US President Donald Trump delivered a fascist rant Tuesday to the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly in which he proclaimed “America First” should be the world’s organizing principle, threatened war and aggression the world over, and lionized the criminal actions of his administration at home and abroad.

He attacked both America’s ostensible allies and states long in Washington’s military-strategic crosshairs in a meandering speech that lasted almost triple his allotted time.

Trump reveled in displaying his disdain and contempt for international law, making clear that Washington will accept no restraints on the ruthless assertion of its imperialist interests, whether through trade war, assassinations, regime-change operations or global war.

He cited as models for the world key elements in his ongoing drive to establish a presidential dictatorship, such as the occupation of Washington by National Guard troops and the assault on immigrants.

Trump blamed the UN and its “globalist” agenda for much, if not most, of humanity’s problems. He charged that the UN, through its limited programs to aid the refugees created by imperialist wars and oppression, is “funding an assault on Western countries,” effectively expounding from the UN rostrum the white supremacist Great Replacement theory.

“The UN,” he declared, “is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them.”

He excoriated America’s traditional European allies for not being aggressive enough in restricting immigration and expelling immigrants, and for seeking to limit greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, the “greatest con job” in history.

“Europe is in serious trouble. They have been invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody has ever seen before. … Both the immigration and suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe,” said Trump.

Trump blithely ignored the genocide of the Palestinians—appropriately enough given American imperialism’s role in arming Israel to the teeth and his own incitement of the Netanyahu regime to pursue the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza with his “Riviera of the Middle East” plan. Even as Israel starved and bombarded the people of Gaza and invaded Gaza City with the aim of leveling it, Trump railed about Hamas “atrocities.”

He boasted of the illegal war the US and Israel waged on Iran last June, during which the US first drew Tehran into a trap by pretending it wanted to pursue peace talks, then amplified the initial Israeli attacks with a massive assault on Iranian civil nuclear facilities. “Today,” gloated Trump, “most of Iran’s military commanders are no longer with us; they are dead.”

The US president also used his UN speech to continue Washington’s preparations to invade Venezuela, as part of its drive to push back against growing Chinese influence in South America. In recent weeks, US military forces have blown up three boats off the coast of Venezuela, killing at least 17 people, on the totally unsubstantiated claim they were trafficking drugs. But even if that were true, no government has the right to summarily execute people.

Yet Trump, flaunting his government’s recourse to criminal violence and pretending to be addressing anyone transporting drugs from Venezuela, declared before the General Assembly, “We will blow you out of existence.″

Trump, in his remarks before the UN and social media posts after a subsequent meeting with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, also escalated US threats against Russia. Not only did he blame Putin and Russia for the continuation of the US/NATO-instigated Ukraine war and threaten Moscow with far more aggressive economic sanctions, Trump declared, “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”

Media reports in the run-up to the UN General Assembly largely focused on the supposedly landmark recognition of a Palestinian state by a number of Western countries, including France, Britain, Canada and Australia.

This maneuver, vociferously opposed by Trump, was born of fear of the radicalizing impact the ongoing genocide is having in the working class and youth of the imperialist centers and the Middle East, and constitutes a desperate attempt on the part of the likes of France’s Macron, Britain’s Starmer and Canada’s Carney to cover up their deep and ongoing complicity.

It is entirely consistent with the European powers’ simultaneous ratcheting up of bellicose threats against Russia. These include vows to shoot down Russian warplanes should they “again” stray into NATO airspace, a claim Moscow denies.

During the first nine months of the second Trump presidency, two interlinked goals have driven establishment politics in Germany, France and Britain. First, disrupting Trump’s efforts to reach an accommodation with Moscow to end the Ukraine war over their heads and at their expense; and second, massively increasing military spending, so they can secure the military power to pursue their imperialist interests independently of, and if need be, in opposition to the United States.

Rearmament and war with Russia will require a massive assault on the working class, as presaged in the declaration last month by the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that “The welfare state as we know it today is no longer economically sustainable.”

They will also necessarily entail a turn to authoritarian methods of rule and the bringing of the far right into the corridors of power, for precisely the same reasons the US oligarchy has turned to Trump—The militarization of society and the elimination of what remains of the social rights of the working class to pay for war will encounter mass working class opposition. These processes are already far advanced, as exemplified by the ruling class’s promotion of the noxious anti-immigrant propaganda on which the far right feeds, and the smearing and repression of anti-genocide protesters by many of the same governments now posing as concerned about the national rights of the Palestinians.

Trump’s fascist rant before the UN stunned the assembled government leaders and senior diplomats. “Six years ago Trump’s UN audience laughed, this year they were silent,” announced a BBC headline.

This is not because Trump is all-powerful. On the contrary, he personifies the decline and depravity of US imperialism, world capitalism’s bulwark since World War II and still the center of world finance and the cockpit of global counterrevolution.

The reality is the United Nations is collapsing as the League of Nations did in the run-up to World War II and for the same fundamental reasons. Faced with a systemic crisis, the rival imperialist powers are seeking to violently repartition the world so as to secure control over critical resources, markets, production networks and strategic territories.

Led by US imperialism and the fascist gangster Trump, any pretense of legality is being dispensed with and the law of the jungle—might makes right—violently asserted. Trump himself mocked the UN for its impotence and irrelevance.

Within the system of capitalist inter-state relations and establishment politics, there is no means of opposing war and the rapid descent into a global conflagration. Putin and Xi head capitalist restorationist regimes that ruthlessly exploit the workers of Russia and China, and oscillate between reaching an accommodation with the imperialist powers at the expense of the masses and reactionary military threats and adventures.

As Leon Trotsky incisively explained, to oppose imperialist wars and capitalist barbarism, the working class must look not to the war map but to the map of the class struggle. The same processes that are driving the capitalist powers to war are fueling social revolution. The critical task is to infuse the growing struggles against war, austerity, dictatorship and fascism with a socialist perspective and arm them with a revolutionary leadership. That is the task to which the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties are dedicated.