David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), was interviewed Wednesday, April 8, on TV5, a Turkish-language news channel based in Turkey. North was asked to address the trajectory of US imperialism under the Trump administration, the relationship between American and European imperialism, and the prospects for opposition to global colonialism.
The interview took place amid the US-Israeli war against Iran, launched on February 28, which has resulted in massive civilian casualties and widespread destruction of Iranian infrastructure. Speaking shortly after Trump announced a two-week “ceasefire” in military operations—during which he had openly threatened to destroy Iran “as a civilization”—North offered a searing assessment of the war and a call for the international working class to organize against it.
Asked how he interprets Trump’s actions given his campaign promises to end wars, North rejected any notion that Trump represented an anti-war tendency. He explained that US foreign policy is determined not by the rhetoric of individual politicians but by the global interests of the American ruling class, stating:
The agenda of the United States is not set by the promises of one or another politician, but by the global interests of the American ruling class. And whatever president is in office, whatever his rhetoric, the aims are fundamentally the same.
North characterized the war against Iran as “a fully criminal war which has resulted in devastating loss of life,” and stressed that the language Trump used in threatening Iran was historically unprecedented in its criminality: “What was said yesterday should not be forgotten today. A two-week pause does not mark the beginning of world peace. It’s only an interlude.” He warned that the ultimate aim of the United States is “to establish once again colonialist control over Iran and in fact over all of the Middle East,” and urged workers worldwide to use the pause to build their opposition to American imperialism.
On the question of tensions between the US and Europe, North described both factions as different wings of the same global imperialist system, noting: “The United States is only the most criminal and most powerful of the imperialist gangsters.” He argued that the central task is the organization of the working class internationally in a common struggle against all imperialist powers, and that workers and the oppressed throughout the world should understand that “neither faction is their friend, is their ally. All are, in fact, criminal regimes.”
When the interviewer raised the legacy of former Turkish Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan and the potential for Muslim societies to challenge global colonialism, North explained that the politics of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International are rooted not in religion or ethnicity but in class, and that the struggle against imperialism “can only be raised successfully to the extent that it unifies the working class of all countries, all ethnicities, all religions in a common class struggle.”
Pointing to the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza, North offered a sharp indictment of the failure of bourgeois nationalist and religious movements to mount any serious opposition to imperialism: “Despite the many decades of rhetoric of, for example, Arab unity or Muslim unity, they were abandoned. And no one came to their defense.” He argued that only an international movement of the working class, guided by a socialist program, can effectively challenge the imperialist powers and liberate the peoples of the former colonial countries from oppression.
North concluded with a direct and urgent appeal to the Turkish audience: “Please understand how dangerous the situation is. We all have seen now what the imperialist powers are prepared to do. They speak of annihilation of entire civilizations. They speak of genocide on a scale that even surpassed what Hitler attempted.”
The interview underscores the growing international audience for the WSWS’s anti-war perspective as the US-Iran conflict continues to escalate.