Starve and drive out

Le Monde diplomatique – June 2025

[ThisarticlepostedinJune2025istranslatedfromtheGermanontheInternet,https://www.woz.ch/lmd/25-06/aushungern-und-vertreiben/!B3S5SB09QPM9.]

“Everyone has become accustomed to hundreds of people being killed in the Gaza Strip on a night of war – the world doesn’t care.” This was recently stated by Knesset member Zvi Sukkot of the Religious Zionism party, which is part of Netanyahu’s governing coalition. He did not mean to condemn the mass killing of civilians by the Israeli army. He merely wanted to dispel any concerns about the reaction of other countries.

The sad thing is that Sukkot is largely right. For 19 months, most of Israel’s allies have responded to its campaign of destruction in Gaza with mild words of warning at most. Now, however, something seems to be changing: the devastating effects of the total blockade of the coastal strip, which has lasted for more than two months, and the starvation of the entire population have prompted some countries to take at least some action. France, Great Britain, and Canada have threatened Israel with “concrete measures.” And a majority of EU states have spoken out in favor of reviewing the association agreement with Israel.

Germany has not supported any of these initiatives and spoke out against a review of the agreement at the foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels. During his recent visit to Israel, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul stated in all seriousness that, in view of the plans for a new distribution mechanism for humanitarian goods, it was “absolutely clear” that Israel could not be accused of acting in violation of international law.

This new distribution mechanism, which excludes UN organizations, has one main purpose: to cram the starving population in the south of the coastal strip into a “sterile zone” – with the option of organizing their “voluntary departure” at a later date. The use of hunger as a weapon and the abuse of humanitarian aid are thus institutionalized, so to speak.

Netanyahu confirmed on May 21 in one of his rare press conferences that the final expulsion of the population of Gaza is the official goal of the Israeli government. There, Israel’s prime minister stated for the first time that the implementation of the so-called Trump plan – which he called “revolutionary” and “brilliant” – was a prerequisite for ending the war. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently stated openly at a Senate hearing that his country was in contact with various states to negotiate the admission of people from Gaza. No one should be under any illusion that the governments in Jerusalem and Washington will shy away from actually implementing such a plan.

Under the impression of the famine in Gaza, the German government has also toughened its tone. According to Foreign Minister Wadephul, it is being examined “whether what is happening in the Gaza Strip is compatible with international humanitarian law.” However, given the overwhelming evidence, one wonders what there is left to examine. There is no way around it: Germany must participate in concrete sanctions against Israel at the European level. To continue to actively enable the horrific crimes in Gaza by supplying weapons would be a moral failure unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic.

Jakob Farah

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Gaza – the long failure of the West

Le Monde diplomatique – June 2025

Israel’s warfare in Gaza is not only a disaster for the Palestinian population. If the West continues to stand idly by and accept the violations of international law there, which experts believe bear the hallmarks of genocide, the international legal order will also be destroyed.

by Gilbert Achcar

[This article posted in June 2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.woz.ch/lmd/25-06/gaza-das-lange-versagen-des-westens/!B2X5SB09HJSJ.]

Mourning in Jabaliya, Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025 Photo: HADI DAOUD/picture alliance/sipa/apaimages

Since October 7, 2023, the Palestinian people have been going through the worst phase of their long history of suffering – worse than the Nakba of 1948. The Arabic word means catastrophe and refers to what is now commonly referred to as “ethnic cleansing.” Only the even stronger word karitha can do justice to the suffering currently being experienced by the people of Gaza. In fact, the catastrophe unfolding before our eyes bears the hallmarks of genocide.¹

But parallel to the killings in the Gaza Strip, Israel is also carrying out ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and in the enclave on the Mediterranean. On May 5, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced in the Israeli settlement of Ofra that the population of Gaza would be “concentrated” in a small area in the south. From there, the people would then “emigrate in large numbers to third countries.”²

Donald Trump is likely to see this threatening scenario as an opportunity to win over the US’s Arab allies for an updated version of his “deal of the century,” which they rejected in 2020. Compared to the prospect of ethnic cleansing, this plan, which envisages the creation of a rump state called Palestine, seems like the lesser evil.

Under this scenario, Saudi Arabia would follow the example of Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates, which have normalized relations with Israel, as Egypt and Jordan have already done. This would be a success for the US president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In reality, however, the problems would remain unresolved. The future of the Middle East therefore looks bleak – as bleak as the entire panorama of international relations.

Unconditional support for a war without end

International relations have not only been clouded since Trump’s return to the White House. “Even before Trump took office, the ‘rules-based international order’ was deeply fractured, in large part because Biden made himself an accomplice to the destruction of Gaza,” writes New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg.³ And social scientist Yagil Levy stated: “Tel Aviv would have refrained from a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, as it has done in the past, had the government not been given international legitimacy for its actions against the enclave’s civilian population in advance.”⁴

By “international,” of course, they mean the countries that have the greatest influence on Israel. First and foremost is the country that has been Israel’s most important supporter since the late 1960s. But Washington made no attempt to moderate its ally. On the contrary, for several months at least, they enthusiastically participated in a war that was, in fact, the first American-Israeli war, even if the US Army did not directly participate in the bombing of Gaza.⁵

There is no “materialistic” or “realistic” explanation for Joe Biden’s zealous support for Netanyahu’s Israel. The only plausible reason is ideological. With his unreservedly pro-Israel stance, Biden even outdid Donald Trump, who had already gone far beyond the bipartisan consensus in the US during his first term. Originally, the Democratic president had hinted that he would reverse some of his Republican predecessor’s commitments. But then, with his unconditional support for an open-ended offensive against Gaza, he not only continued Trump’s policy, but went even further.

This came as no surprise. Back in 2020, journalist Peter Beinart pointed to “Joe Biden’s alarming record on Israel” during the US Democratic primaries. In a long, well-researched article in Jewish Currents, Beinart revealed the following story:

In the spring of 2009, President Barack Obama, who had just moved into the White House, wanted to put pressure on Netanyahu to keep alive the prospect of a Palestinian state. At that time, his vice president defended the Israeli prime minister with fierce determination. According to Beinart, Netanyahu has never had a more committed advocate in the US establishment than Joe Biden.

In 1973, in the midst of the Yom Kippur War, Richard Nixon made the much-quoted remark to Jewish-American businessman Leonard Garment in private: “I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” President Joe Biden has also made the same commitment publicly on several occasions. One year after the attack on October 7, 2023—when important human rights organizations were already speaking of genocide in view of the offensive in Gaza—he proudly declared: “No administration has helped Israel more than mine. None. None. None.”

The traumatic effect of the Hamas attack made Biden’s partisanship even more one-sided. In large parts of the West, which reacts particularly sensitively when disaster befalls its allies, the images of the Hamas attack triggered what could be called narcissistic sympathy.

This, combined with feelings of guilt in countries that had committed or allowed the Nazi genocide of the Jews—such as Germany, Austria, France, and Italy—led to unprecedented unconditional solidarity with Israel. And this in a situation where the country is ruled by people who indulge in fantasies of exterminating the Palestinians and who left no doubt that a massacre of genocidal proportions was imminent.

