Germany and Israel’s role in Trump push to change world map
Demonstrators protest under the slogan "human chain against the AfD and its anti-human policies" demonstrate in the city center with a banner "Against Nazis," in Hamburg, Germany, Friday, Jan. 31. 2025. | Christian Charisius/dpa via AP

BERLIN – The year 2025 started off with many bangs. A new premier in France and soon in Canada, a new coalition in Austria, new presidents in Georgia and Moldova despite protest rallies, a re-elected president in Belarus (with no protest rallies), a resigned premier in Serbia and a deposed president in South Korea, amidst giant rallies.

And there is a limited, wobbly cease-fire in Gaza, bringing freedom to some female Thai and Israeli hostages after 15 months in captivity, and 300 male and female Palestinians, aged 16 to 67, after up to 39 years in prison, including extreme overcrowding, constant humiliation, and frequent torture. Accompanying the pictures of joy, however, were heart-wrenching videos of thousands returning to the wreckage of their homes in northern Gaza. The pictures recall (despite taboos on even thinking such connections) the Warsaw ghetto after its final courageous, futile struggle.

Most prominently marking the new year featured was the change of residents in the White House. Its new tenant immediately set out to change both his country and the world map. Although possibly unable to distinguish Siberia from Liberia, he personally renamed the Gulf of Mexico and vowed to change the map of Greenland, Panama, possibly even Canada.

He proved that he meant business by threatening to wreck the economy of Colombia if it continued to reject landings of U.S. planes full of shackled, handcuffed human beings being deported from homes in the USA.

Trump’s outlook and treatment have long traditions, like the massacre of 400-700 Pequot men, women and children by the Puritans in 1637 or the displacement of 60,000 members of the “Five Civilized Tribes” from 1830 to 1850 – the Trail of Tears. After such “manifest destiny” defeated Mexico in 1848 and reached the Pacific it looked southward and subdued the weak young countries of Central America, including Puerto Rico, Cuba and, further afield, Hawai’i, Guam, and the Philippines.

In 1917 a new barrier arose against unlimited further expansion. The basic aim of U.S. foreign policy, in addition to expanse of its economic, military and political influence, was to create a cordon sanitaire of small, right-wing states surrounding the newly-created Soviet Union and repel its world-wide encouragement for freedom from colonial rule.

Embraced tolerance

This policy embraced tolerance, even support, for fascist conquests in Ethiopia, Spain, Austria and Czechoslovakia. 1941 brought a forty-month break when it was found necessary to join in an alliance against Hitler.

Participants in a protest under the slogan “human chain against the AfD and its anti-human policies” demonstrate in the city center, in Hamburg, Germany, Jan. 31, 2025, the day after with the support of the AfD, the Bundestag approved a CDU/CSU motion to reject asylum seekers at Germany’s borders. | Christian Charisius/dpa via AP

Then, after the predominantly Red Army defeat of the Nazis’ attempted conquest, the main U.S. policy against the USSR was resumed. Any moves anywhere in a socialist direction were met by a carefully-designed, heavily financed attack, above all against a reversed defense cordon, protecting the USSR in Eastern Europe.

By 1993 this counter cordon was broken, the Soviet-led, socialist challenge reduced to a few remnants. But this triumph was not sufficient.

U.S. billionaires sought basic control of the vast Russian territory, such as undertaken and often achieved from Chile and Congo to Kosovo. They were succeeding with Yeltsin, a drunken marionette, but were halted by Vladimir Putin, whose rise to power saved the Russian economy in the last minute and aimed at regaining lost first-class status in the world.

Against this no effort was spared to revive the old cordon sanitaire and then, under the aegis of NATO, to advance, to surround and suffocate what had become one of two major barriers to world hegemony. The next goals were Georgia, and even more the Ukraine.

