** This is the second of a two-part article series by the Resist US-Led War Movement on the transition between US Presidents Biden and Trump on the war record of the two and what to expect for the future


Trump has officially been inaugurated for his second term as US President. He ran on a campaign of “peace through strength” in which he played with words to appear at some times as a peace bringer and at other times as a strongman with an iron will to destroy “America’s enemies.” Trump's false promises of peace appealed to some Americans tired of Biden's aggressive and militaristic presidency. However Trump's xenophobic, chauvinist and "America First" narrative fed right into decades of War on Terror rhetoric, training many Americans to view those struggling to achieve their freedom from ages of imperialist domination around the world as "enemies." With a ceasefire signed in Palestine now that the genocidal Zionist regime has been forced to submit to the negotiating table after over a year of steadfast Palestinian resistance, many are wondering how long Trump the supposed "peace-maker" will last.

Trump's Bloody First Term
Trump’s foreign policy record of his first term is remembered mostly for its bravado.  Trump did not wage the shock and awe campaign that Bush led into Afghanistan and Iraq, instead keeping the silent drone war going that Obama kicked into high gear in West Asia and the Horn of Africa. In a seeming show of strength, Trump dropped what he offensively called the “Mother of All Bombs” in rural Afghanistan, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the US military’s arsenal at the time. Trump upheld minimal airstrikes against Syria compared to Democrats Obama and Biden, but made sure that such strikes were massive when they came. He garnered both controversy and praise for meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and speaking for peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula, but silently increased US troop presence on bases throughout South Korea at the same time. He even made bold claims that the US would leave NATO if other NATO countries did not increase military spending to the alliance.

What should the peace-loving people of the world and the global anti-militarism movement make of these contradictions inherent in Trump’s bravado-filled record? In short, Trump’s entire image was built around “draining the swamp” of the “deep state” of Washington DC and rising on the shoulders of American voters fed up with the endless war and disempowerment of two war-torn and utterly neoliberal Democrat administrations. Trump’s Presidential tenure has always had to have a false face of peace to it in order to maintain his voter base in the US, while blaming his political opposition for the horror and wasteful spending of the wars that he himself also kept going. Trump comes from the most savage camp of monopoly capitalists, and war has always meant big business for these profiteers.

In reality, Trump holds a war record just as brutal as any former President, and he perfected the art of paying other puppets around the world to do the US’s dirty work for it. Trump led his own coup attempt in Venezuela, a brazen attack on an independent country’s sovereignty. He sent truckloads of military aid to the utterly fascist and terroristic Bolsanaro and Duque regimes in Brazil and Colombia. He tore apart families at the US-Mexico border and led a deportation campaign of terror across the US against migrants forced to flee their homelands from US-led militarization at home.

Trump’s comments against NATO succeeded in encouraging NATO members to spend more money on their militaries. Before his Presidency, only two member countries were spending over 2% of their GDP on their militaries, while today 23 members spend this amount. Trump gave fuel to the wildfire that was the Ukrainian civil war through massive military aid packages to the US-puppet Kiev regime and brought NATO training camps up to the border with Russia itself, setting the stage for Russia’s counter-defensive invasion of Ukrainian territory that has led to three years of a bloody US-NATO proxy war against Russia.

Trump brought the genocidal war on Yemen to new heights with his military aid to Saudi Arabia in exchange for lucrative real estate and development deals. He moved the US-Israeli embassy to Jerusalem in a brazen statement of continued support for the Zionist settler colonial occupation of Palestine. He started a trade war with China that increased military tensions and justified the Obama-initiated Pivot to Asia strategy of US militarization of the Pacific. This was the context for Trump’s assistance in the carpet bombing of Marawi City in the Philippines in which people living there have still not been able to return home, all while referring to the Philippines as “a prime piece of military real estate.”

Trump unleashed racist police terror and the military on anti-racist protesters in the US during the George Floyd uprisings of 2020 and even created a new terror designation of “Black Identity Extremists" with the help of his Attorney General Jeff Sessions who had ties to the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan.

Trump ended diplomatic detente with Cuba and pulled the US out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran’s nuclear program, steamrolling every attempt at ending some elements of the US’s inherent imperialist attitude towards other countries. In fact, he made his own utterly racist attitude on other countries well known by banning Muslims from entering the US in the first months of his Presidency while referring to countries in Africa, the Caribbean and West Asia as “shithole countries.”

Trump's Expansionist and War-Mongering Future
This is the pro-war legacy that Trump tried to hide during his 2024 campaign, but it is the legacy that the global anti-war movement must now prepare to throw everything it has against. Trump appears to speak with the same level of empty bravado in his threats to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. While many laugh away these very likely hollow threats, one only has to look at the vast mineral wealth of the Arctic and the profitable trade route across the Panamanian Isthmus to realize that Trump’s big business cabal would benefit greatly if he followed through on this rhetoric.

