The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 16 Three years of war in Ukraine. Perhaps with a truce in sight, albeit in the heated climate of the European shock over the Atlantic crisis and the American about-face. Trump wants to make a deal with Putin without regard for Kyiv and the EU; doubts are spreading as to whether America can be trusted anymore. Friedrich Merz, the next head of the German government, has been heard uttering words that would previously have been unthinkable for an Atlanticist like him: We must become independent from the United States; Berlin must agree with London and Paris on the nuclear protection of Europe. It is uncertain whether NATO, in its present form, will be suitable for this “epochal break”, or whether new European structures will be needed. Perhaps the objective is a Europeanised NATO, a centre of gravity in the Old Continent that can contain or compensate for American oscillations and the unpredictable behaviour of its bull...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 16 Uneven development is a fundamental law of capitalism. We have a macroscopic expression of this in the changing balance of power between States: Atlantic decline and Asian rise are the key dynamics behind the political processes of this era, including wars caused by the crisis in the world order. But behind all this there is a differentiated economic trend, starting from companies and sectors: hence the differentiated conditions for wage earners. And this is the element to keep in mind for an effective defensive struggle. It’s only the beginning The electrical and digital restructuring imposed by global market competition affects various production sectors. The car industry is the most obvious, due to the familiarity of the companies and brands involved. We have already reported on the agreement reached before Christmas at Volkswagen, which can be summarised as a reduction of 35,000 employees by 2030. Die Zeit [De...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 15 From the series The world car battle It is predicted that next year in China the sales of electrified vehicles (mainly battery-powered or hybrid) will for the first time overtake those of cars with an internal combustion engine. This development will mark a historic about turn which will put the world's biggest auto market years ahead of its Western rivals [Financial Times, December 26th]. Meanwhile, the growth in sales of electric vehicles in Europe and the United States has slowed. BYD's leap forward Another important development in 2024 was the record sales of Chinese brands in China: they rose from 38% of the total in 2020 to 56%, a sign of the maturation of the national auto industry which is now able to challenge the Japanese, American, and European manufacturers. BYD's leap forward is impressive, comparable to that of Ford Motors after the First World War, when with the Model T, introduc...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 14 From the series Industry and pharmaceuticals The surge in China’s biopharmaceutical industry over the last decade is part of its broader scientific and technological ascent and therefore deserves our attention. Such growth presents a challenge to other imperialist powers. The Biosecure Act’s intention, to reduce the ties between American and Chinese biotech firms, has been branded by The Economist as “old-fashioned protectionism”. The British weekly recognises, however, that the clash goes well beyond a trade war. The stakes are higher. In a lengthy cover story [“The rise of Chinese science”], it writes that “China is now a leading scientific power”. Just five years ago, this was still considered only a possibility. The current question is whether this is “welcome or worrying” [June 15th, 2024]. Unity and scission The viewpoint of that publication, an authoritative voice of one of the power-houses of imperia...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 13 Joong Ang Ilbo , a newspaper associated with the Samsung group, the second largest in South Korea, writes that Tokyo’s "meticulous preparations" for the February 7th talks in Washington between its Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Donald Trump, “intended to mitigate the potential repercussions of the proverbial” and vaunted “unpredictability” of the American president, “offer valuable lessons” for Seoul. Korea is today shaken by the worst political-institutional crisis since the coup d’état of December 1979. with the impeachment and arrest for “insurrection” of President Yoon Suk-yeol, after his attempt to establish martial law and close Parliament on December 3rd. For the international media, Ishiba’s performance was “a masterful exercise in flattery diplomacy”, aimed at obtaining “Trump’s favour”. But for Joong-Ing his traditional “courtesy diplomacy” can not be dismissed as “mere submission” and “flatt...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 12 From the series Political battles and political cultures in the United States In 1898, the United States went to war with the Spanish Empire over the question of Cuba, but soon found itself ruling the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico. A reluctant entry into the war against Spain led American imperialism, emerging from a century of vast, heterogeneous, and turbulent capitalist development, to the naval “baptism of fire” of its first war in Asia. Some representatives of “expansionism” espoused the new tendency, and their critics nicknamed them jingoes , after the term used for English nationalists. Ambassador Warren Zimmermann in First Great Triumph [2002] portrays expansionists as those whose writing or action, and often both, “made their country a world power”. Admiral A. T. Mahan considered himself a “thinker”; his books set the framework for the debate between the military and publicis...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 11 The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008 has gone down in history as the symbol of the financial crisis and of the subsequent “great recession”. According to our Marxist analysis, that economic earthquake revealed above all a world power balance transformed by Atlantic decline and Chinese rise. It was a crisis in global relations and, in fact, we can also count the birth of the BRICS among its strategic consequences: the coalition of China, India, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa began meeting annually, demanding the reform of the international order to give the emerging powers a bigger say. G7 and BRICS in the G20 The firstborn son of the global crisis was the “Group of Twenty” (G20) which, as swiftly as November 2008, met for the first time in Washington at the level of heads of State and government. We wrote in our newspaper that this was the birth of a “new balance in power relations: the old metropol...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 10 From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism Donald Trump’s political agenda has been dictated by the tempo of the dozens of executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations he has signed, challenging international partners abroad, and Congress, the States of the Union, and the bureaucracy at home. The execution of some orders has already been temporarily suspended by federal judges, while the chaos caused by a memorandum led the administration itself to withdraw it. Other rulings are expected from the courts at the request of citizens, NGOs, and States. Furthermore, as James Politi of the Financial Times notes, “the result of his political success” in the elections is that Trump will have to satisfy “a much more diverse political coalition” than in his first term. Ross Douthat, a conservative commentator for The New York Times , also believes that “at least until the Democratic Party gets up off th...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 9 In January 2017, as soon as he took office in the White House, Donald Trump signalled the new trade policy of the United States with two immediate moves: the exit from the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) and the project for a wall on the border with Mexico. These were accompanied by the threat to abandon the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). That thunderous debut now seems almost moderate, compared to the flurry of arrogant announcements and orders with which his second presidency has begun. Multiple fronts In just a few weeks, Trump has deployed an impressive and omni-directional arsenal of tariffs, making no distinction between allies and adversaries. The first targets were imports from Canada and Mexico, the US’s biggest trading partners. These 25% tariffs were immediately put on hold for a month, in exchange for symbolic concessions from the two neighbouring governments, aimed at countering the suppos...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 8 Douglas Irwin, economist and historian of American trade policy, writes for the Peterson Institute that the tariffs announced by Donald Trump, if implemented, would constitute a “historic event in the annals of US trade policy” and “one of the largest increases in trade taxes in US history. One has to go back almost a century to find tariff increases comparable”. Irwin limits himself to providing us with a historical dimension to the planned duties. But the bewilderment and turmoil created, especially among Washington’s allies, derives from the fact that the tariffs being brandished are accompanied by a hail of presidential decrees and declarations that mark a profound political discontinuity, both in the balance of internal institutional powers and in the balance of power between nations. The watershed was expected, but the speed and vehemence of the White House’s assaults are setting the scene for a change of era i...