This apparent paradox stems from an interpretative approach that draws lessons from the extermination of European Jews by the Nazi regime not in a humanistic-universalistic sense, but from an ethnocentric-particularistic perspective. This is despite the fact that the defeat of the Nazi regime and fascism by the Allies was supposed to usher in a new era, a new international order based on the UN Charter adopted in 1945.

Important progress was also made in this direction. These included the establishment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which replaced the Permanent Court of International Justice founded in 1922 by the then League of Nations, and the strengthening of international humanitarian law through the 1949 revision of the Geneva Conventions, which extended the “ius in bello” to the protection of the civilian population.

However, the order that had been created was very soon devalued. The Cold War – waged by the “West” as a fight against communism and by the “East” as a fight against US imperialism – increasingly became a pretext for a general disregard for the UN Charter, with the US leading the way.

Atlantic-style neoliberalism soon came to be regarded as the only acceptable form of liberalism. When the Soviet power bloc collapsed in the 1990s, this was seen in the opposing camp as a great ideological victory that sealed the radical shift in the global balance of power.

During this brief unipolar phase, there were a few important advances in the transformation of the “new world order” into a “cosmopolitan democracy,” although Washington did not always participate. In 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established. This international court, which is not part of the UN, is specifically responsible for prosecuting individuals accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, or the crime of aggression.

However, the UN had already established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993. In its 2017 ruling, the ICTY classified the Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serbs killed around 8,000 Bosniaks in 1995, as genocide. The number of victims in today’s mass deaths in Gaza is far greater.

In October 2005, the United Nations General Assembly recognized the principle of “responsibility to protect” (R2P), which relativizes the principle of state sovereignty. According to this principle, it is permissible “in individual cases and in cooperation with the relevant regional organizations, to take timely and decisive collective measures through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, particularly Chapter VII, if peaceful means prove inadequate and the national authorities manifestly fail to protect their population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.“ However, the US had already carried out ”humanitarian interventions” before 2005, for example in the Horn of Africa and later in the former Yugoslavia.⁹

The fight against communism as a blank check

It was the beginning of unprecedented military interventionism. The “new world order” proved to be short-lived, because in 1999 the US and its allies committed the first essential violation of international law since the end of the Cold War. The Kosovo War began without the approval of the UN Security Council in order to circumvent a veto by Russia and China.

A year earlier, the US and Israel – along with five other states – had voted against the adoption of the ICC Statute at the Rome Conference. Although it was signed by President Clinton on his last day in office in December, the Bush administration reneged on its accession in May 2002, together with Israel.

Ten months later, the US committed its second significant violation of international law with the invasion of Iraq. Israel had already violated international humanitarian law several times since 2001 in its suppression of the second intifada.

The “war on terror” was the common banner under which George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon began their offensives. It replaced the “fight against communism” as a blank check for flagrant disregard for the principles on which the international order is based.

The principle of the responsibility to protect was then invoked in 2011 to legitimize the intervention in Libya led by the US and France. This operation quickly went beyond the mandate of the UN Security Council, which had been made possible by the abstention of permanent members Russia and China. This precedent discredited the instrument. This is probably why a “responsibility to protect” was no longer invoked in response to massacres such as those in Syria.

Western states have also abandoned this principle with regard to the current genocide in Gaza. It seems that little remains of the entire edifice of the international order. The disregard of many Western states for the ICJ and ICC rulings against Israel and its political leadership has permanently discredited the liberal claim of this order. These states reacted completely differently to the ICC arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin in March 2023 than they did to the arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu, which the same court issued on November 21, 2024.

There is another effect: by passively accepting the crimes of the current Israeli government, Western governments and political parties, but also many intellectuals, are contributing to the trivialization of their own right-wing extremists, whose hatred of Jews has been fueled for years by Netanyahu’s policies.¹⁰ The “new anti-Semitism,” which is attributed wholesale to Muslims and all those who defend them or criticize Israel, is a category used by right-wing extremist forces in Europe and the US to exonerate themselves from actual hatred of Jews. And it is precisely these forces with which a common front is then formed.

Talk of “new anti-Semitism” also promotes indifference to the suffering of the Palestinians and denial of the current genocide. When progressive circles in Western countries join in, they are disregarding their own political traditions.

Within the transatlantic alliance, the forces of the extreme right are on the rise everywhere—including in the two countries that stood firm against the Axis powers in World War II: the US and the UK.

The attempt to breathe new life into the post-Cold War international rules-based order has failed miserably.

This is not due to the rise of the extreme right, which basically only flourished after the attempt had already failed. Rather, it is due to the inconsistency, hypocrisy, and hegemonic arrogance of those who always present themselves as defenders of liberalism.

If the West stands by and watches the genocide in Gaza, the end of this order is sealed. Then the promise of a rules-based international system, made by the West in 1945 and renewed in 1990, will be irretrievably lost.

¹ Karitha means – similar to Nakba – catastrophe or disaster, whereby karitha is the stronger word and can be translated as “great catastrophe.”

² “Smotrich says Gaza to be ‘totally destroyed’, population ‘concentrated’ in small area,” May 6, 2025. See also Gilbert Achcar, “What will become of Gaza?”, LMd, June 2024, and Alain Gresh, “Gaza – the old fantasy of expulsion,” LMd, March 2025.

³ “Trump’s Gaza deal: War crimes in exchange for beachfront property,” The New York Times, February 7, 2025.

⁴ “An army’s morality is measured by a single factor. The IDF has failed this test,” Haaretz, Jerusalem, December 12, 2024.

⁵ See Gilbert Achcar, “The US as a warring party,” LMd, February 2024.

⁶ Peter Beinart, “Joe Biden’s alarming record on Israel,” Jewish Currents, January 27, 2020.

⁷ See “Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” Amnesty International, December 5, 2024, and Akram Belkaïd, “Genocide allegations mount,” LMd, January 2025.

⁸ “Biden says he doesn’t know whether Israel is holding up peace deal to influence 2024 US election,” Associated Press, October 4, 2024; see also the “White House Tapes,” October 18, 1973, Richard Nixon Presidential Library.

⁹ See Anne-Cécile Robert, “Origines et vicissitudes du ‘droit d’ingérence’,” LMd (Paris), May 2011.

¹⁰ See Grégory Rzepski, “Avec des amis comme ça …,” Manière de voir, No. 199, “L’antisémitisme et ses instrumentalisations,” February/March 2025.

Translated from French by Andreas Bredenfeld

Gilbert Achcar is the author of the book Gaza, génocide annoncé. Un tournant dans l’histoire mondiale, published in 2025 by La Dispute, Paris. The text is taken from this book and has been adapted.

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China has the upper hand

Le Monde diplomatique – May 2025

Beijing has long been preparing for an escalation in the trade war with the US. Thanks to Trump, it can now present itself as the guarantor of the global economic order. However, China must reduce its trade surplus in order to avoid angering other partners and driving them toward protectionism.

by Renaud Lambert

[This article posted in May 2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.woz.ch/lmd/25-05/china-am-laengeren-hebel/!Q2Y37V5PYFA.]

