The General Task in the Crisis in the World Order

1. Internationalism
2. No. 83, January 2026
3. Pages 1, 4 and 5

The Trump Doctrine and the Unknowns of Imperialist Europeanism

It is said that the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) – the document that formalises the Trump Doctrine in foreign policy – marks a break with 80 years of transatlantic relations following the Second World War. Moreover, in our Marxist analysis, for more than twenty years we have been writing about a new strategic phase; for almost a decade, about the crisis in the world order; for a couple of years, about the wars of the crisis in the world order, and since the beginning of Donald Trump’s new term, about an Atlantic crisis. That this crisis is now at a turning point is a fact; the extent and permanence of its strategic consequences in the future remain open questions.

Whether Trump’s NSS is conceptually up to the task of American imperialism is debatable. This is where the unknowns lie: in the relative decline of the United States and the Atlantic powers vis-à-vis China; the convulsions of this decline but also the counter-tendencies asserted by Trump; the disproportion between the combination of military strength and strategic weight in global connections on the one hand, and on the other, the manifest weakness on the debt front; the reduction of the manufacturing base for the war industry; and the systemic risks of the AI bubble.

In assessing a historical turning point, we require recourse to theory, to the best sources of the ruling class, and specifically to the course of history, not as a mould of previous experiences but as a reflection on analogies and changes.

Recently, in the book Chiesa multipolare nella crisi dell’ordine (Multipolar Church in the crisis in the world order), we analysed the Catholic organisation as the only force of the ruling class rooted on a global level – the Catholic international, according to Andrea Riccardi’s formula. As often happens, it is political combat that pushes political forces and lines to come out into the open, and even allows Marxism to make theoretical and political acquisitions that remain as permanent achievements.

In our analysis, we considered two aspects of the Vatican’s struggle in the crisis in the world order. First, in Andrea Riccardi’s book La Guerra del silenzio (The war of silence), we discerned, beneath the investigation into Pius XII, a broader inquiry into the Vatican and the war: almost a reordering of archival materials, documenting the Vatican’s strategy from 1914-1945, in order to provide tools and concepts with which to address the crisis in the world order and its wars. Second, we found confirmation of this in the line pursued by Pope Jorge Bergoglio and Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, which led to the historic agreement with Beijing on the appointment of bishops and the reunification of the official patriotic church with the illegal church loyal to Rome. In advocating the agreement, Rome staked a claim to the national role played by the Catholic organisation in the 1914-18 war, offering it as a model and guarantee to Beijing. In the book on the multipolar Church, we documented this thanks to Giovanni Sale SJ’s essay in La Civiltà Cattolica, which focused on the interventionist mobilisation of bishops to counteract the rout at Caporetto, and with our estimate of approximately 10,000 military chaplains engaged on opposing sides from 1914 onwards, as well as approximately 80,000 priests enlisted out of a European clergy of roughly 200,000.

It is not that studies and books on the shift from Catholic neutrality to interventionism did not already exist. However, it is one thing to have a scholarly historical reconstruction and quite another to see that experience studied, claimed, and contested by the Church itself in a political battle, in the new strategic framework that brings war back to the centre of the world contention – even if, for now, these are only the small wars of the crisis in the world order, and not yet the great war marking its breakdown.

Let us take as a reference three moments of internal confrontation within the Catholic international, as they help to shed light on at least the next decade of the political cycle of the crisis in the world order.

Thus, the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI), chaired by Matteo Zuppi, returned to the issue of chaplains in a pastoral note reflecting on the crisis in the international order, marked by a new horrific centrality of war. In the concluding part, there is a proposal to revise the statute of military chaplains:

We look with gratitude at the work of military chaplains who, in many contexts, have borne witness to the Gospel of peace even in very difficult conditions. However, we also wonder whether we should not consider different forms of presence in such contexts, less directly linked to membership of the military structure: these would allow greater freedom in proclaiming peace, especially in critical contexts.

