MARCO RUBIO has laid down the battle lines, and it is time for every socialist and anti-racist on the planet to recognise the danger the United States poses to the world.

The Donald Trump regime is imperialism unmasked: shorn of the usual guff disguising military aggression as defensive or motivated by humanitarian concerns.

Rubio’s address to the Munich Security Conference spells out a mission of imperialist domination of the world equally clearly. If Harold Macmillan’s famous “winds of change” speech was seen as recognising the end of the colonial era, Rubio now demands that process of liberation be reversed.

It’s there in black and white (and his paean to the “great and noble civilisation” of Europe destined to master the world is racist). After the dressing down given European powers by JD Vance a year ago, Western politicians are lapping up Rubio’s praise: but that praise is a defence of imperialism and ethnic cleansing.

He harks back to the golden era when “for five centuries before the end of the second world war, the West had been expanding” to “settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.”

There follows a romanticised vision of bold European settlers colonising the “empty plains” of America. The dispossession and slaughter of the people who lived there at the time doesn’t feature.

The unabashed defence of imperialism is striking, but we should note when and why he says it came to an end too.

The Nazis once vowed to “erase the year 1789 from history,” holding that democratic revolution heralded the end of European greatness. For Rubio, the end of the second world war is not a victory for democracy: it is a defeat, the beginning of the end for those “vast empires” as the ideologies of racism that underpinned them reached their grisly peak in Nazi Germany and the logic of European, white supremacy over the whole world received its killer blow at the hands of the Red Army.

He’s honest about that: the “great Western empires entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swathes of the map…”

It’s true and it’s not as widely recognised as it should be. The anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century were inextricably linked with the international communist movement.

Lenin’s key insight that a worker-peasant alliance, symbolised to this day by the hammer and sickle, could break the “weakest link” in the imperialist chain and liberate the world had its international corollary in the alliance between the working class of the industrialised nations with the dispossessed masses of the Third World, Fanon’s “wretched of the Earth.”

Communists were at the heart of the liberation movements that freed the colonised peoples of Asia and Africa. The Soviet Union armed, trained and funded the anti-apartheid militants of the African National Congress, and their allies in the West were mainly communists too, as depicted in the landmark film London Recruits.

The connections between anti-colonialism and communism have been written out of history by liberals keen to discredit the latter; Rubio now reminds us of them because it is empire itself he wishes to resurrect.

The US has laid its cards on the table. The rise of the global South, powered above all by China and the Brics, is a process it is determined to reverse. The peoples of the world are to be brought to heel, made to knuckle under to what he calls “the greatest civilisation in human history.”

There is no room for “neither Washington nor Beijing” nonsense in this context. The United States is the enemy of freedom, sovereignty and people power worldwide. It wants to reverse the verdict of 1945.

It is public enemy number one, and its stranglehold on British political life must be broken.