In the port of Yantai, China Photo: picture alliance/cfoto

Amidst the “Trump storm” that has swept across the world since the 47th US president took office, the heads of state and government of the Old Continent sometimes look like seasick cruise tourists clinging to the railing on deck. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is quite different: it is acting like the captain on the bridge, keeping a steady eye on the horizon.

On April 2, 2025, the US president imposed tariffs on almost every country in the world, bypassing Congress and citing a “threat to national security.” The scale of the move came as a surprise to the international community—but not to the CCP, if the party newspaper People’s Daily is to be believed. In its editorial on April 6, 2025, it wrote: “According to international market assessments, the US tariff attack was more severe than expected, but the Party’s Central Committee had anticipated the new package of measures.”

The tariffs imposed on China, initially at 34 percent, added up to an average of over 70 percent when combined with the tariffs already in place. The editorial acknowledged that Trump’s decision would have an impact on China’s economy, “but the sky will not fall on our heads.”

Beijing retaliated by raising Chinese import tariffs, restricting exports of certain rare earths that are particularly important for the US aerospace industry, and adding 15 more US companies to an export control list for dual-use goods.

This marked the beginning of a tit-for-tat exchange of sanctions between China and the US that sent financial markets into a tailspin. In early April, the S&P 500 stock index, which tracks the prices of the 500 largest US companies listed on the stock market, fell by more than 10 percent within three days. According to the BBC, this was “a plunge almost as abrupt as during the 2008 financial crisis and at the start of the 2020 pandemic.”¹

Beijing’s tactic of silence

While Trump’s billionaire friends urged him to reconsider his approach and interest rates on US government bonds – considered the ultimate safe investment – skyrocketed, the president insisted that his strategy was proving successful, as heads of government from around the world were calling him and “kissing his ass” to ask for negotiations.² Trump then announced a 90-day tariff pause on April 9, 2025, during which a universal tariff rate of 10 percent would apply to all countries. The exception was China, because Beijing had “disregarded the financial markets.” He therefore raised tariffs on Chinese products to an absurd 145 percent.

Beijing said this escalation was regrettable but didn’t scare China: “We don’t provoke conflicts, but we also don’t let them intimidate us,” the Chinese government said in an official statement on April 5, 2025. “We have been in a trade war with the US for eight years and have a lot of experience,” said an editorial in People’s Daily.

China has taken double precautions. Not only has it reduced the share of exports in its economy from 33 percent to around 20 percent between 2005 and 2022, according to the World Bank. At the same time, it has also reduced its dependence on the US market: at the beginning of Trump’s first term in office, 19.2 percent of all Chinese exports went to the US; by 2014, this figure had fallen to just 14.7 percent.

John Maynard Keynes with Chinese Finance Minister Kung Hsiang-hsi in Bretton Woods, July 1944 Photo: picture-alliance/dpa

During the same period, Chinese exports to the ASEAN countries (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) rose from 12.8 to 16.4 percent of total exports, and to Beijing’s partner countries within the New Silk Road initiative from 38.7 to 47.8 percent. “A decline in US imports,” concluded People’s Daily, “will not have a devastating impact on our economy.”

From Beijing’s perspective, the consequences for the US economy are more serious.³

This is because it is dependent on Chinese consumer goods, intermediate products, and rare earths. Any attempt to decouple is therefore dangerous: “Take the pharmaceutical industry, for example,” wrote geopolitical expert Arnaud Bertrand on April 5 on X. “How can the manufacture of these products be relocated back to the US as long as China dominates the global supply of important active ingredients and many intermediate products?”

According to Bertrand, it is of course possible to try to bring production back, but this requires special equipment, much of which is also manufactured in China: “One could decide to bring back the production of this special equipment, but this would require certain materials, the manufacture of which China also dominates.“

Wang Huiyao, president of the Beijing-based think tank Center for China and Globalization, concludes that the US has ”shot itself in the foot.“⁴ The Wall Street Journal agrees. Following Trump’s ”tariff blitz,” the April 4 editorial stated that the winner was already clear: Chinese President Xi Jinping.

On social media, Chinese nationalist circles are saying that, in order to win, the government in Beijing only had to remember the tactic of “yǐ jìng zhì dòng,” which means “doing nothing in response.”

The recipe for success fits even better with the developments of recent weeks: “Win without lifting a finger.” Although the leadership in Beijing appears determined to “fight to the end,”⁵ the current geopolitical crisis is, in the prevailing Chinese perception, primarily a crisis in which the US is “plunging itself into chaos” (China Daily, March 19, 2025).

“A civil war is quietly taking place in the US,” according to an analysis by the Chinese Foreign Ministry in March 2023. “Behind the Republicans and the Democrats are two diametrically opposed population groups that basically behave like two confederations under the same government.”⁶ This statement is reminiscent of the phrase “America Against America” – the title of the English edition of a book published in 2022, which was written by the young scholar Wang Huning back in 1991.

Today, Huning sits on the seven-member Standing Committee of the Politburo, the highest party body of the CPC. His book is a harsh critique of US democracy, which he argues has been hollowed out by individualism, social inequality, and racism. It is a foundational text of the “neo-authoritarian” movement, whose representatives see Trump’s election victory as a symptom of a disease in US society. It is also proof that centralized regimes are superior to liberal democracies.

On November 7, 2024, an article appeared on the China Academy web portal, which is close to this political movement, under the title: “China’s academics sit back, relax with a bag of popcorn and watch the US elections.”In the article, the media-savvy intellectual Zhang Weiwei, whose books are recommended reading for CCP members, describes how Chinese intellectuals are taking Trump’s revival in stride. And “with a dose of amusement,” which can also be found on China’s social networks, for example in the smug question of whether the US might not be experiencing its own “cultural revolution.”

The “Trump storm” is thus embedded in the larger context of a crisis that is exacerbating a profound transformation. According to this view, the US is now benefiting less than it used to from the globalization it has been promoting since 1945. If the current US president shares this assessment and expresses it in particularly colorful language, he is not saying anything new to China.

Trump’s shift toward isolationism and protectionism is seen less as the beginning of a new era than as the continuation of a trend that began some time ago and for which China is well prepared.

But even if Beijing benefits from Donald Trump’s presidency on the world political stage, his economic attacks threaten to expose one or two weaknesses in the Chinese model.

Xi as defender of free trade

In the academic discipline of international relations, a distinction is made between “revisionist” states that want to change the international order and “status quo powers.” China can be assigned to both camps: On the one hand, Beijing is in favor of reforming the international system in order to respond to the changes that have taken place since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. On the other hand, it wants to return to the status quo ante.

In March 1992, the New York Times published the following passage from a secret US Department of Defense document: “Our ultimate goal is to prevent the emergence of a new rival.” Therefore, everything must be done to “prevent an adversary from gaining dominance in a region whose resources, once under its control, would enable it to develop global power.”