The Comboni missionary Giulio Albanese, with the MISNA agency, was a pioneer of missionary communication; he assisted Bergoglio in his pastoral visit to Africa in 2023 and was appointed one of the advisers to the Vatican Secretariat of State. In an interview with Turin-based newspaper La Stampa, he made a sharp critique of the subjectivist trend that has seen newspapers, television, and social media taken hostage by Trump’s show diplomacy. On Ukraine, Trump’s rhetoric is an illusion, where he claims to simplify a structurally complex conflict by attributing it to the will of a single strong decision-maker. Rather than overestimating himself, it is a case of systemic underestimation of the forces at play:

The Ukrainian conflict cannot be reduced to a bilateral crisis that can be negotiated with a phone call or an ad personam summit. It is a war that expresses a deep geopolitical rift: the redefinition of the post-Cold War European security order, Russia’s perception of strategic encirclement, NATO’s enlargement and its political-military role, and the symbolic stakes of Ukraine’s sovereignty and identity.

The US’s room for manoeuvre is subject to constraints from alliances, bureaucratic apparatus, military-industrial interests, and the expectations of EU allies. For Trump, foreign policy is an extension of trade negotiations, i.e., maximum pressure, personalisation of the relationship with the adversary, and the belief that power asymmetry can automatically translate into concessions. However, this does not work in the face of conflicts based on identity and security issues, where the cost of compromise is perceived as existential. In this sense, the US does not control the dynamics of the conflict and does not determine the choices of Kyiv and the Kremlin. The conclusion is almost surprising for the way in which it challenges the subjectivist conception of political will:

The voluntaristic view of geopolitics is fading: the idea that political will and charisma can bend structures, interests, and historical trajectories. The international system is transitioning towards a more multipolar and conflictual order. Promises of rapid pacification work on a symbolic and internal level, but they clash with the strategic density of real conflicts.

We believe that the limits of show diplomacy will emerge whatever the outcome of the negotiations on the war in Ukraine. The faltering of eternal peace in the war in Gaza is there to prove it.

In the context of the bloody offensive of Russian imperialism, a third source of pluralistic dialectics within the Catholic international comes from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishops – the Uniates who, while preserving the Orthodox Eastern rite, recognise the Petrine primacy and therefore the authority of the Pope over the universal Church. A key actor in the war mobilisation, the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine is moving in the opposite direction to the Italian Church. On July 1^st, 2022, a law came into force formally integrating military chaplains into the Ukrainian army. There are 738 in total, including Orthodox priests, Greek Catholic priests, Protestant pastors, rabbis, and imams. According to the official religious information agency RISU, the commands of the Atlantic Alliance – the same NATO which barks at the borders of Russia, according to Bergoglio’s well-known denunciation – organised training courses in which chaplains serving in the West shared their experience with their Ukrainian counterparts. Ukrainian chaplaincy leaders reciprocated by participating as speakers in similar courses in Assisi and at the conference organised by the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences in February 2025. Among the field experiences offered for reflection was a waterproof religious handbook suitable for use in the trenches. We bring God into the darkness of war was the contribution, and this applies to the EU as an experiment in peace, as called for in the pastoral letter of the CEI.

The fact is that the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine is consubstantial with Ukrainian nationalism in its component rooted in Galicia and Lviv, a nationalism historically so hostile to Poland and Russia, that it led to Stepan Bandera’s collaboration with the Third Reich. In the events that culminated in the dissolution of the USSR between 1990 and 1991, the Rukh (People’s Movement of Ukraine) had the active support of the Greek Catholic Eastern-rite priests who had just emerged from illegality, while the demands for Ukrainian independence were also fuelled by mistrust of Kyiv, to the point of considering the possibility of a secession of Galicia alone from the USSR.

The Church in Lviv claims to have sent chaplains to the Maidan uprising in 2014, which Moscow considered a coup d’état and Ukrainian nationalism considered the revolution of dignity; the same applies to the sending of volunteers from Galicia to the front after February 2022. Almost explicit invitations to enlist are coming from the network of dioceses established among Ukrainian communities abroad. Thus, Archbishop Borys Gudziak, metropolitan bishop of Philadelphia for Ukrainians in America – the SIR agency reports – evoking the Azovstal fighters in Mariupol, urged an audience of young graduates not to be afraid: There are things worth living for, there are those worth dying for, he declared, and this is your graduation.

