is war preparation.
The outcome of the Greenland affair makes clear what all the hoopla was about. Greenland will be militarized so that the West will control the northern shipping roads freed by global warming, and Europe will bear most of the costs. China and Russia are banned from mining Greenlandic raw materials, but the US is not. And NATO? NATO is alive and well.
Obviously that is not everyone’s opinion. There is a real tension in NATO, as was evident at the recent Munich Security conference where several European leaders complained of America’s “wrecking ball politics”, even though Marco Rubio assured them of Washington’s enduring friendship. Some think a new world order is taking shape, although it’s not clear what it might look like. The overriding theme of the Munich conference was the unanimous resolve to escalate the ‘rearmament’ of Europe even faster, which must have sounded like sweet music to the ears of the managers of US Capital and its military-industrial complex.
By the way: the hypothesis that there is indeed a rational, albeit sinister, strategy behind Trump’s behavior does not rule out the possibility that he is mentally deteriorating. According to insiders, years of cocaine and amphetamine use (especially Adderall) have severely damaged his brainii. Incidentally, Hitler was also a notorious amphetamine user. And Hitler also suffered from the megalomaniacal narcissism that so many find so attractive in Trump. I do not want to suggest here that Trump is a second Hitler (although his vice president JD Vance did claim exactly that in 2016, before he converted). What Trump’s behavior does make clear is that in capitalist world politics, rationality and madness are not mutually exclusive. And that is especially true when the system is in crisis.
Fear and loathing in Minnesota
Just like in his foreign policy is spreading fear the main theme in Trump’s domestic politics. Recent events in Minnesota have amply illustrated this. Again, we need to ask why. What is behind this campaign of terror? Is it a symptom of Trump’s dementia, an expression of blind reactionary ideology, or is it part of a long-term strategy?
Again, the events have received so much attention that it’s not necessary to describe the brutal tactics of the ICE army nor the widespread resistance they provoked. iii Even Bruce Springsteen sings about it. A striking aspect about ICE’s terror in Minneapolis-St Paul is its sheer conspicuousness. You’ would think that the ICE agents, if their goal would be to apprehend undocumented immigrant criminals, that they would act discreetly, in order not to alert their prey. You’d also think that they would arrest (undocumented immigrant) criminals. Instead this campaign unfolded in a way that seemed designed to draw maximal attention to itself and the vast majority of the people arrested did not have a criminal record or only for traffic violations. It included children, old folks, immigrants and citizens. Even native Americans, descendants of the original inhabitants, have been held for days on suspicion of being ‘illegal immigrants’! Basically, anybody brown-skinned speaking Spanish is a potential target. Clearly, the aim is to strike fear.
The why question is relevant. This massive hunt is disrupting economic activity (thousands don’t go to work because they’re afraid to leave their homes) and costs the federal state many billions of dollars. It’s not good for profits. So how can it be good for capital?
One answer could be that it is motivated by the racist ideology of the present US government and made worse by the fact that the many people who join ICE (earning big bonuses) are of the thuggish kind and moreover are badly trained. But that begs an explanation as to why then has racism regained so much importance in the governance of US capitalism. Another possible rationale is that the ICE raids are spectacularly frightful in order to make undocumented immigrants flee the country. According to the Department of Homeland Security 1.8 million have already ‘self-deported’ since Trump regained power. That could indeed be a reason if the government expects a huge increase in unemployment and wants to get rid of the burden of ‘superfluous’people.
But there’s more to it. The fear that the Trump government spreads domestically and the fear that it spreads internationally are both functional to its strategy to prepare for global war.
There’s more to war preparation than producing weapons and training armies. An essential condition is to indoctrinate the population to support the war and endure its horrors. A gradually increasing militarization of society is part of that. The population must get used to the presence of soldiers and armed goons in the streets. In a speech in September Trump declared that American cities should serve as “training grounds” for U.S. troops. “Inner cities are a big part of war,” he said. In other words, war on the cities, and more specifically war on the working class they contain, is a necessary step in the larger war preparation. The demonization of immigrants serves to divide and weaken the working class. The climate of fear is aimed at inducing submission. The Trump administration follows Machiavelli’s advice: “He who controls people’s fear becomes the master of their souls.”
The war effort requires a sense of community at the home front. Workers in the factories and soldiers on the battlefield have to think that they share the same interests as their rulers and exploiters against a common enemy. But the more capital’s real domination penetrates the whole of society, the more it destroys any remnants of pre-capitalist and working class-based community life. Those who have been uprooted are left with a powerful longing for their lost communities. The more frustrating, unsatisfying, and insecure the world shaped by capital has become, the stronger this feeling. And it is the capture of that feeling which is key to the war preparation strategy of the Trump administration and those factions of the ruling class who share it, not only in the US but around the world. The goal is the creation of a national community. A false community that brings people together not on the base of real common interests but on the base of speaking the same language and having the same ethnic, cultural-historical background. Its unity has no rational base, it rests on strong emotions and trust in the great leader.
The MAGA community provides a substitute gratification for the genuine longing for community felt by many. But the identity upon which this community is established necessarily entails the exclusion of those who do not share the common historico-cultural traits. Those excluded, though they live in the same country, become alien elements, infiltrators that need to be removed. In language reminiscent of Hitler, Trump repeatedly has said immigrants coming to the U.S. are “poisoning the blood of our country”. They are all pictured as rapists, murderers, drug pushers, gangsters and terrorists. The purpose was to make them the scapegoat for all the real pain and frustrations mounting in society. The more crisis ridden the society becomes, the more it makes sense for the ruling class to channel the anger it causes away from itself, onto the scapegoat. The very brutality of the ICE thugs then becomes a satisfying ritual of revenge. The greater the rage of the mass against the scapegoat, the more the ruling class can use this rage to mobilize the mass behind its projects, especially war.