At the time, the New York Times described this strategy as “the clearest rejection yet of collective internationalism—the strategy that emerged from World War II, when the five victorious powers founded the United Nations as an institution capable of mediating disputes and controlling outbreaks of violence.”⁷

A few years later, influential political scientist Gilford John Ikenberry recommended that Washington should take advantage of the “unipolar moment” and replace the architecture created in 1945 with an “international order based on rules that would ensure the global dominance of the US and the West even if America’s power were to decline.”⁸ Since then, the term “rules-based order” has been repeated like a mantra in the speeches of Western foreign policy makers.⁹

However, by deciding to withdraw the US from several United Nations (UN) sub-organizations, the Trump administration is taking a step that could lead to the dismantling of the international system established after 1945. China, on the other hand, has been moving away from the “keep a low profile” foreign policy doctrine of the Deng Xiaoping era since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 (1978–1989). At a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in March 2021, Yang Jiechi, head of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, declared that China defends “the UN-centered system and the international order based on international law” – and not “what a few countries tout as a so-called rules-based international order.”.¹⁰

According to political scientist Nadège Rolland, one thing in particular has changed: “China’s leaders are convinced that their country now meets all the requirements to not only play the role of critic and dissenter in the existing international order, but also to proactively promote its own view of things.”¹¹

During a panel discussion at the China International Finance Forum (CIFF) in January 2025, an interesting dispute arose when Zhang Weiwei, quoted above, pointed out that China has been the world’s largest economy in terms of purchasing power for almost ten years.

The influential Hong Kong banker Charles Li countered that Zhang was making a strategic mistake: “I don’t think it’s right to keep repeating that China is already number one. We Chinese prefer to be number two or three.” Zhang responded: “Those who underestimate their own strength can face serious geopolitical problems.

The US has long treated Russia as if its economy were the size of Spain’s. So they pushed ahead with NATO expansion at the risk of war. Now Putin only talks about his country’s economy in terms of purchasing power parity“ – and according to this calculation, ”Russia is Europe’s largest economy, ahead of Germany.“¹²

The days of ”keep a low profile” are clearly over. Between 2021 and 2023 – during which time Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described the G7 as the “steering committee of the world”¹³ – Xi made three moves to strengthen multilateralism: the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative (the English acronyms are GDI, GSI, and GCI)..

These three initiatives have since formed the backbone of Chinese foreign policy. They outline the prospect of a “different” international order, with Beijing insisting that China does not seek to claim the role of a hegemon. At the same time, however, this new order is intended to overcome US hegemony.

What do these proposals contain? A return to an international order based on the principles of the “Westphalian model” that form the foundation of the United Nations system (absolute sovereignty of states, territorial integrity, non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations); Taking into account the security needs of each country; Renouncing unilateral sanctions; Refocusing international cooperation on development as a priority goal; Advocating for the right of peoples to choose their own social order and rejecting the automatic superiority of Western ideas; Recognizing the right to development as a human right; Stronger representation of the countries of the “Global South” in international organizations.

From Beijing’s perspective, two of its most recent diplomatic successes can be traced directly back to initiatives launched by China: the signing of the agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia on March 10, 2023, to normalize diplomatic relations; and the agreement between the Palestinian parties to the conflict in July 2024, which led to the formation of a government of national unity in Gaza.¹⁴

The three Chinese initiatives received the support of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and more than 120 countries and international or regional organizations. However, according to the Washington think tank Atlantic Council, they have so far existed “essentially only as ideas.” If they are to play a significant role in reshaping the world order, China must “convince the world that the principles it has put forward are not merely a substitute for the US-led rules-based order, but are in fact an improvement and better suited to resolving conflicts, addressing the challenges ahead, and promoting prosperity.”¹⁵

Could it be that Trump, with his raging against any kind of order and any rules, is helping to promote China’s plans? For now, everything will depend on the other open battle being waged between Beijing and Washington: the battle on the economic front. In the immediate future, the focus will not so much be on preserving a multilateral order as on issues of world trade.

However, reservations about free trade did not begin with Trump in Washington. A look at history makes it clear, we read in the China Daily (March 19, 2025), that the US always advocates this principle when it serves its interests, but switches to protectionism “as soon as market forces challenge its supremacy.”

In line with this maxim, Trump initiated a neo-mercantilist policy at the beginning of his first term in 2017, which has remained fundamentally unchanged under his successor Joe Biden. On the contrary, on April 27, 2023, Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave a highly regarded speech at the Brookings Institution in which he harshly criticized the effects of neoliberalism in the US: The country’s industrial base had been “gutted,” the logic of government investment, the guiding principle of the “American project” after 1945, had been abandoned, and the working population no longer participated “in the fruits of growth.”

Sullivan thus declared the “Washington Consensus” to be over – a turning point that justifies the introduction of protectionist measures aimed at blocking China’s access to certain sensitive technologies.

The US concluded its last free trade agreement in 2023. It was negotiated with Japan and covers only important minerals. China signed free trade agreements with Serbia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua in the same year and is currently negotiating with Honduras, Israel, Moldova, Norway, and Sri Lanka. Preliminary negotiations are underway with Bangladesh, Canada, Colombia, and Mongolia.

So while Trump is imposing tariffs on (almost) the entire planet, China is trying to position itself as the real guarantor of an economic order that Washington has long promoted. A few days before Trump celebrated his “Liberation Day,” Chinese President Xi Jinping gathered more than 40 international corporate leaders in the Great Hall of the People and delivered “one of his most passionate speeches in defense of international trade and the system of globalized supply chains,” according to the Financial Times on March 29, 2025.

“China is already the most important trading partner for more than 140 countries,” Zhang Weiwei points out. “If Donald Trump and the US decide to withdraw from globalization, we will push ahead with it.” On April 7, the Chinese embassy in Washington posted a video on X in which former US President Ronald Reagan warns of the protectionist threat.

But “defending international trade” is unlikely to be of much help to China’s partners as they try to negotiate a reduction in US tariff barriers for themselves. Trump’s strategy is neither “free trade” nor truly protectionist, but above all “transactional,” i.e. focused on individual deals: it is quite conceivable that he will tear down trade barriers for countries that join his campaign against China.

When the CCP points to declining Chinese exports to the US, it fails to mention that exports destined for the US market are now partly routed through companies in Southeast Asia in order to circumvent the barriers erected during Trump’s first term. This explains, for example, why US imports from Vietnam and Indonesia have risen so sharply in recent years.

Washington has not failed to notice these evasive maneuvers: “We expect countries such as Cambodia, Mexico, and Vietnam to no longer allow China to circumvent American tariff barriers,” warned Peter Navarro, Trump’s advisor on trade and industry, in the Financial Times (April 8, 2025). Countries that comply with this request can probably hope for a reward.

However, China is by no means helpless in the current power struggle. Not only has it virtually caught up with the cutting-edge technologies that Washington wanted to withhold from it, but Beijing is also already hinting at the extensive arsenal of retaliatory measures at its disposal.

On April 8, 2025, Ren Yi, an intellectual known for his proximity to those in power, showcased this arsenal in his blog. According to Yi, China could suspend cooperation with the US on fentanyl, the synthetic drug that has led to the opioid crisis ravaging the US and some of whose ingredients are manufactured in China.

In addition, Beijing could further restrict exports of agricultural products such as soybeans and sorghum to the US or impose import restrictions on US poultry products. Countermeasures could also be taken in the service sector, where Washington has a trade surplus with Beijing.