The national-Catholic system in western Ukraine is similar to that of other episcopates in the region, such as the Polish Church, and it is not certain that it will be easy for the Vatican to persuade Lviv to accept a compromise peace. Volodymyr Zelensky’s repeated meetings with Leo XIV probably have this subtext. However, the criticism mentioned above, levelled by the Comboni missionary at the illusions of the primacy of political will, is also well-founded here: perhaps not even the Petrine primacy will be able to bend the structures, interests, and historical trajectories of Ukrainian nationalism. This serves as a counterpoint to the pastoral letter of the Italian bishops, which deplores the way religion is often exploited by nationalism, or to the similar denunciation by Giulio Albanese himself.

It is not a question of Catholic hypocrisy – or not only that. The point is that, in the real roots of the universal Church, there cannot be the dioceses of Matteo Zuppi without the eparchies of Sviatoslav Shevchuk. This is anchored in their strategic and theological reflection, as well as in their ecclesiological reflection – the latter being the Church’s party theory. In war, they have experimented with and offered the autonomy of local episcopates in the service of the nation in a dialectic with the Vatican centre, where the pontiff as common father can reserve for himself the painful denunciation of useless slaughter. This allows for the recovery of unity once the war is over, and in this sense, the Catholic international offers itself to the ruling class as an experienced organisation, accompanying the intertwining of unity and scission of unitary imperialism.

This premise was necessary in order to understand how the study of the dialectic of the Catholic international, an institution very functional for the ruling class, can be useful in defining the tasks of communist internationalism today which is the unyielding adversary of that class. Karl Kautsky was a keen connoisseur of the history of Christianity; who knows if the Red Pope, as he was nicknamed, was also inspired by the history of the Church in his belief that there was no alternative for socialist parties but to side with their bourgeoisies, waiting for the years of war to pass as a painful interlude. The Bolsheviks rejected this abdication and imposed a revolutionary peace with the October Revolution. Lenin confronted Kautsky and the failure of the Second International; today, the only political force of the world’s ruling class that deals with issues of peace and war with comparable influence, albeit caught within the same logic of power relations among bourgeoisies locked in struggle with one another, is the Catholic Church. Let us retain three observations.

First, what the Italian bishops and the Ukrainian bishops have in common, although in opposite directions, is their relationship with the powers of the State. The CEI is considering revising the position of chaplains in the military structure in order to reserve freedom of action especially in critical contexts. The Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine not only participated in military incorporation in accordance with the 2022 law but is also an active supporter of the war effort in line with its national-Catholic roots. On closer inspection, even the new balance in China between legal and illegal organisations, with the unification of the patriotic church and the church loyal to Rome, has been shaped by the relationship between the powers of the State, those of the Vatican and those of the People’s Republic of China. Who knows whether the still-secret part of the agreement does not provide, in future critical contexts, for the deployment of a number of chaplains alongside the network of party political commissars in the PLA, the Chinese army.

Secondly, what distinguishes the two episcopates is their different positioning – in space as much as in time – relative to the war front. The CEI, like the other European Episcopal Conferences, operates in a Europe that is behind the front lines in the war in Ukraine and in the conflicts in the Middle East, while the Ukrainian Church is on the front lines. This explains why Italian bishops can seek a degree of distinction from military incorporation, something that is no longer possible for Ukrainian bishops. However, their positioning is also different in time: while Europe is today in the rear lines of the small wars of the crisis in the world order, tomorrow it may find itself directly involved in a conflict – not just by proxy, as it is now, on the Ukrainian borderlands. It is doubtful that in the critical contexts alluded to in the CEI’s pastoral note, the bishops would be able to maintain their degree of detachment. The historical experience of 1914-18 tells us otherwise: in the end, all the national churches found themselves enlisted in the Union Sacrée of imperialist massacre, and in 1917, in Italy, neutralist positions definitively shifted to interventionism, coinciding with the defeat at Caporetto and the October revolutionary assault in Russia which raised the spectre of atheistic communism.

