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 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. 85, March 2026 Page 16 No surprise: the US Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump's protectionist policy. He was not allowed to bypass Congress and impose tariffs through emergency procedures. Some see in this a vindication of the principle of checks and balances . The unchecked claims of the executive power – the presidency – have been pushed back by the highest expression of judicial power – the Supreme Court – which has returned the matter to the legislative power – Congress – to which the US Constitution grants authority over taxation. Everything seems to fall into place, yet liberals can easily shut themselves inside their paper labyrinths and thus lose sight of the clash of real forces which shape rules and institutions. For us Marxists, the plurality of powers reflects the plurality of interests of the dominant groups of capital, amid relentless battles that know no truce. ...

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 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 ...

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 5 When, in 2015, Moscow initiated direct military intervention in Syria against ISIS bases and in support of Bashar al-As-sad's regime, this was seen as a signal of Russia’s resurgence as a great power: it was its first deployment in a war zone outside the territory of the former USSR since its withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. Singers of the resurrection Sergey Karaganov, honorary chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, and currently one of the most fervent supporters of the war in Ukraine, wrote that this action “has strengthened Russia’s international position”, to the point of making 2015 “one of the most successful years in the history of Russian foreign policy” [Russia in Global Affairs, February 23, 2016). Dmitri Trenin, then head of the Carnegie Center in Moscow, which was later closed by the authorities in 2022, revisited this in his 2018 book What is Russia up to in the Middle East?, ...