US President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on February 24, 2026. AFP
Twelve days after United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a fascist, imperialist policy declaration at the Munich Security Summit, President Donald Trump unveiled what could easily be dismissed as an ego-driven distaste of the union.
Bureaucrats and constitutional scholars may refer to Trump’s speech before Congress on Tuesday as the State of the Union address, but to critical US watchers it was the state of the immoral union—or even, as some argue, a paedo union.
Although 90 percent of the speech focused on the economy, tariffs, migration, border security, and domestic policy—clearly designed to prepare the Republican Party for the midterm elections nine months away—Trump’s address, delivered as his popularity plummeted to an all-time low of 36 percent, only underscored the fascist, racist, and xenophobic nature of a union striving for global dominance and energy supremacy through force.
Rubio’s speech went further. Referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the eventual demise of the Cold War, Rubio disparagingly invoked Francis Fukuyama’s famous “end of history” theory—a post-Cold War world order in which every nation would be a liberal democracy, ties of trade and commerce would replace nationhood, a rules-based global order would supersede national interest, and humanity would live without borders as global citizens.
Deriding and dismissing such an idealistic peace-based vision, Rubio urged the European leaders he addressed not to follow such “foolish” ideas but instead to work for the restoration of Western civilisation’s supremacy. In pursuit of this goal, morality is abandoned, force becomes a tool, migrants are cast as enemies, climate concerns are dismissed as a hoax, and the West is upheld as the only source of enlightenment. Hubris has made Rubio forget his own migrant roots in Cuba. He was also oblivious to how European invaders committed genocide to seize Native American lands—sometimes even distributing smallpox-infected blankets under the guise of charity to innocent, nature-loving, credulous natives.
The speeches of Trump and Rubio also confirm that the era of imperialism is here to stay. Combined, they amount to a white paper for a world without the United Nations. The process has already begun; the UN remains sidelined. In its stead, Trump’s so-called Board of Peace is touted as the mechanism for peacemaking, though to critical observers it is a well-crafted deception aimed at establishing a US-led or US-and-Israel-led world order where there is little respect for the UN Charter. Nations may resort to the use of force only with UN sanction, says the Charter. Yet Trump deploys his military to abduct Venezuela’s president and his wife, disregarding international law and the UN Charter. He threatens Iran with war, in total disdain for Chapter VII of the Charter.
If nations ignore the UN Charter, it tolls the death knell for the UN system, established in the aftermath of World War II to promote international peace and security—“to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war… to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights… and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” The UN pursues world peace through non-violence, but in Trump’s world order, peace comes through strength—a point he reiterated in his State of the Union speech marking one year in office.
Trump has declared that he is the law. International law, he insists, is whatever he says it is. “I don’t need international law. My own morality, my own mind — that’s the only thing that can stop me,” he has said in interviews.
Morality? What morality, when the president has partied with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein—an Israeli agent who urged world leaders to sing and dance in praise of Israel, as the visiting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did on Wednesday, lavishing praise on a regime accused of the worst crimes against humanity? The US Justice Department (DOJ) has released about three million heavily redacted Epstein files while withholding an equal number. If Trump is not complicit in Epstein’s crimes and has not engaged in immorality, he should come clean and order the DOJ to release the rest.
In Britain, the fallout from the Epstein files led authorities to arrest powerful figures such as former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and one-time minister and ambassador Peter Mandelson. But in the morally bankrupt US, no such arrests are forthcoming, with the Attorney General and Federal Bureau of Investigation being accused of protecting politically connected child-sex predators.
Except for a few isolated voices, the Democratic Party is also lackadaisical in its call for justice for the victims. Most Republican and Democratic politicians depend for campaign funds on corrupt oligarchs connected to Epstein and the Zionist lobby. US politicians comply with their demands.
Incidentally, there was no mention of Epstein in the State of the Union address — not even in the form of a promise to the thousands of women trafficked into his resorts. Nor did the issue receive so much as a footnote in the Democratic Party’s traditional reply, even though a few Democratic lawmakers, such as Ro Khanna, invited Epstein survivors to attend the State of the Union.
While Democratic Party lawmakers slammed Trump’s speech as a bundle of lies, their criticism centred largely on the economy.
Terminological inexactitudes were also present in the few paragraphs he devoted to foreign policy, his supposed peace efforts, and the looming prospect of war with Iran. Trump claimed that Iran was working to build missiles capable of striking the United States. The assertion echoed the falsehoods President George W. Bush used in 2003 to justify war against Iraq, alleging that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Turning to Iran’s nuclear programme, Trump—who has repeatedly claimed that by bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities in June he had obliterated both the sites and Iran’s ability to resume the programme—struck a different note on Tuesday. “We wiped it out, and they want to start all over again. And they’re at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions,” he declared.
He went on: “We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’” This, too, was a distortion. Iran has consistently stated that it has no intention of producing nuclear weapons. Under The 2015 nuclear deal, Iran even allowed International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor its nuclear sites. Even in recent talks with Washington, Iran reaffirmed that it seeks nuclear capabilities only for peaceful purposes. At talks yesterday in Geneva, it may have repeated that commitment even more emphatically.
Conspicuous in Trump’s speech was the omission of his usual China-bashing, perhaps due to his meeting with Xi Jinping in April. But with the US reviving a 19th‑century force-based imperialistic world order, China and the Global South cannot remain silent. A world without a viable balance of power becomes a dangerous theatre of constant war and conflict.
India, which appears to have abandoned its Gandhian policies in favour of Israel’s friendship, must reclaim its principles-based Global South identity and join China in forming a counterbalance to the imperial West. This may seem like wishful thinking, but it is perhaps the way forward.
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