Trump’s comments that there would be “Hell to pay” in Gaza if a ceasefire was not signed before his inauguration is a dark reminder that he is ready to shield the Zionist regime from any of its genocidal war crimes just as any past President has been. Had it not been for the heroic resilience and militant steadfastness of the Palestinian people, Trump would still be giving Netanyahu the green light. The mass movement for peace must be ready to continue weathering the harsh repression it has faced up until now. And with West Asia being violently redrawn by the US and Zionists in Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, the peace movement must not give up the fight.

Regarding the Palestinian solidarity movement in the US, Trump has promised to “deport Pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again,” and Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to answer if he would order the US military to shoot at protesters during his Senate confirmation hearing. Trump’s party platform also includes the ominous promise to “restore safety in our neighborhoods by replenishing police departments,” and “protecting officers from frivolous lawsuits,” responding to the many just attempts to hold murderous police officers accountable to the communities they operate it.

With a rising trend of African countries declaring their intention to kick out US and French military presence, such as Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Chad, Ghana, and Ivory Coast, it is likely that Trump will double down on AFRICOM missions of US counterinsurgency across the continent and attempt US puppet coups. The people of the world must prepare to support the people of Africa in their rightful fight for sovereignty against imperialism and foreign intervention.

And no where holds more potential for the spark of a third world war than in the Pacific. Trump may have pulled the US out of the Trans Pacific Partnership, but Biden’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework provides more favorable ground for Trump-style bilateral trade wars, and Trump will wield all the military might necessary to wage them. Biden set the stage with more new Pacific military agreements than at any time since the end of World War Two, and Trump now holds this regional command structure in the palm of his hand.

The Tasks Ahead
In conclusion, the global mass movement for peace must be just as ready to combat the moves of Trump just as much as it did against Genocide Joe. The Trump-led Republican Party platform states clearly the intention to “ensure our military is the most modern, lethal and powerful forces in the world.” We must remember that it is not just rival states that the US war machine is gearing up to clash with, but it is also the ever-rising movement against US-led war and militarism that the US and its militaristic allies cannot ignore. Wars of aggression and militarization are causing extreme suffering and death of tens of thousands of people and pose an existential threat to life as we know it. We must bind together our movements to overcome Trump and all war profiteers and bring about the downfall of US imperialism in order to achieve a true just and lasting peace.

** This is the first of a two-part statement analyzing the militaristic past of outgoing US President Biden and likely future of incoming President Trump **
 
As Joe Biden spends his final days in the office of the US Presidency, it is important to look back at his record as a war-making and peace-destroying President, carrying on the militaristic legacy of every President before him who has occupied the office of the most consistently war-making country in the world. Indeed, Biden has left incoming President Donald Trump with a fully loaded (and in terms of the nearly $1 trillion US military budget, very well-funded) weapon to unleash upon the people of the world.

Genocide Joe Funds War, Destabilization, and Militarism throughout the World
The darkest stain on Biden’s legacy will undoubtedly be the US-supplied and US-protected Israeli genocide of Palestine. Biden allowed an unending flow of weapons to go towards the Zionist state even while open threats of exterminating the Palestinian people were made for years by governments and citizens alike. Since October 7th, Biden has directly handed over $17.9 billion to the Zionist killing machine and has committed billions more to come, including an $8 billion package at the close of his Presidency and after the news has seen hospitals leveled, neighborhoods wiped out, other nearby countries aggressively invaded and possibly over 200,000 deaths in Gaza alone.
 
Many of Biden’s supporters and opponents have tried to paint the outgoing President as a peace-maker by pointing to his act of pulling US troops out of the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, the US’s longest war project on record. However, this was after sending millions of dollars to expand the US presence and fund local warlords who used their positions in the Afghan government and military to create their own regional fiefdoms, rife with corruption and violence, to terrorize their own people as the cost of keeping the country “stable” for US military positioning and the profits of mining and agricultural corporations.
 
On the extreme reverse, Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was done with little concern for the people themselves, who now live under the doubly harsh rule of the US-created Taliban government and one of the severest US sanction regimes in recent years. It is inarguably beneficial for the people of any country to have a foreign power leave their country. But it is just as inarguable that Biden’s actions were not done out of empathy for the workers, farmers and other common people of Afghanistan who were left with no other choice of government besides the extremely repressive Taliban and who are willfully blocked from their much-needed medicine, agricultural inputs, building materials, and other public funds adding up to $200 million in seized government assets still being held by the US government.
 