Thirdly, we should point out that the pastoral note itself is of decisive importance in the way it highlights the centrality of war as the distinctive feature of the new political cycle compared to recent decades, both in international and domestic relations.

It is therefore a matter of examining how the issues of the State, the spaces and times of conflicts, and the centrality of war present themselves for revolutionary politics, defining specific tasks that accompany the general task of establishing a party based on the Bolshevik model in the European metropolis – a task which remains central and, if anything, becomes even more urgent in the new conditions of the crisis in the world order.

Lenin wrote the essay The Collapse of the Second International in May-June 1915 and the pamphlet Socialism and War in July-August. The context was the political battle ahead of the Zimmerwald Conference to be held on September 5^th-8^th, 1915; the aim was to assert the positions of revolutionary defeatism and the transformation of war into revolution, laying the foundations for a Third International and countering the centrist positions of those who were reluctant to make a definitive break with the parties that had betrayed internationalism and enlisted in the Union Sacrée with their own bourgeoisies.

Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland, wrote about the transition to a new form of organisation and struggle, but the reference is to the days of the revolutionary assault that are worth twenty years of peaceful progress, years in which there is no revolutionary situation and the conditions that cause unrest among the masses or heighten their activities do not exist.

Today, we are not in those days that are the transformation of war into revolution, nor are we in Zimmerwald, which nevertheless brought together narrow minority currents. In Socialism and War, which was to be distributed to the delegates at the conference, the ambivalence of the situation is still evident: the war has begun but there is still no mobilisation of the masses. Lenin wrote, of course, about new forms of organisation, but he also urged intervention in pacifist demonstrations:

The temper of the masses in favour of peace often expresses the beginning of protest, anger, and a realisation of the reactionary nature of the war. It is the duty of all Social-Democrats [communists] to utilise that temper. They will take a most ardent part in any movement and in any demonstration motivated by that sentiment, but they will not deceive the people with admitting the idea that a peace without annexations, without oppression of nations, without plunder, and without the embryo of new wars among the present governments and ruling classes, is possible in the absence of a revolutionary movement.

Today, we repeat, we are not in the days but in the years of the wars of the crisis in the world order, how many remains to be seen. The internationalist political battle, with its theoretical, political, and organisational implications, is the specific task that goes hand in hand with the general task, in a phase that is no longer the strategic lull of the liberal order, nor yet the breakdown of the order of imperialist war, but is precisely the crisis in the world order with its chain of conflicts and its cycle of rearmament.

It remains to reflect on how much the turning point in the Atlantic crisis signalled by Trump’s NSS will affect the European political cycle, and also on the connotations of that internationalist battle, which, as a struggle against our enemy at home, is first and foremost a struggle against European imperialism. The analysis of the National Security Strategy contains as many as a dozen fragments from the doctrines expressed over the decades by American imperialism; therefore, it cannot be said that the NSS expresses positions that are entirely eccentric with respect to those orientations. The section on the Western Hemisphere and the enunciation of a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine can be linked to Henry Kissinger’s theses, albeit reinterpreted in a more assertive tone. Many measures appear to be aimed at countering China’s penetration into Latin America, but they undoubtedly also refer to the EU and the EU-Mercosur treaty. For Kissinger, in Does America Need a Foreign Policy? [2001], if the EU-Mercosur agreement and the enlargement of Mercosur itself had been pursued in agreement with the United States, the US would have allowed them within the framework of a large transatlantic free trade area. Otherwise, it would have prevented them.

The thesis that America can no longer sustain the global order on its own, with the image of Atlas no longer wanting to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, can be traced back to the Nixon Doctrine or Guam Doctrine of 1969. The idea that the United States should pursue a strategic stability with Russia, under which Europe would be positioned, is also reminiscent of Kissinger’s conceptual framework. In this context, he reiterated the desire to prevent an exclusive rapprochement between the EU and Russia and declared the search for the classic position of advantage in the balance of power, in which the United States would be closer to both Europe and Russia than they were to each other. The assertion that American economic strength – $30 trillion, which could become $40 trillion in the 2030s – plus that of its allies, totalling $35 trillion, could confront China in the foreseeable future, recalls the hegemonic coalition theorised by Fred Bergsten in 2022, in the twenty-year perspective of a subsequent G2 between the united West and the Chinese dragon.

