Theresa May, having committed Britain to self-imposed isolation as a result of Brexit, was eager to enlist the support of Trump as soon as he was elected, in search of any patron, and source of scraps from the table. May rushed to offer Trump a state visit to Britain. Although the state visit idea has subsequently been dropped, Trump is still scheduled to make an official visit to Britain next year, at the Tories request. Socialists should not call for a state ban on Trump's visit. Calling for such state bans takes the responsibility for fighting fascists and other opponents of the labour movement out of the hands of workers themselves, and puts it into the hands of our enemies in the capitalist state. That capitalist state will undoubtedly use such calls for state bans against us, to a far greater extent than they will be used against our enemies.
If the Tories want to continue with their offer to the vile Trump to come to Britain, let them do so. It will reflect on them accordingly. If Trump comes it should be the opportunity for the labour movement to mobilise on a scale never before seen, and an opportunity to mobilise a movement against everything that Trump, the Tories, and other reactionary nationalists stand for. Trump definitely has fascist tendencies, but his government is not a fascist government. On the contrary, the dominant elements within the US permanent state are hostile to Trump, a fact that Trump himself and his ideological backers like Bannon are all to well aware of. Nevertheless, we should treat a visit by Trump, in exactly the same way as we would have done a Tory government in the 1930's inviting Hitler or Mussolini or Franco to Britain on an official visit. We should deny Trump, as we would any of these other vile creatures any opportunity to spread their odious politics of hate. Everywhere he goes we should erect a cordon sanitaire around him, drowning out the ignorant bigotry he promotes, with the ideas of working-class international solidarity.
Of course, a progressive social-democratic government in Britain would never offer any kind of official visit to Trump. Yes, we should have relations with the United States, but a progressive social-democratic government in Britain should only be interested in offering such official visits to politicians in the United States of like mind. At the present time a progressive Labour government in Britain should offer an official visit to Bernie Sanders, for example, in the same way that we should offer such visits to the leaders of Syriza, Podemos, and so on. We do not seek to isolate the people of the US, or anywhere else, because the people in those countries are the forces we offer international solidarity with, to fight against our respective ruling classes.
In the 1930's, Trotsky warned against those who wanted to lend support for democratic imperialism against Hitler, because he said it would give Hitler a perfect opportunity to rally support around himself, against these external enemies. He wrote,
"Naturally, not a single German worker wants this. To throw off Hitler by revolution is one thing; to strangle Germany by an imperialist war is quite another. The howling of the “pacifist” jackals of democratic imperialism is therefore the best accompaniment to Hitler’s speeches. “You see,” he says to the German people, “even socialists and Communists of all enemy countries support their army and their diplomacy; if you will not rally around me, your leader, you are threatened with doom!” Stalin, the lackey of democratic imperialism, and all the lackeys of Stalin – Jouhaux, Toledano, and Company – are the best aides in deceiving, lulling, and intimidating the German workers." (Phrases and Reality, in Writings 1938-9, p21)
Trump would undoubtedly use any proposals to impose sanctions on the US itself, as an opportunity to rally the same kind of reactionary nationalist sentiment in the US. We should deny him that opportunity, even as Trump himself seeks to isolate the US, and to impose sanctions and trade limits on other countries. We should reach out to those in the US, such as the supporters of Sanders, to build a movement that holds hands across the ocean against the reactionary nationalists, and we should build the same movement across Europe, and offer the same kind of solidarity to the workers of Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia who are confronted by the same kind of reactionary nationalism, and the attendant xenophobic and fascist ideas.
The fact, is that it is not the supporters of Trump who are in the ascendant in the US, but the supporters of Sanders. That will increase even more as the lies of the Trump campaign and its connections with the reactionary nationalists in the Kremlin are increasingly exposed. The same is true in Britain, not only are the lies of the reactionary nationalists being exposed as the Brexit negotiations are exposed but the nexus of connections between those reactionary nationalists with Trump, with the Kremlin, and with other reactionary nationalists in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel are also being exposed.
The fact that these connections can sometimes appear contradictory is nothing new. The USSR had connections with Nazi Germany, for example, culminating in the Stalin-Hitler Pact; Zionists had connections with the German Nazis, and with the Italian Fascists. As Wikipedia Wikipedia sets out in relation to the Lehi Group, also known as the Stern Gang.
"Lehi initially sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, offering to fight alongside them against the British in return for the transfer of all Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe to Palestine. Believing that Nazi Germany was a lesser enemy of the Jews than Britain, Lehi twice attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis. During World War II, it declared that it would establish a Jewish state based upon "nationalist and totalitarian principles". After Stern's death in 1942, the new leadership of Lehi began to move it towards support for Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. In 1944, Lehi officially declared its support for National Bolshevism. It said that its National Bolshevism involved an amalgamation of left-wing and right-wing political elements – Stern said Lehi incorporated elements of both the left and the right – however this change was unpopular and Lehi began to lose support as a result."
The fact that the followers of such reactionary nationalist ideologies may seek to establish various alliances with others of the same ideology in other countries does not mean that they will not also seek to further their own nationalist strategic advantage. Trump, for example, spreads his virulent brand of Islamophobia under cover of hostility to Islamic Terrorism, and yet has deepened his support for the Saudi regime, which is the biggest financier, and armourer of jihadism across the globe, and the promotion of Wahabbist ideology across the globe. And, whilst Trump's supporters are virulent anti-semites, that does not prevent him from deepening his relations with the Zionist regime in Israel, or its growing connections with the Saudi regime. That alliance is built solely on the grounds of trying to counter the growing regional strategic power of Iran, a growing power that arose directly out of the US war against Iraq, which dislodged the regime of Saddam, and also flows from the Saudi US backed operations of jihadists in Syria to try to topple Assad.
Our task is to present an alternative both to these reactionary nationalist regimes and forces, and to the conservative social-democracy that has held sway in much of the developed economies over the last 30 years. It was the failure of that conservative social-democracy in terms of the Clinton dynasty in the US, of Blair in the UK, and of similar forces across the EU, which opened the door to the rise of reactionary nationalism in the shape of Trump, Farage, Bojo, Le Pen, Wilders and so on. As Trotsky put it,
"Fascism is a form of despair in the petit-bourgeois masses, who carry away with them over the precipice a part of the proletariat as well. Despair as is known, takes hold when all roads of salvation are cut off. The triple bankruptcy of democracy, Social Democracy and the Comintern was the prerequisite for fascism. All three have tied their fate to the fate of imperialism. All three bring nothing to the masses but despair and by this assure the triumph of fascism." (Phrases and Reality, in Writings 1938-9, p19)
We have seen the potential for that in Greece, where the imposition of austerity by conservative politicians in the EU, and ECB undermined the Syriza government, and created the potential for a collapse into fascism, and has already led to a rise of the right-wing forces that presided over the creation of the Greek crisis in the first place. In France, the failure of the Left to rally around a common progressive social-democratic programme, opened the door not only for Le Pen, but also for Macron, whose repetition of those same old, failed conservative politics opens the door even wider for Le Pen in four years time.
Now more than ever we need to reforge the idea of a Socialist International, not as some kind of talking shop where politicians gather every so often for a junket, but as an active international fighting organisation of the global working-class.
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