When we published the Italian edition of this book in May 2025 (Bologna, DeriveApprodi), it was already clear that what we called the Pax Trumpiana was an integral part of the Third World War scenario. The fragments of peace achieved have been nothing but the continuation of war by other means, while both peace and war have become tools of domestic politics and ways to impose the needs of US capitalism. Since he took office, the “pacifist” Trump bombed Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Nigeria, and now has attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro. He did so to force a reversal of the policies of state control over strategic commodities—oil first and foremost—set in motion by Hugo Chávez twenty-five years ago, and thereby to curb Russian, and above all Chinese, influence in Latin America. The “special military operation” ordered by the Trump administration lays bare the essentially void nature of any appeal to international law. It belongs fully to the Third World War—understood as beginning with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—because it is driven by an arrogant and desperate attempt to reassert U.S. supremacy amid a transnational disorder that is increasingly ungovernable.
At the end of the book, we wrote that, against the inevitability of war, we need to build an organization that should turn our politics of peace into a practical guide for preparing the conditions of a transnational social strike against the war and its world. In autumn 2025 we saw dozens of Italian cities being stormed by workers, students, migrants, women, men and LGBTQ+ on strike against the genocide in Palestine and the logic of war, while hundreds of thousands of people were demonstrating around the world. We have seen students in Germany going on strike in 100 cities against the introduction of compulsory military service. We are now seeing millions of people in Iran risking their lives and refusing to entrust their liberation from the Islamic Republic to the bombs threatened by Trump. Now we can sense what a strike against war can actually mean more clearly than we did one year ago. This makes the call for a transnational organization that is up to the task of making this possibility a long-lasting force even more urgent.
Read online the original Introduction and the 2026 Preface to the English edition. Download and share the book in PDF.