A flock of heavily-financed NGOs spent five billion dollars to organize a putsch there, ousting a corrupt yet democratically-elected government, open to Russia and the West, and installing one headed by a man who led enthusiastic cheering in the Canadian Parliament for a former volunteer in Nazi killer units. The units Zelensky cheered murdered thousands of Jews, Russians, Poles, pro-Soviet Ukrainians and, indirectly, U.S. and Canadian soldiers fighting Nazis in World War II. Support for such Bandera-worshippers (the fascist Ukrainian leader allied with the Nazis in World War II) could only mean trouble!

As early as 2008 William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and until now CIA boss, warned in a secret memo exposed by Assange’s Wikileaks:

“Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.“

And so it happened – necessarily or criminally, as you judge – but quite predictably, for the Ukraine war was clearly provoked by people who ignored Burns’ warning and alternative peaceful approaches. And Putin’s attack, however one may condemn it, was aimed at defending Russia from strangulation, a refusal to accept Yeltsin-style subjugation and degradation to domestic poverty and third-grade world status.

The refusal to accept this included refusal to accept it by many possible means. They included things like engineered uprising in Maidan Square, the splintering of national groups like that organized against Yugoslavia, or the military clashes unleashed by some provocation including the false mining of the “Maine” in Cuba or the falsified Saigon Bay attack.

Those provocations were followed by devastation from the skies as in Vietnam, Laos,  Cambodia, Iraq, Libya, Serbia and Syria. Any of these may have seemed possible to Putin, including the threat of a repeat of June 1941 when the Wehrmacht marched in and destroyed so much of the USSR.

A fuller world picture

But a full world picture must also turn to two junior partners of the U.S., though occasional rivals, in U.S.-billionaire endeavors. One is Israel, a very small country with very ambitious rulers. In 1938 its leader David Ben Gurion defined its direction:

“Let us not ignore the truth … politically we are the aggressors and (the Arabs) defend themselves… The country is theirs because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away their country from them. … Behind their terrorism is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice.” (“Zionism and the Palestinians“, Simha Flapan, p. 141)

But in 1948 Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, wrote in his diary:

“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria…We will …eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.” (Michael Bar Zohar, “Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet”, p. 157).

Israel’s leading Likud Party, founded in 1977 by Menachem Begin, a man described by the British government as the “leader of the notorious terrorist organization” Irgun – notorious for its bomb killings. He became prime minister with the policy: “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

The present boss, Benjamin Netanyahu, maintains this same goal: “Everyone knows that I am the one who for decades blocked the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger our existence.” After October 7 2023 he repeated: “No matter what, Israel will maintain full security control over all territory west of the Jordan River,” meaning both Gaza and the West Bank. And then maybe more.

Israel’s rulers carried out their expansion policy as partners of U.S. leaders, who saw this small country with its powerful army, including many atomic warheads hidden among the dunes, as a key ally in the Middle East. Regardless of who resided in the White House, it supplied Israel annually with billions in aid, mostly weaponry.

This was a two-edged sword; Israeli influence, manifested played an important role in U.S. politics, even determining elections by wrecking the careers of anyone opposing weapons for Israel. Netanyahu occasionally defied this generous patron, even humiliating presidents, as with his speech to Congress in 2015 despite Obama’s cold shoulder or provocative OKs on West Bank settlements despite mild disapproval from Washington.

Or occasional wobbly red lines soon ignored. Regardless, the ties remain tight, their goals are not contradictory, and 2000 lb. “Made in USA” bombs, with a 365-meter lethal fragmentation radius, can still flatten several apartment buildings with all who dwell in them. Over 50,000 Palestinians have died since October 7.

*Germany is the other main junior partner in Washington-Wall -Street-Pentagon expansion, although here, too, there are contradictions.

