In an open threat to wage nuclear war against Russia, US President Donald Trump announced on August 1 that he is repositioning US nuclear submarines to strike Russia. The threat came in the run-up to August 8, the day Trump says he will impose crippling tariffs on Russia and all its trading partners if Russia does not stop fighting in Ukraine.
On Telegram, former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev attacked Trump’s tariff threat as “playing the ultimatum game,” adding: “1. Russia isn’t Israel or even Iran. 2. Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country.” Medvedev also advised Trump to watch the post-apocalyptic TV series The Walking Dead to see what a US-Russia war would mean. Trump replied:
“Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that … Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.”
With this monumentally reckless threat, it is clear that the military and trade conflicts between the major powers are escalating completely out of control. The Kremlin has brushed off Trump’s tariff threats and kept mounting localized offensives all along the front lines in Ukraine. Trump’s pledges to rapidly negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war have failed, and a seemingly unstoppable momentum is building up in ruling circles for a massive military escalation of the NATO conflict with Russia.
During the US election campaign, Trump postured as an opponent of the Ukraine war and even pledged to end the Ukraine war in “24 hours” with a few phone calls. As president, however, after briefly suspending US military aid to Ukraine this winter and opening talks with the Kremlin, Trump rapidly resumed arms shipments worth tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine. This was hailed by Democratic Party officials as well as the European Union (EU), who have made support for war with Russia the center of their opposition to Trump.
Negotiations with Russia have stalled, however, because US and NATO officials are not willing to acquiesce to key Russian demands that drove the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022—in particular, that NATO not be allowed to post its forces in Ukraine, on Russia’s border.
Over the last week, Trump administration officials have made increasingly pessimistic statements on diplomatic talks with Russia. Last Thursday, Trump indicated that threats of sanctions likely would not stop Russian President Vladimir Putin from continuing military operations in Ukraine, saying: “I don’t know that sanctions bother him.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the president was “bothered” by the failure to make progress on a diplomatic settlement of the Ukraine war and might abandon the talks. “So at some point,” Rubio told Fox News, “[Trump’s] got to make a decision here about how much to continue to engage in an effort to do cease-fires if one of the two sides is not interested.”
Instead, economic and military tensions between the major world powers are continuing to surge. Should Trump in fact impose the 100 percent tariffs on countries trading with Russia, the result could be a catastrophic collapse in world trade. Purchasers of Russian oil and gas include not only major Asian economies like China, India, and Turkey but also, despite EU sanctions on Russia, a number of EU states: Hungary, Belgium, France, Slovakia, Czechia and Italy.
Though US Democrats were initially enthusiastic about using sanctions to try to compel a Russian surrender, liberal publications are also taking an increasingly pessimistic tone. On Thursday, the New York Times wrote, “it is hard to imagine that China’s president, Xi Jinping, would abandon Mr. Putin, his most critical partner in challenging American power.”
Trump’s resort to nuclear threats must be taken as a warning: Conflicts between the major world powers in Europe and beyond are so intense that they will not be resolved peacefully, unless the working class intervenes decisively to take power out of the hands of the capitalist governments.
As the US attempts to use diplomatic or commercial weapons to force Russian compliance fail, the NATO imperialist powers are moving rapidly towards military escalation against Russia.
Indeed, as Trump was threatening nuclear war with Russia, German officials confirmed to Reuters that they are preparing a staggering increase in Germany’s land army, with Europe launching a multi-trillion-euro rearmament drive. Berlin will order 3,000 Boxer armored vehicles and 3,500 Patria infantry fighting vehicles worth €17 billion as well as Eurofighter jets. This follows German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s pledge in May to use Berlin’s €1 trillion rearmament program to make the German Bundeswehr “the strongest conventional army in Europe.”
Other EU powers are also making huge purchases. France plans to acquire 1400 Serval and 1437 Griffon armored vehicles, as well as hundreds of Caesar truck-mounted cannons. Italy is purchasing at least 1050 Lynx armored vehicles and 380 Panther main battle tanks from Germany’s Rheinmetall corporation. Poland has also announced plans to acquire over 1,000 tanks from South Korea, the United States and Germany, as well as other armored vehicles.
The European military build-up points to the escalating danger of nuclear war and the political bankruptcy of the Kremlin’s foreign policy. The EU alone, with a population of over 448 million and a Gross Domestic Product of $20 trillion, massively outweighs Russia’s population of 143 million and $2 trillion GDP. Should Europe fully remilitarize, Russian conventional forces would be vastly outnumbered in any war with NATO—rapidly posing the question of whether the Kremlin would use its nuclear arsenal to avoid being overwhelmed.
The NATO war against Russia is, moreover, inseparably bound up with the international class war on the workers. While Trump slashes social programs and moves to send the US cost of living soaring with his tariffs, the EU powers are preparing austerity measures in the hundreds of billions of euros. After millions mobilized earlier this year in mass protests against Trump in the United States, explosive anger is building among European workers against governments preparing austerity to finance military build-ups in blatant defiance of the will of the people.
Indeed, when French President Emmanuel Macron last year proposed to prepare to send French or EU ground troops to Ukraine, the proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by the population of France and of Europe. A Eurasia Group poll found that 89 percent of Western Europeans were hostile to involvement in a war with Russia.
Doubling down on militarism and austerity, however, the NATO imperialist governments—abetted by political establishments that have all adapted themselves to the Ukraine war—are rapidly escalating the war towards a catastrophic nuclear conflict threatening the survival of humanity.
The great question today is the construction of an international movement in the working class, connecting mass opposition among rank-and-file workers against social austerity and police repression to opposition to imperialist war, and a revolutionary socialist perspective to take power out of the hands of the financial oligarchies that have placed the world on the brink of nuclear war.