Under pressure from the economic elite in his own country, Trump has already announced a series of exemptions from his tariffs. At a press conference in the White House on April 22, he even announced that tariffs on Chinese goods would be “significantly reduced” in the future.

Daniel Russel, vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington, therefore believes it is possible that Xi will exercise patience and “bet that Trump’s tariff monster will collapse under pressure from the financial markets.”¹⁶ In doing so, the head of the world’s largest communist party can count on support from speculators in the financial world.

In fact, however, China has its sights set on future negotiations in the conflict with the US. The prospect of the economy growing less strongly than expected is causing concern in Beijing. Youth unemployment rose to over 15 percent in 2024, and everything points to increasing conflicts in the labor market.

China has undergone several internal crises in its history, and for the CCP, a dynamic economy is the only means of preventing social or political protests. “The core issue for China is its need for security,”¹⁷ said Deng Xiaoping to US President George H. W. Bush in February 1989.

A few months later, the protest movement culminated in Tiananmen Square, and the “core issue” became the top priority. On June 4, 1990, the first anniversary of the Tiananmen Square “events,” the party newspaper People‘s Daily appeared with the headline: “Stability is the top priority.” This view has not changed since then: Xi took office immediately after the Arab Spring, which he – by his own admission – viewed with skepticism.

When the Chinese captain on the high seas fears an approaching storm, it is also because he fears mutiny.

China is therefore doomed to growth. Despite all the recent measures designed to boost domestic consumption, the Chinese are spending less since the collapse of the real estate market in 2021 wiped out part of their savings. The rulers in Beijing responded by announcing that they would do more to strengthen domestic consumption, but above all to boost export-oriented production capacities again. This includes, in particular, automation, through which China hopes to secure its competitiveness.

This has (at least) two consequences. The first is domestic: “If too many unskilled workers are displaced from modernized industries, their wages will stagnate or fall. This weakens demand and slows growth,“ the Financial Times (March 25, 2025) quotes an expert as saying. The result: ”Countries whose workforce is socially polarized are often politically unstable.” The CCP’s efforts to maintain stability could therefore lead to a policy of growth at any price, which in the end would again jeopardize stability.

This gives rise to a second, geopolitical problem: China’s share of global industrial production has risen from 6 percent in 2000 to 32 percent today.¹⁸ That accounts for 18 percent of global gross domestic product, but only 15 percent of consumption. The Financial Times (April 9, 2025) sums up what this means: “To get rid of its huge production surpluses, China is dependent on demand from other countries.” This is the problem that already preoccupied John Maynard Keynes at the end of World War II (see the box following this text).

In 2024, China’s trade surplus reached an all-time high of just under $1 trillion. The Chinese export boom is already considered the main reason for the deindustrialization of some countries in Southeast Asia. This phenomenon is further exacerbated by US tariffs, which are forcing Chinese companies to divert certain exports to the Asian region. Europe must also expect to be flooded with products that China can no longer sell in the US.

If Beijing fails to seize the opportunity offered by Trump and does nothing to redress this imbalance, it could provoke China’s partners to take protectionist measures. And such measures could be less erratic and much more cleverly planned than those of Donald Trump.

¹ “Wild market swings as tariffs rattle US economy,” BBC, April 8, 2025.

² “Trump says tariffs will help House Republicans ahead of midterms,” The Hill, April 8, 2025.

³ See also: Zongyuan Zoe Liu, “How China Armed Itself for the Trade War,” Foreign Affairs, April 29, 2025.

⁴ “China punches back as world weighs how to deal with higher US tariffs,” Associated Press, April 4, 2025.

⁵ “China’s Wang Yi lauds Russia, pans ‘two-faced’ U.S. policy at NPC,” Nikkei Asia, Tokyo, March 7, 2025.

⁶ “The State of Democracy in the United States: 2022,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, March 20, 2023, www.mfa.gov.cn.

⁷ Patrick Tyler, “U.S. strategy plan calls for insuring no rivals develop,” The New York Times, March 7, 1992.

⁸ See: John Bellamy Foster, “The New Cold War on China,” Monthly Review, Vol. 73, No. 2, July/August 2021.

⁹ See Anne-Cécile Robert, “A geopolitical battle cry,” LMd, November 2024.

¹⁰ “How it happened: Transcript of the U.S.–China opening remarks in Alaska,” Nikkei Asia, March 19, 2021.

¹¹ Nadège Rolland, “China’s vision for a new world order,” NBR Special Report, No. 83, The National Bureau of Asian Research, Washington, D.C., January 27, 2020.

¹² “China’s strategy to Trump 2.0,” January 26, 2025, thechinaacademy.org.

¹³ “Remarks by national security advisor Jake Sullivan at the special competitive studies project global emerging technologies summit,” White House press release, September 16, 2022, bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov.

¹⁴ See Kishore Mahbubani, “Europe incompetent, China successful,” LMd, January 2025.

¹⁵ Jonathan Fulton, Tuvia Gering, and Michael Schuman, “How Beijing’s newest global initiatives seek to remake the world order,” Atlantic Council, Washington, D.C., June 21, 2023.

¹⁶ “Asia Society Policy Institute experts comment on the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China,” email sent to the Aspi mailing list on April 11, 2025.

¹⁷ Qian Gang, “When did ‘maintaining stability’ become a common term?” (in Chinese), September 19, 2012, cn.nytimes.com/.

¹⁸ “China fuels export drive with extra $1.9 trillion,” The New York Times, April 9, 2025.

Translated from French by Andreas Bredenfeld

Renaud Lambert is an editor at LMd, Paris.

Keynes’ foresight

On March 23, 2009, in the midst of the shock of the subprime crisis that had caused horrendous damage worldwide, China’s central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan gave a much-noticed speech. With the Western powers – the architects of the house of cards that had just collapsed – discredited, Zhou seized the opportunity to call for

that it was now finally time to tackle a “reform of the international monetary system.” Zhou pointed to the structural problems caused by the lack of a truly international reserve currency. He then recalled a plan presented by economist John Maynard Keynes at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference: the creation of an international currency, the Bancor.

Unfortunately, Zhou said, the US pursued its own project, even though it was now becoming clear that Keynes’ approach was “clearly more far-sighted.”

Keynes was convinced that the Bancor should be linked to a second measure: an international balancing mechanism to regulate the problems caused by trade imbalances. For Keynes, the tensions that led to the major conflicts of the 20th century also resulted from the surpluses accumulated by some countries and the deficits incurred by others. From a global perspective, the sum of the surpluses was equal to the sum of the deficits.

Keynes therefore proposed imposing a series of sanctions on countries that export too much, while adopting accompanying measures for countries that are overly dependent on imports, so that they would be spared the harsh medicine of austerity policies. The restoration of balance was to be achieved by adjusting national exchange rates in relation to the bancor.

Today, reform of the international monetary system is once again a highly topical issue. However, it is doubtful whether today’s China, with its extreme trade surpluses, would still refer to the “far-sighted” Keynes.

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How real is the Russian threat?

