The Internationalism

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...

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...