But it seems that the strategy backfired. They must have seriously underestimated the common bonds between migrants and non-migrants in the working class neighborhoods of the twin cities. It was, mutatis mutandis, as if on Kristallnacht (1938) the majority of the Germans would have supported the Jews. The ICE assault provoked a wave of protest and resistance not seen in the US since the George Floyd rebellion in 2020 (which also started in Minneapolis). Hundreds of thousands demonstrated in several cities. Barricades were erected in the streets to impede ICE patrols. Neighborhood ICE watches were organized spontaneously. The gangs of ICE-agents were continuously confronted. Hotels where they stayed were trashed. Food deliveries were organized for migrants too scared to leave the house. Many other creative initiatives were taken, often by people who never protested before. It was beautiful and encouraging to see, even from afar.
And yet. It didn’t make ICE flee the twin cities. They continued their assaults, perhaps a bit less aggressively. Only on February 13 ‘Border Czar” Tom Homan announced a “significant drawdown” of the ICE campaign in the twin cities, because it had “accomplished its mission”. But he added that there would be no change in the enforcement policy. ICE is preparing to bring its terror campaign to other cities and towns. It plans to spend 38 billion dollars to buy giant warehouses and convert them into additional detention centers. Meanwhile the Democratic politicians held press conferences and filed lawsuits and sent out their police to protect ICE from the demonstrators.
On January 23 a day of action was organized in the twin cities which was billed as “a general strike”. But the strike, while celebrated, was far from general. In fact, in all the companies in the area that employ a large number of workers it was business as usual. The trade unions said they were sympathetic to the movement but opposed striking, because it was forbidden by their contract. This illustrates the weakness of the working class struggle in the US. The victims of the ICE assault are working families, and so are the vast majority of those fighting against it. But they don’t fight using the very weapons that make the working class potentially so strong. A real general strike is what is needed to stop ICE.
Still, the degree of solidarity with the victims of the state’s attack was and still is impressive. It’s a slap in face of Trump whose authority, already battered by scandals and discontent over the high cost of living, seems significantly diminished. At this time, it seems likely that the Congressional elections in November will result in a resounding Democratic victory. But that would not be a victory for the working class. The Democrats, like their kindred spirits in Europe, have a different strategy than the Trumpists but their goal, subduing the working class and prepare for war, is the same. The masks must fall.
The Democrats are no alternative
The Democrats do not oppose ICE, they want its agents to be better trained and wear body cams when they do their dirty work. They want a velvet glove on the iron fist, like when Obama was the president. He earned the nickname “Deporter in Chief” because his government deported more undocumented immigrants than any president before – close to three million. The Democratic president expanded ICE, ordered the construction of detention camps, hired for profit companies to run them, contracted the Silicon Valley spyware company Pallentir to work with ICE. On the other hand, the modern president who legalized the greatest number of immigrants was Reagan, a Republican. It doesn’t depend on the party but on the circumstances. World capitalism in its present phase of intensifying destruction induces ever more people in the poorer countries to flee in order to escape violence, hunger and lack of opportunity. That is a reality that is the product of a system of which both Democrats and Republicans are agents. The exodus may go up or down depending on the economic conjuncture but it will no go away. The mass of people that are superfluous for Capital is a growing burden for the system. In that light it’s not surprising that the Trump administration imposed drastic cuts in foreign aid and that European governments followed its example, which will result in many millions of deaths.iv But US Capital also needs undocumented labor so neither party wants to get rid of it. Instead they want to manage it, turn the faucet open or closed depending on Capital’s needs and the propagandistic demands of their own political marketing strategies. These strategies differ. For the Democrats the democratic mystification – the idea that the country is owned by its citizens of all races who rule it together by participating in the democratic system – is crucial. It may be a more potent tool to unify the nation and thereby prepare it for war than Trump’s fear mongering approach. So while the latter spotlights the brutality of immigrant crackdowns, the former covers them with the cloak of multicultural patriotic love. But the goal is essentially the same. In foreign policy too, the Democrats share the goal of war preparation. They too want massive military spending and are even more aggressive than their Republican counterparts on waging economic war against China.
Yet the Democrats seem different. So different that at the height of the tension in Minnesota there was talk in mainstream media about the possibility of a new civil war. But that possibility simply does not exist. Despite appearances, the Democrats and Republicans have much more in common than what divides them. Right now the Democrats’ popularity is rising. All they have to do for that is not be Trump. One of the worst effects of Trumpism is that, by contrast, it gives new credibility to worn-out mystifications. It could be a Democratic president who leads the country, in renewed unity and once again proud to be a nation of immigrants, to war.
Sanderr
2/14/2026
i More on that in: https://internationalistperspective.org/capitalism-crisis-and-war/ . But regardless of the obstacles, an accidental start of global war cannot be excluded entirely. During the cold war this almost happened twice. According to experts, the integration of AI in military launching systems increases the possibility.
ii This claim was made by Noel Casler who worked closely with Trump on the TV-show “The Apprentice” and by the actor Tom Arnold. Trump denies it but has not sued Casler.
iii Among the many overviews of the events we found these interesting: https://illwill.com/lies and https://wildcat-www.de/en/current/e_a127_chinga.html
iv Global humanitarian aid decreased from 2022 to 2025 with 60%. According to experts, the US cuts alone result in 500.000 to 700.000 additional deaths per year.