Le Monde diplomatique – April 2025

It is understandable that people in Latvia and Poland fear a Russian attack. What is less logical is the way Brussels and Paris are conjuring up the threat of war for the whole of Europe. Such alarmism stems from a misreading of Putin’s expansionist ambitions, which could prove costly for Europe.

by Hélène Richard

[This article posted in April 2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.woz.ch/lmd/25-04/wie-real-ist-die-russische-bedrohung/!RNHZ4DNDFYK6.]

Brussels, March 6, 2025: Macron claims leadership in the defense of Ukraine Photo: LUDOVIC MARIN/picture alliance/ap

On February 20, 2025, French President Emmanuel Macron informed citizens via social media: “France is not an island. There are about 1,500 kilometers between Strasbourg and Ukraine. That’s not very far.”

So after Donbass, is Alsace next? Macron’s exaggerated alarm signal may even have made his defense minister, Sébastien Lecornu, smile. Like most serious people, Lecornu rules out such a scenario: “As a nuclear power, we are logically in a completely different position than a country that does not have nuclear weapons,” Lecornu stated in an analysis published six months ago.¹

Hervé Morin, French defense minister from 2007 to 2010, takes the same line, posing the rhetorical question in the weekly newspaper Journal du Dimanche on March 9: “Is it necessary to frighten our fellow citizens to such an extent by more or less suggesting that the greatest threat to France’s borders is Russia?”

The same question could also be asked in Germany. Or in Spain and Italy. But what is the situation in Central Eastern Europe and around the Baltic Sea? Is a major conflict to be expected in the middle of the “old continent”?

With few exceptions, influential figures and politicians across Europe are no longer limiting themselves to the subjunctive in their predictions. They are convinced that the Russian army is already mobilizing. If a permanent ceasefire is reached in Ukraine, President Macron declared on March 1 (in the daily newspaper Le Parisien), Russia will attack “Moldova for sure and Romania perhaps.”

Special case Ukraine

According to a report in Le Monde on February 22, Raphaël Glucksmann, a leading figure in the Place Publique (PP) party, is convinced that Russian troops will invade Estonia or Latvia.

The Member of the European Parliament is thus picking up on the domino theory that was recently put forward by the French weekly magazine L’Express. According to this theory, Putin will not rest until he has brought Ukraine to its knees, after which he will attack Georgia, Moldova, or even the Baltic states and Poland.

From the perspective of Brussels or Paris, a diplomatic solution does not seem feasible because two things are taken for granted: first, that Russia only understands the language of force, and second, that Putin is a liar anyway.

This mistrust stems from a particular interpretation of the causes of the conflict, according to which Moscow bears sole responsibility for the war.

This interpretation reduces the events of the last 30 years to the wars started by Russia: against Chechnya in the 1990s, against Georgia in 2008, the occupation of Crimea and the war in Donbass in 2014, and finally the large-scale attack on Ukraine in 2022.

According to this interpretation, the sequence of these wars demonstrates Moscow’s intention to restore the borders of the old Soviet Union, if not to regain a sphere of influence in Europe, primarily through manipulated elections. The invasion of Ukraine – note that this was after Russia had committed itself in 2015 to a diplomatic solution to the conflict over the separatist and pro-Russian republics in Donbass – is seen as proof that the Kremlin government was merely waiting for a pretext for a renewed offensive.

Anyone who opposes this prevailing interpretation is quickly accused of propagandistic “blindness” or even of being “fascinated” by Putin’s Russia. The West as a whole, too, is said to have shown criminal weakness toward the Moscow regime.

In fact, the mistake made by the Western world was not so much in believing that Putin would keep his word, but rather in assuming that it could break its own promises without consequences. When Paris and Berlin took over the patronage of the Minsk agreements in 2015, their main aim was to “buy time so that Ukraine can recover and rearm,” as former President François Hollande and former Chancellor Angela Merkel later explained.²

They allowed Kyiv to make the organization of regional elections, which were to be held in accordance with Ukrainian electoral law and under OSCE supervision, contingent on regaining control of its borders. And they assumed that the Kremlin would accept the conflict petering out.

Many observers shared this view at the time. Hadn’t Russia been content in the past to keep similar separatist processes simmering in Georgia and Moldova so that these countries could not join NATO because of “unresolved crises”? Moreover, France and Germany believed they had already made a major concession by accepting the annexation of Crimea without much protest. Moreover, both countries continued their economic cooperation with Russia: France primarily in the nuclear industry, Germany with its natural gas imports.

But there was something the West failed to consider: For Moscow, Ukraine is not the same as Georgia or Moldova. Since 1991, Russia has viewed both Belarus and Ukraine as closely allied countries, and thus as much more than just a sphere of influence. This is especially true of Ukraine, which was considered the “heart” of the Slavic Orthodox nation during the Tsarist Empire.³ The annexation of the Crimean Peninsula was intended to draw a “red line” for the West and put an official stop to the further expansion of European-Atlantic influence toward Kyiv. When that didn’t work, Moscow went back to being hostile.

From Russia’s point of view, Ukraine is a special case. So, you can’t just assume that Moscow is also after other Eastern European countries because it invaded its neighbor.

Geographically, the Baltic states and Poland are on Russia’s border, but they’re not as important to Moscow as Ukraine is. The risks that the Kremlin has taken to bring Kyiv into its sphere of influence by force are negligible compared to the risks that Russia would take if it wanted to extend this sphere of influence to other countries.

This also applies to states with Russian-speaking minorities such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which are now members of NATO. Even if Moscow were to feel an insatiable hunger for more territory, it would be difficult to give in to this urge. A military attack on the Baltic states would mean confrontation with a NATO coalition comprising some 30 European states (not to mention the US).

Russia is by no means the Germany of the 1930s, to which it is constantly compared. Under the banner of “appeasement,” a spirit of weakness is denounced that allegedly gives the Russian steamroller free rein; historical parallels are drawn to 1938, when France and Great Britain abandoned Czechoslovakia. However, the blitzkrieg launched by Nazi Germany against Poland in September 1939 – under the pretext of bringing Danzig “home to the Reich” – led to the surrender of six European states just nine months later.

By way of comparison, today the Russian army is gradually conquering a few hundred square kilometers in the Donbass, even though it is fighting only one army, albeit one that receives logistical and military support from the West. Can one seriously assume that this army, which has failed to take Kyiv, will invade Estonia or Latvia for no reason?

Moldova is another case. The country is more vulnerable and does not enjoy security guarantees from NATO. However, if Moscow wanted to establish a land connection from Crimea to Transnistria or even advance to the mouth of the Danube, it would first have to conquer the entire northwestern coast of the Black Sea. This would include Odessa, which has twice the population of Mariupol, which was occupied and destroyed in May 2022.

However, despite these considerations, the scenario of an expanded war in Europe cannot be ruled out. Not all wars begin because some general staffs have drawn up secret plans of conquest. The First World War was the result of an arms race between the powers of the time, as well as the diverse alliance commitments that became the trigger for the “world conflagration.”

Such war-mongering factors are also abundant in our present day. The danger probably stems less from Russia’s military power than from its awareness of its own shortcomings and losses. This assessment is shared in particular by Russia’s neighbors, which are themselves heavily dependent on Washington for their military strength.

