The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 4 “By punishing his longtime allies with tariffs, Donald Trump is encouraging other nations to form trading blocs and networks that exclude the United States”. Whilst the New York Times treats the issue polemically, it constitutes an important strand of reflection in European and Asian assessments. The duties are a “declaration of economic war”, according to Le Monde. A rapid, temporary negotiating truce followed, with tariffs suspended in exchange for tactical concessions from Canada and Mexico. Whilst the “bluff” may have yielded some transitory results, a “permanent instability” is settling at the heart of American affairs. Unpredictability as a weapon is the strategy with which the new presidency intends to tackle, and perhaps even temporarily reverse, American decline. This, though, comes at the cost of compromising the United States” credibility as the guarantor of the old order and the network of alliances which...

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 2 Fog of war is a military expression referring to the difficulty, during the course of battle, of knowing and calculating all factors at play as they unfold and interact. This image can be extended to the military-strategic and also to the political dimension of power relations: today a rearmaments race, regular parades of war devices, new alliances, political warnings and mutual ambiguities in Asia signal the agitated beginning of a long crescendo of tensions. A number of questions can help us understand the new characteristics of this contention. Should NATO extend its strategic aim to the confrontation with China? Jens Stoltenberg, the Alliance’s secretary general and a Norwegian — a fact which expresses an Atlanticism closely aligned with American positions — thinks so. He tells the Financial Times that China, even though it cannot be defined exclusively as an adversary , is having an impact on European ...

The Strategic Surprise of the Agreement between Beijing and Tehran and the Suggestion of a Six-Power Concert The agreement between Beijing and Tehran falls under the definition of strategic surprise , i.e., events that entirely appertain to the political realm and mark a change or an about-turn in the balance among the powers. New alliances, the breakdown of alliances, the overturning of coalitions, diplomatic openings or unexpected military sorties: these are the regular novelties of international politics that Arrigo Cervetto wrote about. However, if the agreement was an unforeseeable event in itself, the long-term objective economic and political trends. that have determined it and made it possible are entirely investigable. The invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR at the end of December 1979 was interpreted by the United States as a potential threat to the oil routes of the Persian Gulf, and it was a contemporary revival of the Great Game , which had set the British Empire agai...