After its defeat in 1945, Germany lost hopes of achieving first place and has no thoughts of geographic expansion. But in economic power Germany rates as third strongest in the world. Here, too, a brief look backward is edifying. On July 21, 1945 a Senate subcommittee headed by Harley Kilgore (Dem, W. Va) reported the following:

“The evidence shows that German industry has been dominated by a number of combines and domestic monopolies …and the leaders of these combines, together with the Junkers and Nazis, were Germany’s principal war makers… it was the cartel and monopoly powers…who were among the earliest and most active supporters of the Nazis, whom they used to accelerate their plans for world conquest …these industrialists remain the principal custodians of Germany’s plans for renewed aggression.”

Men long dead

Those men are long dead, mostly unpunished, even honored to the end. But their giant enterprises, minus or plus a few, flourish again. Bayer, BASF, Thyssen-Krupp, Siemens, Daimler, Rheinmetall still predominate in Germany’s economy, domestic and foreign policy and have subsidiaries from Siemens in Goa to Mercedes in Tuscaloosa,  Volkswagen in Mlada Boleslav and Rheinmetall’s plans for Ukraine.

Until 1990 there were some limitations on their power. The East Bloc, above all the GDR, was a partial hindrance to eastern expansion, nor could they hit too hard at West German labor because of GDR comparisons.

Nor did they dare military excursions. But with East Germany colonized the barriers were gone, a “united Germany” could now move against working people at home and abroad and join the U.S. in military conflicts in Serbia, West Africa and Afghanistan, where involvement was feebly justified by Defense Minister Peter Struck: “Our security is being defended not only, but also, in the Hindu Kush mountains.”

After two recessions, a COVID epidemy and three years with a coalition led by the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, children and seniors face increasing poverty, working people are hit by prohibitive prices for groceries, frightening rent increases, weakening medical and child care, public schools in disrepair, food pantries unable to supply lengthening lines, more and more bankruptcies, major retail chains closing down.

Even giants like Volkswagen are closing workshops and  struggling to meet foreign competition. Though still one of the most prosperous nations, it is sliding downhill fast, with domestic growth at a 0.3% level, or status quo. And status quo means losing out!

Nevertheless, billions for a military build-up were approved for a special fund announced by Olaf Scholz. Economics Minister Habeck wants to raise the huge 2% warfare budget to 3.5% (and Trump is pushing for 5% in Europe). Defense Minister Pistorius wants a reinstalment of the draft, also possibly for women, and calls for “war readiness,”  while joining in military and naval maneuvers all around Russia and sending  troops to permanent stations in Lithuania where Germans  once fought Russians.

In December the government,  abysmally low in popularity, fell apart, with the right-wing Free Democrats calling for tax cuts for the wealthy but cuts for assistance to the poor, provoking a split. Scholz felt forced to call for a no-confidence vote, knowing he would lose it and thus requiring quick new elections on February 23rd instead of the regular planned ones in September.

The Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian partner (CSU) – together the “Union” – get about 30% in the polls, well ahead and sure to win. The next chancellor seems almost certain; the stiff Friedrich Merz, once a finance lobbyist, from 2016 to 2020 board chairman of the German branch of the world-wide asset manager Blackrock, and a vigorous advocate of militarization. His policies are very close to those of Trump, except for the threats to increase painful tariffs on German imports.

But 30% does not bring in enough deputies to reach a majority. A partner must be found.  The Free Democrats (FDP), who provoked the cabinet collapse, would love to be chosen. But the polls show them slithering under the necessary 5% level. They may find themselves not only out of any Cabinet seats, but out in the winter cold, left entirely out of the Bundestag. They are of no use.

The Greens, though still rejected by the Bavarian Christians as dangerous radical climate-worriers and “woke” radicals, have long since given up earlier radical roles and are the loudest cheerleaders for anti-Russian belligerence, with Foreign Minister Baerbock as a conductor.

They want weapons reaching to ever greater heights – and at ever more sites: missile sites. Even their main selling point, saving the environment, now has holes like Swiss cheese. While they were always more than comfy with their Washington mentors, they may now have trouble snuggling up to Donald Trump.