The beginning of a new arms race

Since February 24, 2022, the Russian armed forces have suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries, as well as the loss of over 12,000 armored vehicles, including around 3,800 battle tanks.⁴ Although the military leadership was able to use arsenals from the Soviet era, this advantage in conventional weapons has largely melted away. In terms of armored vehicles, the Russian army now only has reserves that, depending on the model, make up between 10 and 50 percent of its 2022 stock.⁵

In the Baltic Sea region, Russia has fallen behind in terms of conventional weapons, as political scientist Pavel Baev from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (Prio) explains: “During the first phase of its invasion of Ukraine, the Russian high command considered it necessary to deploy its most powerful combat troops, including the air assault division and the marine infantry brigade, in the most important offensive operations. At the same time, the amphibious units of the Baltic Fleet were transferred to the Black Sea.”⁶ Most of the armed forces were also withdrawn from the so-called Kaliningrad stronghold.

Baev concludes: “Whatever the outcome of the war, Russia will neither regain its superiority in the Baltic Sea region nor come anywhere close to establishing a balance with NATO forces.” This is especially true given that NATO is implementing a new plan to strengthen its forces in line with the new situation.

In response to US President Trump’s change of heart on Ukraine, the European pillar of the Atlantic alliance in the Baltic Sea region is now being strengthened. At the end of December, Germany and Poland joined the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF). This British initiative within NATO is now supported by twelve northern European countries, while the US is not involved.

At the last JEF summit in Tallinn on December 17, the member countries decided on joint measures against Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers. Denmark, which controls the straits between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea and thus access to the Atlantic, also signed the declaration of intent.⁷

This means that Russia’s second most important economic area around St. Petersburg, which borders the Gulf of Finland, can be sealed off in the event of war by the five NATO countries Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland. In addition, all five countries have announced their intention to withdraw from the Ottawa Agreement, which bans the use of anti-personnel mines.

On March 5, Emmanuel Macron referred in a TV address to the military goals Moscow wants to achieve. Given the targets – 1.5 million troops, 7,000 battle tanks and 1,500 combat aircraft by 2030 – it can be assumed that the Kremlin is factoring military developments on its borders into its calculations in order to be prepared for a long-term confrontation.

But before EU members declare rearmament against the Russian threat to be a matter of collective reason, they should consider the fatal “security dilemma” pointed out by strategists: in the absence of international agreements, both sides interpret the other’s defensive measures as offensive actions, prompting them to further expand their military capabilities. This in turn reinforces the sense of threat on the part of the opponent, and so on.

This scenario is particularly worrying because there are hardly any arms control instruments left in Europe. The 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty) expired in 2007; the Vienna Document, which provided for the exchange of information on military maneuvers above a certain scale, was only in force from 1990 to 2020, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) from 1987 to 2019.

The gradual scrapping of these peacekeeping instruments also marks the history of the last wars on the European continent. The first violation of the CFE Treaty was committed by Russia, which failed to withdraw its forces from Moldova and Georgia in the 1990s according to the agreed timetable. In 1999, Moscow then signaled its displeasure with NATO’s intervention in Kosovo. At that time, the Western alliance decided for the first time to intervene militarily contrary to its defense doctrine and without a mandate from the UN Security Council.

In a later phase, Russia justified its disregard for its obligations and its assertion of conventional supremacy in Europe with the 2004 accession of the Baltic states to NATO—which did not sign the CFE Treaty—which it saw as destabilizing its western flank.

During negotiations on updating the Vienna Document—i.e., the exchange of information on military maneuvers—Moscow stipulated in 2016 that NATO must abandon its “policy of containing Russia” and instead “recognize and respect Russian interests and establish normal relations with the Russian Federation.”⁸

As for Russia’s violations of the INF Treaty, these were justified by the installation of a US missile defense shield in Romania and Poland, to which Moscow responded by developing its hypersonic missiles.

Today, the danger of a renewed uncontrolled arms race is greater than ever. It could only be averted by reactivating arms control instruments, which would have to provide for information exchange, coordination, limitation, and inspection visits. Unfortunately, however, we are once again faced with a major paradox: whenever such instruments are most urgently needed, the conditions for renewed arms limitation agreements are at their least favorable.

The second major obstacle to de-escalation is that Russia continues to attempt to use military force to shift an international border. This is one of the most serious violations of the international order, which Ukraine can never accept—or only in the event of surrender.

This also applies to Europe as a whole. Most governments believe they have no choice but to continue the war until Moscow is prepared to abandon its Ukraine project once and for all.

But perhaps we could try a broader perspective: negotiations on a pan-European security architecture. That would mean exploring Moscow’s interest in a definitive withdrawal of the US from Europe. In other words, accepting the death of military transatlanticism, which Russia has been demanding since 1991.

The countries that value the US protective shield the most, especially Poland and the Baltic states, are opposed to this concept. But France, as the country that has been so vocal in championing the idea of strategic European autonomy, should not dismiss this option out of hand.

At the moment, Paris, like the United Kingdom, is trying to take the lead in the confrontation with Moscow at the expense of working on a formula that would officially give Moscow control over part of Ukrainian territory without recognizing new borders. But that could be a first step toward a peace treaty.

¹ Sébastien Lecornu, Vers la guerre? La France face au réarmement du monde (Towards war? France and global rearmament), Paris (Plon) 2024.

² Hollande in March 2023 in a “prank call” interview with two Russian satirists. See Euronews, April 11, 2023. Former German Chancellor Merkel expressed a similar view in Die Zeit on December 7, 2022.

3 See Juliette Faure, “Wer sind die russischen Falken?” (Who are the Russian hawks?), Le Monde diplomatique, April 2022, and Jules Sergei Fediunin and Hélène Richard, “Wie imperialistisch ist Putins Russland?” (How imperialist is Putin’s Russia?), Le Monde diplomatique, January 2024.

⁴ “Attack on Europe: Documenting Russian equipment losses during the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” oryxspioenkop.com, April 1, 2025.

⁵ Pavel Luzin, “L’industrie et la guerre de Poutine: déconstruire un mythe”, February 21, 2024, legrandcontinent.eu.

⁶ Pavel Baev, “Russia faces hard strategic reality in the reconfigured Baltic/Northern European theater,” Institut français des relations internationales (Ifri), November 14, 2023.

⁷ See Charles Perragin and Guillaume Renouard, “Russia’s shadow fleet,” LMd, March 2025.

8 Quoted in Olivier Schmitt, “Maîtrise des armements conventionnels et sécurité européenne: la montée des périls” (Conventional arms control and European security: the rise of dangers), Les Champs de Mars, 2018.

Translated from French by Heike Maillard

Hélène Richard is an editor at LMd, Paris.

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The International Alliance of Censors

Le Monde diplomatique – April 2025

[This article posted in April 2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.woz.ch/lmd/25-04/die-internationale-der-zensoren/!RPE84DNDP688.]

