The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 80, October 2025 Page 9 Amid constant contradictions and deliberate ambiguities, Donald Trump has never clarified to what extent his trade war is conceived as an end in itself – new protectionist barriers to stymie global competition – or as a means of international intimidation, serving other political objectives. So far, this duplicitous lack of clarity remains: the powers that have come to terms with the American president, such as the European Union and Japan, and yielded to his main demands, are nonetheless suffering a significant increase in tariffs. The British model After declaring economic war on Liberation Day in April, Trump immediately changed course at the first signs of financial panic, proclaiming a three-month tariff truce. In May, Keir Starmer’s British Labour government was the first to accept the unilateral conditions imposed by the White House. Although it was not contributing to the US trade deficit, the...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 10 Donald Trump has always maintained that trade wars are easy to win . The first six months of his second term show that they are not even easy to start. In addition to the new 10% universal tariff on all exports to the US, on April 2 nd – Liberation Day – President Trump ordered aggressive reciprocal tariffs against some 60 countries, only to immediately postpone them for three months when the first worrying tremors hit the stock, debt, and dollar markets. One month, ten agreements To reassure Wall Street, the White House promised 90 agreements in those 90 days, offering a discount on reciprocal tariffs to the threatened nations in exchange for concessions, such as the purchase of US arms and energy, commitments to heavy investment in the United States, and greater market openness to American goods...

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 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. 33, November 2021 Page 7 The signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership ( RCEP ), a major Asian trade agreement, in November 2020, was remarkable because India decided not to take part in it while Japan was determined to strike a deal with China, despite the difficult political transition underway in Washington. Some questions arose at that time. Would the EU show as much autonomy from the United States on the Euro-Chinese economic negotiation front? Would India eventually join the RCEP ? Would the United States return to the competing transpacific project? Would China also seek to join also the Trans-Pacific Partnership ( TPP )? TPP ’s variable geometry In December 2020 came the first reaction from the European Union, which signed the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investments ( CAI ), ignoring a request from Joe Biden’s new presidency to stall the proceedings. On September 16 th , 2021 the question regarding China w...