The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 12 The third US Gulf War has entered its fourth week. Fatih Birol, director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), was quick to describe it as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market , due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In normal times, 20 million barrels per day (Mb/d) of crude oil and refined products flow through the Strait of Hormuz. 80% of the total flow is destined for Asia, rising to 90% in the case of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Iran claims that the Strait is closed only to its enemies, but, for all practical purposes, the risk of crossing it is such that insurance premiums for oil tankers not explicitly authorised to do so are prohibitively high. With no storage capacity for the extracted crude and hoping to reduce the number of targets, the Gulf States have cut their oil production by at least 10 Mb/d. Acc...

From the series News from the Silk Road The international tensions which China will face on the seas in the next fifteen years could find a buffer in the expansion of China’s influence on land in Central, Southern and Western Asia. Wang Jisi is the dean of the School of International Studies at the University of Beijing and a major figure of the American party in China. His unexpected foray into ‘geopolitics’ has reignited the old clash between different American currents — a phenomenon we analysed more than twenty years ago. At the time, Robert Manning, the author of The Asian Energy Factor and adviser to the State Department in 1991, viewed Asia’s growing dependence on the Persian Gulf for its energy requirements in the light of geoeconomics and geostrategy and foresaw a possible convergence between the USA and China. From a geoeconomic standpoint, both trade and the funding and development of the infrastructure necessary for Asia’s energy needs were more important than terri...

Politics of Science and Passion The Internationalist Youth Day conference was held in Milan on February 1 st , in piazza San Babila’s New Theatre. Below we report a synthesis of the conclusions drawn at the conference. The heightening tensions among the powers of imperialism and exacerbating social contradictions around the world have been two unmistakable facets marking the first two decades of this century. In the last few months social protest has animated the streets and squares of various regions on the world stage, in Latin America, the Middle East, Hong Kong, India and France. Albeit with their specific features, both protests and demands for better living and working conditions resounded everywhere. Essentially, those streets and squares reconfirm a well-known passage from Marx and Engels’ Manifesto – The modern bourgeois society […] has not done away with class antagonisms confirming that society is more and more splitting up […] into two great classes directly facing ...