The thesis that the US will prevent an adversary power from dominating the Middle East and will guarantee freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, albeit with an external balancing action, without eternal wars, and through the economic attraction of the Abraham Accords, contains at least the guiding principle of the 1980 Carter Doctrine. The thesis that the United States will not allow any other power to strengthen itself to the point of threatening American interests, and that it reserves the right to prevent the global [...] domination of others, and in some cases even regional domination, can be traced back to the Bush Jr Doctrine of 2002 and his neoconservative advisers, as well as to Vice President Dick Cheney. Based on that conceptual framework, we analysed the 2003 war in Iraq as a war by choice and a war for time in order to prevent China’s rise in the Gulf.

The arguments that economic and technological strengthening is the priority, that it is the basis of strategic and military strength, and that globalism has hollowed out the industrial base and hurt the middle class, have been part of the Obama Doctrine of retrenchment since 2009, and of the Sullivan Doctrine or Biden Doctrine on a foreign policy for the middle class. The thesis that the US can manage a mutually beneficial relationship with China, despite the latter having almost reached parity with the United States, can be traced back to the convictions expressed by Kissinger in On China [2011], with the formula of a possible co-evolution between Washington and Beijing. In Trump’s NSS, this is accompanied by the confirmation of the strategy of denial that denies China control of the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait as outlined by Elbridge Colby, but similar to the arguments of Kurt Campbell, a former member of the Obama and Biden administrations.

The confirmation of strategic ambiguity concerning Taiwan, at least in words, is in line with a position that Washington has agreed with Beijing and pursued since the Shanghai Communiqué signed by Kissinger and Zhou Enlai in 1972.

Finally, the reluctance to recognise the EU as a semi-federal and confederal State, assimilating it instead to a mere multilateral organisation, is taken to the extreme in what has been described as a kind of political and identity war waged on Europe. Leaving aside the exaggerated tones of show diplomacy, this is in fact a common tool of American politics, as is the game of dividing and pitting individual national components against each other. Consider Kissinger’s convictions, in which there coexisted both the thesis that the EEC and later the EU lacked strategic substance, and the line discussed with Richard Nixon aimed at preventing its consolidation, as well as the intention to obstruct any autonomous strategic synthesis in Europe that would bypass American involvement. Without going back as far as the true partition of Yalta between the US and the USSR, consider Alan Greenspan’s scepticism about the birth of the euro in the late 1990s, George W. Bush and Cheney’s game of Old Europe and New Europe played in the 2003 Gulf War, and American support in 2014 for the Maidan uprising in Kyiv, which leveraged the aversion of Poland and the Baltic States to any convergence between the EU and Russia.

What is fundamentally changing, and what is causing the Atlantic crisis to spiral, is the interconnection, proportion, and scale of priorities of these fragments of the American strategic trajectory, which are sometimes contradictory due to the disorderly contribution of different political currents within the administration to the drafting of the NSS. The dominant key is the refocusing on the Western Hemisphere, already confirmed by military pressure against Venezuela. Russia and China are no longer considered systemic adversaries, as they were in the 2017 NSS of the first Trump administration. Above all, the European Union is denied legitimacy in the name of the priority of Nation-States, and this is argued with the thesis of the distortion of European society due to immigration. On the other hand, the end of the era of mass immigration is also proclaimed for the United States, denouncing the hostile intent to form electoral blocs capable of influencing American politics. Again, although without the tones of white supremacy that pervade Trump’s rhetoric, we recall that Kissinger had already alluded to the influence of immigrant communities on European politics. The issue has become a regular feature of the continental political cycle, even in judicial investigations, and this is ultimately an objective reflection of the Union’s role as the rear area of Middle Eastern conflicts.

