The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 85, March 2026 Page 13 The Supreme Court has rejected Donald Trump's attempt to impose tariffs by invoking emergency powers. The ruling and the US president's counter-reaction, imposing a universal tariff of 10%, open up unpredictable scenarios. This will be discussed in the coming months, between now and the midterm elections. For the moment, this plunges all the agreements signed by the administration to date into uncertainty. Last June, we predicted a season of flourishing free-trade agreements in the winter of the crisis in the world order , in response to the tariff war declared by Trump against the whole world. Since then, the EU has announced agreements with Indonesia, the South American bloc Mercosur, and India: a historic hat-trick that will improve European access to markets with a combined population of 2 billion. The European Commission is pursuing other negotiations, especially in Asia, and is looking towards con...

Internationalism No. 85, March 2026 Page 3 From the series European news At the Davos Forum in January, US President Donald Trump withdrew his threats to take Greenland away from Denmark and impose tariffs on all countries that opposed him. However, the damage had already been done. The episode was a trauma for Europe: now we no longer know how far the Americans might go , commented Emmanuel Macron. The French president warns against an illusory sense of relief after the peak of tensions. This Greenland moment has undoubtedly made Europeans aware that they are under threat . Now, we must think of Europe as a power [ Süddeutsche Zeitung , February 11 th ]. The German chancellor also spoke out in favour of more European power in his speech to the Bundestag on January 29 th . There, Friedrich Merz issued a warning: Anyone in the world who believes [...] that it is necessary to use customs tariffs against Europe must know—and now knows—that we are...

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Page 16 We must force ourselves to think of the present in terms of a decade, because the changes already underway are reshaping the face of the world. In the next ten years, China will have surpassed America's economic power, by whatever metric one chooses to calculate it. The Chinese navy will deploy six, or perhaps nine, aircraft carriers, compared with the United States' current eleven. Within the decade, China will also have 1,500 deployed nuclear warheads, bringing it level with the current deterrents of the US and Russia. To withstand the tripolar confrontation, America plans to increase its number of deployed warheads to 3,000. Not to be outdone, European imperialism plans to double military spending and is already thinking about a European bomb , drawing from the nuclear forces of France and the United Kingdom. The AI bubble will burst, but a handful of giants will emerge to share out...

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Page 6 With the announcement of an increase in military spending from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion in 2027, Donald Trump is relaunching the United States’ primacy in the rearmament cycle. This Trumpian rearmament will have to be approved by Congress, where so far only the heads of the armed forces committees have expressed their support. Regardless of whether or not these figures will be immediately reflected in the Pentagon’s budgets, they are nevertheless indicative of the strategic scenario that Washington intends to guard against. On the one hand, with 5% of its GDP, the US would ensure that its spending over the next few years exceeds the combined total of the three runners-up — Europe, China, and Russia — and in this sense, this functions primarily as insurance against the multipolar dynamic. On the other hand, in terms of American political culture, which tends to frame international issues in ...

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026, Special Issue Pages III and IV From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works") , recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. VII In this chapter, we offer a selection of writings on the Italian cycle, in both politics and in social and economic change, taken from three books that collect articles written over a 40-year period, from 1950 to 1991. Il ciclo politico del capitalismo di Stato ( The political cycle of State capitalism ) spans from the post-war period, at the beginning of the 30 years of the accelerated development of the economic miracle, until 1967, when the first signs of the struggles of workers’ spontaneity had already appeared, but before the explosion of the autunno caldo ( hot autumn ) of 1969. These are articles that appeared in Libertario , l’Impulso , Agitazione (the internal bulletin of the GAAP), Azione Comunista , Prometeo a...

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026, Special Issue Pages I and II From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works") , recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. VI The reflection on the political shell – in which Cervetto returned to the fundamentals of the Marxist theory of the State – was itself a political battle, as it equipped the new generation of the party against the myths of true democracy that accompanied the reformist line and the electoral expansion of the progressive PCI into new social strata. The very title of the book recalls Lenin’s formula of democracy as the best political shell for the dictatorship of capital. However, these editorials were not limited to restoring the concepts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin; the theory was developed and updated to apply to contemporary forms of imperialist democracy . Alongside those crucial notions, dozens of politic...

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026 Pages 1, 4 and 5 The Trump Doctrine and the Unknowns of Imperialist Europeanism It is said that the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) – the document that formalises the Trump Doctrine in foreign policy – marks a break with 80 years of transatlantic relations following the Second World War. Moreover, in our Marxist analysis, for more than twenty years we have been writing about a new strategic phase ; for almost a decade, about the crisis in the world order ; for a couple of years, about the wars of the crisis in the world order , and since the beginning of Donald Trump’s new term, about an Atlantic crisis . That this crisis is now at a turning point is a fact; the extent and permanence of its strategic consequences in the future remain open questions. Whether Trump’s NSS is conceptually up to the task of American imperialism is debatable. This is where the unknowns lie: in the relative decline ...