The Internationalism

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 10 On January 9 th , the European Council authorised the signing of the agreement with Mercosur, the customs union comprising Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. The decision by the 27 member States, taken by majority vote, overrode strong opposition from France, with Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Ireland also voting against and Belgium abstaining. Ratification by the European Parliament is still pending, as it has requested a legal opinion from the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, but both the Council and the Commission seem inclined to apply the agreement provisionally, as urged by the German and Italian governments. Meanwhile, on January 17 th , Presidents Antônio Costa and Ursula von der Leyen flew to South America to seal the deal, moving to close a 30-year political battle. False breakthroughs and ultimatums The EU’s strategic interest in Mercosur was already evident in the mid-199...

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...