However, the text of the NSS clearly states the intention to cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations. This is already evident in the support for Nigel Farage in the UK, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, while the overall rhetoric on Europe echoes the well-known speech of Vice President J.D. Vance at the Wehrkunde in Munich in February 2025. Here, we note, there is a first possible dividend for the Euro-solubility of the Italian-style sovereignism embodied by Giorgia Meloni, because throughout Europe – and even in Japan, by the new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi – that formula is being studied as a way to bring disoriented public opinion back to a basic strategic consensus.

Giampiero Massolo, former secretary general of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and most likely close to Meloni’s ear, takes the NSS seriously in the Corriere della Sera: the risk for Europe is existential because it is identitarian, and then also securitarian and economic. It is wise to keep the three areas separate, because the EU is too weak to treat them as a unified challenge. The defence of Europe must be addressed through collaboration between willing governments, recognising that, for the foreseeable future, the United States cannot be dispensed with. Therefore, pro-Atlanticism and pro-Europeanism are not in opposition: a necessity, if not a convenience that Rome would have understood before others. In the economic field, however, there is no possible reconciliation; Washington considers the EU a bloc to be dismantled. It will be a matter of simplifying European rules, but also being ready to defend ourselves with all possible means. For Italy, starting with the defence of Ukraine, the time will come to make choices: If the Atlantic widens, it would be complicated to remain without a European shore.

Bernard Guetta, an openly pro-European voice close to Emmanuel Macron, attempts to systematise for La Stampa the line of pragmatic federalism put forward by Mario Draghi, in order to circumvent the slow decision-making process of the 27-member Union and to bring the United Kingdom back into the European process. Political leadership will have to come from German, British, French, Italian, and Polish leaders, from a G5 organised by London, Paris, and Berlin. For Guetta, this is already happening; the time has come to say it and formalise it.

The path of a Franco-German-British E3 steering a possible G5 may foreshadow a European Security Council, but it must be assessed in its nature as a real process: a terrain in which forces confront one another, rather than a magic formula capable of cancelling out a contradictory movement that will always exist, in every configuration of Europe’s pluralistic superstructures, since that confrontation between forces is in the very nature of pluralistic centralisation. The test of the European Council on December 18^th is revealing: a pragmatic reading of the EU’s institutional treaty has effectively allowed for majority voting in foreign policy; enhanced cooperation has circumvented the opposition of Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic and launched a form of Eurobonds worth €90 billion in aid to Ukraine.

Friedrich Merz gave an ambiguous response to Trump’s NSS, which sounded like implicit pressure on the Union’s partners: the US needs allies, and if not Europe, it could be Germany. The European Council’s compromise, while acceptable to Berlin, seems to put the brakes on the ambitions of a German-led Europe. The ECB’s reservations about the confiscation of Russian assets worth €210 billion prevailed, confirming that the federal power of the Central Bank is difficult to circumvent. Bulgaria joins the euro federation, and the issue of accession is also back on the agenda in Sweden and Denmark.

The Italian initiative, in conjunction with Paris on Eurobonds and the temporary postponement of the EU-Mercosur agreement, has shown a dynamic that eludes the hierarchy of the E3 steering the G5; Rome is at least showing ambition for an active Europeanism that goes beyond the decades-long practice of passive Europeanism. This is not the first time; Matteo Renzi’s similar attempt ended in failure. However, our synthesis of a Euro-soluble sovereignism is based on the assessment that the attraction of the European force field remains decisive. Barring any mishaps along the way, even the opposition will have to fall in line behind Meloni in the multiple Union Sacrées of imperialist Europeanism, whether it be rearmament or missions in the turbulent Mediterranean.

The general task of establishing an organised force of European Leninism remains central; it is confirmed that the objective advantage of a continental labour market is complemented by that of a unified political space, which makes the large concentrations of young people in Europe more accessible to our organisational work. The internationalist battle against European imperialism has taken on new connotations of revolutionary opposition to rearmament and the wars of the crisis in the world order.

Lotta Comunista, December 2025