The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 11 From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism The tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump on allies, partners and opponents of the United States have opened a phase of negotiations with the affected countries and caused reactions from some key States. The legal opposition from almost all areas of the US poses a test: whether States, courts, and Congress can influence trade policy and constrain the expansion of executive powers. Amid conflicting rulings, the tariffs have been reinstated – an outcome that, The New York Times remarks, has “left Washington, Wall Street, and much of the world trying to discern the future of US trade policy”. California’s dispute with the federal government has expanded to immigration policy and the domestic use of military force. The political, economic, and power struggle...

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. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 9 Since the beginning of his second term, Donald Trump has been laying siege to the Federal Reserve. The immediate reason is his hostility towards its interest rate policy, with the Fed insisting on a 4% floor, explicitly attempting to counter the inflationary effects of the tariffs imposed by Trump. The president wants to bring rates down to 1%. His economic advisers argue that the economy needs more fuel; that the cost of money must be lower than that of the European Central Bank (ECB), currently at 2%; that a further depreciation of the dollar exchange rate is needed to promote exports; that the cost of mortgages needs to be lowered; and that the cost of servicing the US national debt, currently equal to defence spending, needs to be reduced. These arguments foreshadow an ultra-expansionary monetary policy which, over ...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 8 In the June presidential elections in South Korea, Lee Jae-myung, a centre-left candidate from DPK, won by a large margin, following the tragicomic attempt by Head of State Yoon Suk-yeol to impose martial law and his subsequent ousting. Defeated by Yoon in the 2022 election, Lee won over 17 million votes this time around, compared to 14 million for the candidate of PPP, the centre-right coalition. For The Japan Times , Lee’s victory represents an anti-Yoon referendum , with a section of the conservative electorate siding with the Reform Party, which was created by splinter groups from the PPP and smaller parties, and is led by 40-year-old Lee Jun-seok, who has conservative-nationalist and pro-Japanese positions. The DPK are traditionally more pro-China and in favour of dialogue with Pyongyang and a more autonomous fore...

The new conflagration in the Persian Gulf, the twelve-day war between Israel and Iran before the United States intervened with its bunker-buster bomb on the Fordow nuclear site, appeared to be a conflict between a State armed with nuclear weapons and one seeking to acquire them. There is talk of Benjamin Netanyahu’s gamble, which since October 7 th , 2023, has engaged Israel on seven war fronts and in a massacre in Gaza that has no end. But, in reality, Israel’s commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is a long-term strategic decision shared by all its political currents and known as the Begin doctrine . Wars are part of the revisions of history in political theories and strategies; this also applies to the norms and doctrines of international law, the paper walls of the liberal conception of international relations that we already saw crumbling in the first Gulf War in 1991. The NPT, the Nuclear Non-Prolifer...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 7 From the series Industry and pharmaceuticals The contention in the biopharmaceutical field between the two sides of the Atlantic addresses the issue of costs, in two different ways. In a letter to the Financial Times published on April 23rd, Vas Narasimhan and Paul Hudson, the CEOs of Swiss company Novartis and French company Sanofi respectively, presented a harsh diagnosis of the state of European biopharmaceuticals compared to their major competitors, the United States and China. Narasimhan, an American son of immigrants from Tamil Nadu, and Hudson, a Briton, head two of the world's ten largest pharmaceutical multinationals. The two executives see "a strong outlook for the US – thanks to policies and regulations conducive to fast and broad patient access to innovative medicines". In contrast, Europe, ...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 6 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement According to Arrigo Cervetto [ Opere , Vol. 7], “paracentrism” is “the biggest obstacle to the formation of the worldwide Bolshevik party”. The Spartacists at Zimmerwald and Kiental Cervetto was analysing Lenin’s battle against centrism for the creation of the Third International, a battle which saw him isolated at Zimmerwald. He wrote down one of Zinoviev’s quotations from Histoire du parti communiste russe . “We were in the minority at Zimmerwald [1915]. […] In the years 1915 and 1916, we were nothing but an insignificant minority”. “But what is more serious?” – observed Cervetto – “is that the Zimmerwald Spartacists also said they were opposed to us”. In the strategic perspective of the “two separate halves” of socialism – the political conditions in...

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 5 From the series Asian giants Trends in rearmament spending and comparisons of military equipment are increasingly set to dominate coverage of the contention between powers in the crisis in the world order . The military factor has entered the strategic debate, accompanied by a wealth of figures and technical details. The increase in military spending as a percentage of GDP represents a widespread sign of the rearmament cycle at this juncture, but spending alone cannot entirely explain the situation, given the qualitatively different natures of the arsenals being compared. Nor are comparisons between this or that type of weapon useful in themselves, because ultimately all weapons are only ever used in combination with the complex military means available to a power, either in alliance or in conflict with other powers i...