Likely junior partner

The most likely junior partners for the Christian “Union” are the Social Democrats (SPD), once about equal in popularity. But their repeated pre-election promises to their traditional, century-old voting core, the working class, were all too often diluted or forgotten afterwards, and they are down to 15% – just barely enough to swallow pride and be the Union’s junior partner.

They are a divided party, with Olaf Scholz reluctant about total support for Zelensky’s Ukraine, especially about sending Taurus missiles, which could hit Moscow and mean major war. But with Boris Pistorius gung ho-eager to stir up war fever and build war power, I think that if the SPD does become junior partner to the Christians under Merz, it is likely that Pistorius will get the vice-chancellor job – and Scholz his walking papers.

Second from the top in the polls with 21% is the quasi-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose main theme is racist, anti-foreigner hatred-mongering. It has built on dissatisfaction and disillusionment, especially in East Germany, standing for protest against the old parties, which it accuses of betraying Germany and good Germans by spoiling refugees and immigrants and bowing to a hitherto “all-too liberal USA.”

But while opposing  aid to Ukraine and demanding an end to the war there, blaming it on American economic rivalry with inexpensive Russian oil and gas imports, it is purely nationalist and pro-capitalist, wants a draft and military build-up, lower taxes for the wealthy, no aid to those who struggle to get by, and a return to good old traditions – opposing homosexual marriage (“We need more German kids”) although its charismatic woman candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, has a foreign-born wife.

But despite minimizing or almost denying Nazi guilt it avidly supports the Netanyahu crowd – because they are anti-Muslim! A friendly exchange of views – similar views – between Weidel and Elon Musk may improve AfD’s position in the election, though Musk is hardly admired in Germany, despite his giant new Tesla plant near Berlin.

Since the AfD founding in 2013, and due in part to all-too fascistic utterances by some leaders, any collaboration, accord or coalition with it was deemed totally taboo for all other parties. Many are even demanding it be forbidden.

All the same, in September elections in three East German states, the AfD barely missed first place in Saxony and Brandenburg and won it in Thuringia, where all other parties, even the Wagenknecht BSW and the LINKE had to join in preventing an AfD state government and governor. But gradually that taboo, called a “fire wall,” despite countless big, well-organized rallies, is crumbling and disappearing in some village and town councils – and sometimes higher.

Last week an immigrant from Saudi Arabia, violently anti-Islamist and clearly psychotic, ran amok in a park in Bavarian Aschaffenburg and killed a kindergarten child (of Moroccan origin) and a man who was trying to protect the children.

The killer was supposed to be deported long ago. While there are hundreds of murders every year in Germany, this very tragic one was just what the media wanted; a huge wave of anti-immigrant hate propaganda swept the country, and the rightist Christian Union, Free Democrats and the AfD swooped in to use it to win votes in the approaching election.

This week Union boss Herz introduced a resolution in the Bundestag, demanding a tight control of all German borders, locking up rejected asylum seekers until they are flown away, and tightening all rules for non-citizens. Very much like Trump!

This “recommendation” was too brutal for the Greens and Social Democrats who, with the LINKE, dared to vote against it, despite all the hysteria. But the AfD approved it, with Merz saying the Union would accept “Yes” votes from anyone, even a taboo party.

It won by a 3-vote margin and the AfD triumphed, calling this a major breech in that fire wall and overcoming its pariah status. But big crowds, both major churches and many Christian Democrats even the retired Angela Merkel and Berlin Mayor Wegner, criticized Merz.

Second vote went better

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz with Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. German support for armaments for Ukraine has been strongly opposed by the pear movement there. Scholz’s Social Democratic Party is polling at only 15 percent in the leadup to elections in Germany on February 23. | Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

A second vote two days later, this time for a legally binding law, was defeated, with too many party deserters voting Nein or abstaining, making any future coalition suddenly less certain in what could mark dramatic changes.

