This article by Eoin Ó Murchú first appeared in Unity, the weekly publication of the Irish Communist Party, on 15 February 2025.
WHILE Liberal Western Imperialism expected Donald Trump to challenge the old certainties of how the US dominated the world, no one expected the blunt, brazen declaration of might is right that came from Trump, as he laid claim to Greenland Panama, declared the aim of making Canada a 51st state, and openly proposed the ethnic cleansing of Gaza to turn it into prime real estate.
The Liberals gloss over it, of course, but there is nothing really that exceptional about Trump’s declared ambitions.
After all, the whole USA is founded on the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the native peoples of that continent, and of course on the seizure of their land. The Sioux Lakota people were, for example, driven out of North and South Dakota when gold was found there, just as Trump is planning to drive the Palestinian people out of Gaza so that US companies can clear the rubble and build a millionaire paradise holiday site on their land.
It is indeed an obscene suggestion, but it is how the US was founded, and at the end of the day is only a more explicit illustration of US attitudes to other peoples throughout the world. The US has perpetrated military interventions in over 400 countries since its inception, half of these since 1950 and a full 25% since the end of the cold war.
Trump opponents, like Clinton, Biden, Obama, have been no slouches when it came to interventions. Libya, for example, once the richest country in Africa with an outstanding health and education service, is now an open-air slave market – directly as a result of US intervention under Obama. And, while Biden occasionally used honeyed words when talking about Gaza, his administration armed and financed the Israeli war machine which perpetrated the atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians.
What Trump has really done is to strip the pretense. The US is exposed as an aggressive land-grabbing bully using its military might to steal other people’s wealth and keep them under its thumb. And this is as true of Europe as it is of the rest of the world. Apart from maintaining military bases especially in Germany, US has its power to enforce anti-Russian sanctions on the EU, sanctions which have devastated Germany’s economy and seriously set back the economic well-being of the rest.
Ireland is now being threatened not just by a change of US investment policy as Trump tries to force US corporations to bring their investments back home (while keeping its domination over world trade of course), but by punitive counter-actions as a result of our principled stance in support of the Palestinians. The spineless Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, is already rushing to remove the Triple Lock which ensures that Ireland can only participate in Unmandated military action overseas, but is also planning a watering down of the promised Occupied Territories Bill (another election promise due to be broken) and the adoption of the Zionist definition of antisemitism, which, ironically, would include President Michael D Higgins and Tánaiste Simon Harris on the black list.
SIPTU has already raised its voice demanding the full implementation of the promise over the Occupied Territories Bill, but this government must be challenged at every level over its continued subservience to what is plainly an obscene and unacceptable disregard of the rights of people.
The long-suffering Palestinian people cannot be left to face on their own what the Israelis call “voluntary” resettlement – a term reminiscent of the “voluntary” resettlement of European Jews by the Nazis. So far, of course, Trump’s words are just words. The enforced resettlement of the population of Gaza is probably unfeasible, but already Israel is speeding up its grabbing of land on the West Bank, with the establishment of new illegal settlements, the very settlements which are the target of the Occupied Territories Bill.
The future looks bleak.
But really it is the sting of the dying wasp, as the US is steadily losing its monolithic hegemony over the world’s economies and politics.
Our task is to make sure that Ireland finds itself on the right side of history, that we match our words of solidarity with action to oppose ethnic cleansing and genocide, and to right against the increasing militarisation into which our capitalist leaders are trying to draw us.