Biden’s legacy will include the start of the bloody war in Ukraine that has so far claimed the lives of 43,000 soldiers and almost as many civilians. Biden continued the military build-up of NATO troops and training camps that Obama started and Trump expanded, bringing the world’s largest military alliance closer to Russia than ever before as he funded a bloody civil war led by the US-backed Kiev regime right on Russia’s border. Biden ignored all warnings of an all-out war starting between Russia and Ukraine and then crushed every round of peace talks between the two countries by promising a seemingly endless supply of weapons, the latest being long-range missiles that fired deep into Russia itself, threatening to escalate the conflict even further.
 
Biden has expanded US military presence in Latin America as well. He gave $750 million to Central American governments for their repressive police forces ostensibly to stem the flow of migration into the US. Yet, it is actually the US agricultural, mining and real estate companies stealing land and displacing the indigenous and peasant communities with the violent backing of US-funded local police and military that is forcing people to flee their countries and migrate abroad for survival. Instead of offering an easier path for those forced to migrate by his own policies, Biden passed executive orders narrowing access to asylum and speeding up deportation removals. He also created new military agreements with repressive governments in the Caribbean and laid the groundwork for a full invasion of Haiti, a country devastated by US companies since its foundation. He would also follow in his predecessors’ footsteps by attempting to discredit the Venezuelan election system, funding black ops forces to attempt to overthrow the government there, and continuing one of the most brutal sanction regimes in history when those attempts failed.
 
In Africa, Biden re-sent troops into Somalia where counterinsurgency operations by the US and NATO have brutalized the mostly pastoral and fisherfolk communities to support US-friendly local warlords in protecting US economic interests. He signed off on the creation of 2 new military bases in Kenya while the people live in abject poverty under economic polices that sell off the country to foreign investors. He oversaw the advising of repressive militaries in Angola to build US-owned railroads and in Congo to mine cobalt in what much of the world has called a genocidal situation. Among other militaristic actions on the continent, Biden facilitated weapons transfers to the occupation regime of Morocco to continue its settler colonial project against the Saharawi people of Western Sahara.
 
Biden created more military agreements in the Pacific than at any period of time since the decade following World War 2. These agreements with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia (together with the United Kingdom), and the Pacific Islands Forum have led to an unprecedented expansion of US military bases, exercises, and forward positioning of military forces and missiles including nuclear weapons up to the very borders of China and North Korea. This massive military build up in the Pacific has caused environmental devastation, violence against poor communities, particularly women, and force entire countries to live in a constant state of fear if a war will start in their home tomorrow.

Militarization of the Border, Cuts to Services, Repression of Organizing in the US
At home in the US, Biden’s Countering Domestic Terrorism program has seen state and municipal police budgets skyrocket and a heightened increase in police violence against Black and other communities of color, migrants, workers on the picket line and activists in the streets. Trump’s boastful promises to unleash the police on anyone calling for peace in the have been set up for success by Biden himself.
 
These last four years of militarization and war build-up underline what Biden has never ceased to proclaim as the coveted “rules based order” of the US’s presence in the world. It is not hard to follow the paper trail of Biden’s military record to see that they cover the tracks of incredibly exploitative trade and investment deals such as the Partnership for Global Investment and Infrastructure across Europe and the Atlantic, the India-Middle East-Economic Corridor across South and West Asia, and the Indo-Pacific Economic Partnership across the Pacific. The US rules-based order has paved a path of blood across entire nations under Biden’s pen.
 
Biden’s Democrat party stated in their party platform under an ill-fated Harris presidency that “the Democrats will revitalize American diplomacy to ensure that the United States remains the world’s pivotal power and a principled force for peace and prosperity.” While the reins of the world’s most powerful military machine will pass to Trump in a few day’s time, Biden’s four years already spoke to this intention of his own Presidency from day one. Billions of dollars were spent by Biden on a genocidal holocaust in Palestine, on a frozen stalemate in Ukraine, and countless other situations in which people striving for only peace and stable livelihood were gunned down by the hired gangs of monopoly capitalists in Washington, London, Berlin, Tokyo and many other imperialist capitals around the world.
 
Yet there remains little for the failing infrastructure, relief from record inflation and precarious employment and devastating environmental destruction for the people of the US itself. As wildfires consume entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, as they did in Lahaina Hawaii, the massive military bases in Southern California and Hawaii are made some of the most climate-resilient structures on the planet. Truly, the US war machine brings death and destruction to the people of the US itself while it spreads it around the world.
 
Joe Biden’s record as President is a world torn apart by conflict and genocide engineered and funded from the White House with an earnings check sent to Wall Street. There is much to fear when it comes to the war threats of the incoming Trump regime, but Biden’s record is a sobering reminder that a less maniacal warmaker in the White House is still a warmaker and not a genuine alternative. Only a global mass movement for a just and lasting peace in solidarity with all peoples’ struggles around the world can bring about the end of the US war machine.