In current Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, appeasement stands for cowardly and illusory pacification, as exemplified by the Munich Agreement of 1938, which conceded to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia without stopping the march towards world war.
Were Shigeru Ishiba, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz really, as has been said, the Neville Chamberlains of the tariff war, accepting appeasement on the 15% tariff in an ignominious surrender to Donald Trump's blackmail? And has Trump really revealed himself in Anchorage, Alaska, to be an appeaser towards Vladimir Putin? Was it, finally, only the firmness of the Europeans at the Washington summit which convinced Trump to remain as one of the guarantors of Ukraine's security?
The plague of television and social media diplomacy feeds on simplistic and propagandistic images, but also consumes and contradicts them at the pace of a reality show. Thus, the Europeans, from servile subjects of the American president on his golf course in Scotland, were transformed into stubborn defenders of the West at the televised roundtable at the White House. Trump, meanwhile, the triumphant champion of protectionism, heedless of his allies, was first ensnared by the Kremlin leader's strongman allure, and then brought back to reason by those same allies. Tomorrow, who knows?
Of course, the new forms of show politics and social media politics must be understood, but we must also avoid the caricature of a contention between powers reduced for the masses to a daily improvisational performance, and we must further understand the use of those representations in campaigns for domestic public opinion. Trump is staging the new nationalism of MAGA as part of a protectionist and industrialist shift that he hopes will counteract American decline. The image of the EU's "submission" is functional to the social-imperialist mobilisation of Europeanism: it is no coincidence that Mario Monti alludes to this when he writes of a European "Canossa" or, in more analytical terms, Mario Draghi, when he notes the illusion has "evaporated" that economic strength alone could "translate into geopolitical power and influence in international trade relations".
For von der Leyen, accepting a 15% rate was a "deliberate choice" for "stability" and "predictability", avoiding "tariff retaliation" that would have precipitated the Atlantic crisis. The Economist sees "subtler wins" for the EU in what the agreement does not contain, such as clauses against Beijing or constraints on the Union's power to tax and regulate digital services.
The Marxist science of international politics knows how to demystify the game of ideologies and subjectivist representations. Its task is to bring scientific order to the revolutionary political struggle; therefore, it does not chase media trends and knows how to trace theses and interpretations back to the plurality of forces and interests at play.
More than 35 years ago, we encountered a realist thesis on appeasement policies that went beyond mere moralistic condemnation. In the article "Ipotetici blocchi con le super-declinanti" ["Hypothetical blocs with declining superpowers", February 1989], Arrigo Cervetto considers the arguments of Paul Kennedy, "historian of the rise and fall of great powers", expressed in an essay from the early 1980s on "why the British Empire lasted so long":
"Kennedy's basic thesis is that the British Empire managed to slow its decline for almost a century thanks to a policy of compromise, the final phase of which, managed by Neville Chamberlain, is known as 'appeasement'". The British historian ironically invited Reagan and Andropov - and later Gorbachev - "both at the head of declining empires", to learn from "a century of British history".
The strategic context of the global balance of powers has changed radically since then. The decline of the USSR soon led to its implosion in 1991, paving the way for German reunification and the euro federation. At the time, Washington saw Tokyo as the main threat, and Kennedy suggested "supporting China as a counterweight to Japan"; today's puzzle has become how to balance Beijing, and both the US and Europe are discussing policies of either bloc against bloc or appeasement in relation to this unprecedented continent-sized power.
What unites the notion of appeasement, throughout the long decline of the British Empire, in the destinies of the US and USSR as declining superpowers in the 1980s, and today in the struggle among the old Atlantic powers, including Japan, and between them and China, is the battle over time, both in the short and medium term.
If choosing to accept the 15% tariff was an act of appeasement, in the short term it is a calculation based on the timing of the unfolding American crisis, as Washington is marked by factional division. The most striking aspect of this is the challenge between Trump and Jerome Powell's Fed, while key sources such as The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and The Economist argue that the tariffs will represent self-inflicted damage to the United States.
In the medium term, the tariff war must be viewed in relation to other aspects of the confrontation, primarily European and Japanese rearmament. The compromise of 15% is also a consequence of military dependence. This is why the time factor for the EU means not only waiting for American contradictions to mature, but also proceeding with countermeasures and balancing measures: rearmament, to some extent rebalanced via European preference in procurement, and the network of multilateral agreements with Japan, Mexico, ASEAN, India, and Mercosur.
Since this is a combination of compromises and a policy of balance that concerns the US but also China, it is crucial to understand that rebalancing the relationship with Washington also requires preserving the strategic ties of the Atlantic Alliance and the Japan-US alliance, as China's emergence also affects European and Japanese interests.
Karl Kaiser, the "transatlantic patriarch" who for 30 years headed the DGAP, the German Society for International Politics, summarises the German and European dilemma regarding relations with the United States in Internationale Politik:
"The [transatlantic] family is facing the greatest test in its history. It must survive a destructive deviationist. On the one hand, this means cultivating and preserving the fundamental values of the transatlantic community, but on the other hand, it also means responding to this destructive force. More specifically, Europe will have to strive for greater independence, but also do everything it can to preserve the common project, the long-term project of the 'West'. After all, this was once the raison d'état of the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany — and it remains so".