Where were the leftists amidst all this clamor? The LINKE, desperately trying to reach the 5% level and stay in the Bundestag, now teeters between 4% and 5%. Even with less, it could get its proportion of seats if at least three deputies win in home districts; it is concentrating on Thuringia’s ex-Governor Ramelow, its best-known co-founder Gregor Gysi in Berlin, and caucus chairman Dietmar Bartsch from Rostock, calling them its “Three Silverlocks”. Four others also have chances, all in East German areas.

Despite media furor they continue to reject any and all anti-immigrant statements. For the first time they are knocking on doors on a large scale, asking voters about their needs, wishes and hopes.

A few main Netanyahu fans have left the party, but aside from demands to stop any and all weapons shipments, demand ceasefires and negotiations and reject US missile sites, the pro-Israel fans and quasi-NATO apologists are still stronger, if no longer so loudly and aggressively, and the inner-party conflict, though interrupted for the election, remains crucial, with its outcome uncertain.

What about the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), once the hope of Marxists and all those who wanted a change, not only in labor laws, child care and pensions but in the whole damned system? That split from a conformist, academic, genderism-stressing and fading LINKE by some of the party’s leading lights saw the new alliance surging amazingly in voter approval, and so well in East German Brandenburg  and Thuringia that its third highest position meant that it was needed for government coalitions with the SPD or even the Union so as to bar the vote-strong AfD.

But the role of the BSW as a party of protest was weakened when it made compromises so as to join the two state governments. And while the BSW continues to demand an end to the Ukraine war and send no armaments to Kyiv – or Israel – it also continues its basically anti-immigrant position, even going so far as to abstain in the Bundestag vote on Merz’s brutal anti-immigrant resolution, when its ten votes would have defeated it and then, on the proposed law, to vote astonishingly “Ja” – together with the AfD and most of the Union and FDP!

And Sahra Wagenknecht’s policy of accepting only a few members, and then only after top level vetting, has resulted in a near total lack of enthusiasts to knock on doors, put up posters, organize and attend rallies. In Germany’s biggest state, Bavaria, the BSW has only 30 members! But happily, Wagenknecht announced that her name will soon be dropped from the Alliance title.

In the polls the BSW has dropped to a low see-sawing between 4% and 7% while the LINKE, between  4% and 5%, might just surprisingly overtake it. But in this unhappy race both left parties face total election defeat and resultant political collapse, and this at a time when a strong leftist force is so vitally needed in Germany, in Europe and the world!

The danger of a major, even an atomic war, is accelerating alarmingly, the offensive led by the titans of oil and gas, the armament, technical and now AI networks is increasingly aggressive, led primarily by US billionaires and enterprises, but intertwined with its two major partners, Germany and Israel, and with atomic powers France and Britain not too far behind.

Their offensive does face new obstacles or rivals, above all the growing BRICS group. Not that its members are ideal heroes; aside from the Ukraine war, Russia has many greedy oligarchs, China a long list of billionaires, not to speak of the rulers of India, Iran, or Egypt.

But in opposition to total world control dominated by the U.S. and symbolized by the likes of Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg and Koch, a multipolarity system in the world based on equality might be a partial response to the U.S. behemoth which is still worldwide the strongest, militarily, economically and, at least until the recent inauguration, politically as well.

Desperately needed for now and the future is a formation and consolidation of genuinely left-wing socialist forces, above all in the USA, Palestine-Israel and in Germany. Here and there a few good signs of resistance are also visible – may they flourish and blossom in 2025.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Victor Grossman
Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman is a journalist from the U.S. now living in Berlin. He fled his U.S. Army post in the 1950s in danger of reprisals for his left-wing activities at Harvard and in Buffalo, New York. He landed in the former German Democratic Republic (Socialist East Germany), studied journalism, founded a Paul Robeson Archive, and became a freelance journalist and author. His latest book,  A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee, is about his life in the German Democratic Republic from 1949 – 1990, the tremendous improvements for the people under socialism, the reasons for the fall of socialism, and the importance of today's struggles.

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