The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 13 The United States has been arguing for the need to reform the WTO since well before Donald Trump unleashed his world tariff war. In 2015, Michael Froman, President Barack Obama’s trade representative, denounced the failure of the Doha Round, a major negotiation underway since 2001 but bogged down in its own ambition to reach a comprehensive agreement among all countries on every aspect of world trade. Froman’s solution was pragmatic multilateralism , capable of proceeding through sectoral agreements or between small groups of nations. Behind the arcane formulations of international law, Washington’s real accusation against the WTO, then as now, is that it has facilitated the spectacular rise of China’s industrial power. Longstanding issues Decisions on WTO reform can only come from its Ministerial Conference, held every two year...

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 6 On February 28 th , the attack launched by the United States and Israel against Iran ignited the third Gulf War . Already dealing with the conflict in Ukraine on its eastern flank, Europe now finds itself facing a second war on its borders, this time to the south. Unlike in 1991 and 2003, in the current conflict Washington has made no effort to build a coalition. No European or NATO country, nor any regional power, has been formally involved in the plans for intervention. European exclusion and the Atlantic crisis Europe’s initial exclusion – despite now being called upon to bear the energy, economic, and political consequences of Washington’s new war of choice – is the latest chapter of the Atlantic crisis . The issue has been at the centre of the European press’s commentary. Particularly in the early days, Brussels’ delays and impotence...

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Pages 4 and 5 According to The Economist , the war that began on February 28th with the American and Israeli attack on Iran has rightly earned the label third Gulf War . A clarification is needed: the war between Iran and Iraq, from 1980 to 1988, cost at least half a million lives and left its mark on the Persian Gulf no less than the subsequent conflicts. However, if we consider only the wars initiated by the United States in an attempt to manage its own decline, the current conflict follows on from those of 1991 and 2003. Hence, the third Gulf War . The conflict has already transcended regional boundaries, involving all countries in the area; the unprecedented assassination of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s religious and political leader, on the first day of the war, was the turning point. The war’s objectives are unclear: it is a war without a strategy , writes The...

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 3 From the series European news The next half-century will be the age of nuclear weapons . This was the grim prediction with which Emmanuel Macron concluded his speech on nuclear deterrence, delivered on March 2 nd at the Île Longue submarine base. Standing before Le Téméraire , the nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine that carries a strike force equivalent to the sum of all the bombs dropped on Europe during the Second World War , the president announced a significant evolution in French nuclear doctrine. The emergence of new threats and the realignment of American priorities make it necessary, according to Macron, not only to strengthen deterrence by increasing the number of nuclear warheads, but also to rethink the deterrence strategy deep inside the European continent . His proposal is the gradual implementation o...

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...