Since the NATO summit in June, which launched the five-for-five initiative - 5% on rearmament and security infrastructure to guarantee Article 5 of the Atlantic Treaty, which commits members to mutual defence - we have followed the evolution of the international contention along six lines and criteria of analysis.
The first line of interpretation concerns the United States' intention to reduce its military commitments in Europe, though exactly how and to what extent is yet to be defined. According to Politico, there is uncertainty in Berlin about the "Global Force Posture Review", which will be published in September; Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has asked that Germany be kept informed, but for two years he has taken it for granted that at some point "the Americans would do less". The issue of security guarantees for Ukraine, we note, will become a concrete testing ground for this redefinition of mutual commitments, and may also counteract American disengagement, at least on a general political-strategic level.
The second line regards the confidential negotiations over the issue of a European nuclear deterrent. This has been confirmed in substance, with the network of bilateral agreements between Paris, London, and Berlin, but also by the fact that the discussions happened behind closed doors. The decision to coordinate between the French force de frappe and the British nuclear deterrent has been made official, with a joint "control group" chaired by the two governments. Negotiations on German participation - whether in the form of financial contributions or participation in the missile and non-nuclear aspects of a European deterrent - remain secret. The possible evolution of the control group into a European Security Council is also on the table but is a similarly confidential matter.
The third line of inquiry concerns the countermeasures against the outcomes of German rearmament. Germany's rearmament plans have such far-reaching consequences that they will inevitably bring about a new political balance in Europe, as well as triggering reactions from Moscow and elsewhere. Berlin's three-year budget plan envisages increasing military spending from €80 billion to €150 billion over three years, with the explicit aim of restoring Germany to its position as the biggest conventional military power in Europe. According to SIPRI data on 2024 figures, global military spending rose last year to $2.718 trillion, an increase of 9.4% in real terms, the highest since the end of the Cold War. The United States' spending increased by 5.7% to $997 billion, 37% of global spending. The European part of NATO stands at $454 billion, 16.7% of global spending and about 2% of European GDP. If the target of 3.5% of GDP is reached, spending will be in the order of $800 billion. Russian spending rose to $149 billion, 38% more than in 2023 and double that of 2015 - a burden of 7.1% of GDP weighing heavily on its weakened economy China's spending grew by 7% to $314 billion; Japan's by 21% to $55.3 billion.
So, according to SIPRI, NATO-Europe spends three times as much as Russia, which is at war, and Germany alone will surpass it in 2029. Moreover, once the Atlantic Alliance's plans for direct military spending of 3.5% of GDP are implemented, Berlin will have an overwhelming share of European budget allocations. The need for political and institutional guarantees in Europe is obvious. Draghi alludes to this in his speech at the Rimini Meeting of Comunione e Liberazione, where he notes that the EU, in its tendency to reactivity rather than proactivity, has been pushed into rearmament "in ways that probably do not reflect Europe's interests".
Kaiser responds that Germany is now perceived as "a great European power" and, together with France, is the bedrock of the EU. It will become "the greatest conventional military power in Western Europe", while it is already "the greatest economic power", this "forces Germany to play a key role in the organisation of conventional deterrence against Russia". Faced with the danger that the reawakening of the "German giant" will rekindle old fears, "one of the main tasks of the German government in the coming years will be to prevent this [..] by seeking ties with European allies and rooting its actions within the European Union"
The transformed return of the dynamic triangle between Paris, London, and Berlin calls for some additional considerations. In the 1980s, Cervetto went so far as to describe European defence projects as "unrealistic if they did not include Great Britain. On the other hand, London was willing to slow down European initiatives in an Atlanticist sense. We have observed in the past how Cervetto's reflection was still couched in the strategic framework of Yalta. Based on the assessment of the power relations in the true partition between the US and the USSR, his evaluation was that the Franco-German axis alone would not be able to overcome the division of Yalta, especially when Moscow had its boots on the ground in Berlin.
The implosion of the USSR had the effects of a Third World War. Germany emerged reunified and, riding that wave, the European Union was born in 1992 - a merger of the various community and intergovernmental institutions that had accompanied the European Common Market (ECM) since 1957 - and the euro federation was born in 1998. One might well ask whether that 1980s assessment of the power relations in Europe, which required the cooperation of France, Germany, and Great Britain for European defence, still held true in the new partition, which had reconquered Eastern Europe from Russia and pushed the political-State dividing line back into the Russian sphere. Moreover, London maintained its intrinsic ambiguity towards the EU even with Tony Blair's more pro-European line. In fact, at the decisive moment - the 2003 war in Iraq that, like a knife through butter; divided Old Europe and New Europe - Britain lent itself to American divisive action.
One of the conclusions that could be drawn from 2003 was that the military centralisation of the EU could not be achieved in opposition to the United States. Although the subsequent twenty years have proved that reservations about that war by choice were correct, and that the US has been unable to withstand the consequences of this foreign intervention on its domestic consensus, the fact remains that European defence has been frozen for two decades, confirming that the only possible way forward remains the formula of a European pillar within NATO. After all, the true partition did not only mean the presence of the USSR in Germany and Eastern Europe under the Warsaw Pact, but was fundamentally based on the convergence of Washington and Moscow in supporting that division in the heart of Europe. The collapse of the USSR would not have been enough to end it, if American opposition to European autonomy persisted
Already in the Quaderni 1981-1982 ("Notebooks 1981-1982"), which are a summary of his own strategic analysis, Arrigo Cervetto, referring to his 1962 thesis on the "economic blocs of imperialism", observed that there was more integration between the US and the ECM than he had assessed in the early 196os. Starting from that observation, we have developed our Marxist analysis on European imperialism over the last 30 years, on the assumption that its strategic framework would imply the gradual transformation of Atlantic relations, rather than their breakdown.
The process that led to the single currency can serve as a reference point for European defence. That result not only established European strategic autonomy in the field of monetary powers, but also crossed the Rubicon of transferring sovereignty to the euro federation. The key to success was to have achieved that strategic independence without severing the Atlantic relationship. It was therefore a two-pronged movement: the birth of the euro federation and the transformation/ preservation of the relationship with the United States. It is worth remembering the determination with which Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing set out on the path towards a monetary union, which was accompanied by the utmost attention to preserving the Atlantic Alliance. In 1975, the Rambouillet summit, which launched the practice of the G7, represented an admission that the US, despite the unilateral upheaval of the Nixon shock in 1971, could not manage global relations on its own: Schmidt and Giscard, champions of Europeanism, were at the same time the protagonists of the birth of that directorate.
Certainly, to that strategic framework, already transformed by the break of 1989-91, one should add today's crisis in the world order, where the issue is no longer just the rise of Europe and Japan, but the emergence of China as a competitor on par with the US. If this is at the root of the Atlantic decline and the American fluctuations personified by Trump, transatlantic reciprocity - the search for an equal relationship between Europe and America, as Wolfgang Schäuble contemplated - is now on a new footing. An American Sonderweg - a solitary and unilateral path for the US - is a threat to Europe, but it also contradicts the common strategic interest in balancing China. Europe's interest in restraining American fluctuations concerns both Atlantic relations in the strict sense, to which the balance with Russia is linked, but also global relations and the Chinese question, where the EU also feels the pressure of the Middle Kingdom. At the same time, calibrating relations with Beijing, as well as with Tokyo, Jakarta, New Delhi, and Brasilia-Buenos Aires in Mercosur, is part of the attempt to contain American fluctuations, and this is certainly being discussed in Europe, Japan, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and even China.
This brings us to the fourth line of inquiry, which concerns the confusion in Asia over the unilateral moves of the US. where the blows dealt in the tariff war are causing uncertainty in political and security relations. Some of the commentators who reflect the views of Ishiba's executive are discussing "indivisible security": if Trump proves that he can unilaterally agree to appeasement with Moscow, he could do the same with Beijing.
Hiroyuki Akita, one of the leading commentators for the authoritative Nikkei, reaches conclusions similar to those of Kaiser, extending them to Tokyo's network of relations: to prevent dangerous shifts in American foreign policy, the United States' major allies must "co-ordinate closely", "share detailed assessments" and even "divide tasks" in engaging Washington. For America's allies, "managing the relationship with Washington" becomes as crucial as defining their own strategies towards Moscow and Beijing.
In Asia, it is the relationship between Washington and New Delhi which seems to be the most damaged at the moment. The Quad is becoming more fragile, to the benefit of the bilateral relationship between India and Japan, and Beijing is once again gaining weight in the calculations of India's multi-alignment.
A fifth line of inquiry concerns a chapter that has just begun to unfold, that of reactions to German and European rearmament in Russia and among other powers in general, starting with China. This will be especially true for the entry of a European nuclear deterrent into the balance of power in Europe and globally. In the past, Euromissiles and Asiamissiles have been at the centre of crucial political battles; today, this is combined with China's nuclear rearmament program, which seeks parity with the US and Russia, and with the crisis of the NPT non-proliferation treaty.
Finally, the sixth line of analysis is above all a methodological criterion. Every dimension of the crisis in the world order - tariff wars, rearmament, regional wars and conflicts, shifts in the balance of power, and the political cycle in key powers - must be considered within the network of mutual relations and interdependencies. The Financial Times reports that those among European grands commis who considered the tariff negotiations to be just a "classic trade dispute" were pushing for retaliation. However, it was by assessing the "big picture" of the crisis that von der Leyen opted for "caution" and "risk aversion", while the Directorate-General for Trade asked member States for "strategic patience". Here too, we can glimpse the link between tariff appeasement and the times of European rearmament.
Lotta Comunista, July-August 2025