An axis is forming before our very eyes – not one of “evil,” i.e., the enemies of the West. Nor is it that of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. It is a much broader alliance, and yet hardly noticed: the International Censors, in which autocrats, democrats, and bureaucrats unite. Six days after taking office for the second time, Donald Trump banned the US Air Force from telling the story of black pilots in World War II. Terms such as diversity, discrimination, and gender disappeared from government websites. Shortly thereafter, Trump signed an executive order against foreign students who express pro-Palestinian views for “supporting jihad.” On March 8, police arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a student at Columbia University. In Europe, too, muzzles have become fashionable. In France, a former president, two former prime ministers, numerous mayors, and members of parliament—from both right-wing and socialist parties—have called for anti-Zionism to be included in the law as a form of anti-Semitism. This would make an opinion held by left-wing activists and ultra-Orthodox Jews alike a criminal offense.Censorship is also being justified with the war in Ukraine. In 2022, the EU banned the Russian broadcasters RT and Sputnik. The decision was welcomed by President Macron, who also did not protest when the Israeli parliament banned the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera in May 2024. In Romania, the first round of the presidential elections was annulled in December 2024 because a candidate close to the Kremlin had too big a lead. He was barred from running again because of alleged Russian interference via social media. “Our information space is the geopolitical battlefield where we are currently losing the war,” warned EU chief diplomat Kaja Kallas in March, comparing the spread of fake news to a violation of territorial integrity.The criminalization of political opponents, previously typical of authoritarian regimes, is now reaching democracies. The Network Enforcement Act, which came into force in Germany on January 1, 2018, to control social media is so vaguely worded that, according to Human Rights Watch, it sets a dangerous precedent for other countries “that want to restrict freedom of expression online.” Criticism also came from PEN Berlin. Dark dictators and enlightened liberals, religious fanatics and outraged activists are all dancing to the tune of the censors and following, as liberal thought leader Benjamin Constant wrote in 1814, the “remarkable tendency to reject everything that causes the slightest inconvenience, without checking whether this hasty renunciation might not entail lasting inconveniences.” For the victory of one side is followed by the revenge of the other. And at the end of such struggles, only one thing is certain: a loss of freedom for us all.Benoît Bréville

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Toothless in Brussels

Le Monde diplomatique – April 2025

The chimera of EU security policy

by Anne–Cécile Robert

[ThisarticlepostedinApril2025istranslatedfromtheGermanontheInternet,https://www.woz.ch/lmd/25-04/zahnlos-in-bruessel/!G88M00WFRS4P.]

Various fantasies are circulating in the discussions about a common European defense policy. One of the most audacious is that of a united Europe standing together to defend itself against geopolitical threats. But the EU is no longer a major player on the world stage. The first European summit following the rapprochement between the US and Russia took place in London on March 2, 2025—even though the UK left the EU in 2020. In addition to eleven EU countries (out of 27), Norway and Canada also took part in the special summit on Ukraine, as did NATO member Turkey, which has been waiting to join the EU for decades.This was followed on March 11 by a round of talks in Paris on a possible peace plan for Ukraine. The talks were attended by 34 chiefs of staff from Europe, as well as Canada and Australia, who are interested in playing a mediating role.

NATO in Europe

(large view of infographic)

The European Union only came to the fore when money was at stake: On March 4, the EU Commission announced a €800 billion financing program for the national defense industries of EU countries. According to a white paper, even the legendary restriction on annual budget deficits to 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) could be abolished for the benefit of arms manufacturers.However, the laudable goal of reducing dependence on US technology is all the more difficult to achieve given that cooperation in the arms industry, despite some successes, is hampered by serious disagreements, not least between France and Germany. The impending windfall is one of a series of previous attempts. It began in 2004 with the European Defense Agency (EDA); this was followed in 2017 by the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) and in 2021 by the European Defense Fund (EDF). In March 2021, the European Peace Facility was established, which – contrary to its name – finances the export of lethal weapons to war zones and was increased a year later to strengthen Ukraine’s military potential.In fact, the European Commission has no powers whatsoever when it comes to the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP). It is the economic governing body of the single market and has only very limited influence on foreign policy (e.g., through trade policy), even though the European Council (EC), consisting of heads of state and government, deliberately maintains the opposite impression. In September 2024, for example, the EC, by means of a very liberal interpretation of the EU treaties, authorized the Commission to appoint a Commissioner for Defense. The strategic objectives of a common foreign policy must ultimately be determined by the member states, with the principle of unanimity applying. Despite the various structures listed above, the adoption of a genuine common defense policy is prevented by the different histories of the countries and their diverging interests. This leads to ad hoc circles such as the London “coalition of the willing” in the case of Ukraine.After the trauma of the Yugoslav Wars, the EU developed a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) in 1993, which could lead to a common defense policy. With this in mind, it has since established several coordinating bodies, such as the Political and Security Committee (PSC) and the European Union Military Committee (EUMC). It also runs five military and training missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, Somalia, and Ukraine. Inconsistent and inconsequential However, this institutional framework is not based on a “European vision” and does not contribute to the development of such a vision. The “Strategic Compass for Security and Defense” adopted on March 21, 2022, is limited to a catalog of objectives within the framework of NATO.And on March 6, 2025, the 27 heads of state and government of the EU declared “that a stronger and more capable European Union in the area of security and defense will make a positive contribution to global and transatlantic security,” but only in complement to NATO, which “remains the foundation of collective defense for EU member states that are members of NATO.”¹On the subject of Ukraine, it is stated that security guarantees will only be provided in association “with like-minded and NATO partners.” This explicit reference is not an empty credo, but reaffirms a decisive decision. Europe is a product of the Cold War. Or, in the words of transatlanticist Jean-Louis Bourlanges: “It was not Europe that made peace. Peace made Europe.”²This birth defect is once again evident in the Ukraine debate in the active role played by the UK, which is presenting itself as a bridge to Washington, and in the involvement of NATO member Turkey, even though the country under Erdoğan is moving further and further away from democratic standards.The excitement surrounding the “Russian threat” may create a quick external unity, but it cannot permanently curb the centrifugal forces that are affecting the Union, which has expanded from six to 27 members.While the Baltic states and Romania are unsettled by Russia’s actions for historical reasons, the Mediterranean countries are concerned about other threats on their southern flank: chaos in Libya, conflicts between Algeria and Morocco, tensions between Greece and Turkey, migration pressure, and jihadist networks in North Africa.Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni complains about the EU’s lack of solidarity with her country, which is receiving large numbers of refugees, boasts of her close ties to President Trump, and wants nothing to do with a European military presence in Ukraine. Polish President Andrzej Duda, on the other hand, constantly emphasizes his attachment to a “Europe of nations and traditions,” as does his Slovak counterpart Robert Fico. New subgroups are constantly emerging within the EU: EuroMed with the nine Mediterranean countries Cyprus, Croatia, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, and Slovenia; or the Three Seas Initiative led by Poland with 13 members: Poland, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic.³ And in 2021, Paris and Athens signed a bilateral defense agreement that is clearly directed against Turkey. “The politics of all powers are determined by their geography,” Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to the King of Prussia on November 10, 1804. This is also the view of the European Council when it states, albeit less pointedly, in its declaration on Ukraine of March 6, “that any military support and security guarantees for Ukraine will be provided in full respect of the security and defense policies of certain Member States and taking into account the security and defense interests of all Member States.”⁴However, even the idea of a European pillar of the transatlantic alliance does not answer the question: What is the point of it all? The EU also continues to refer to NATO because it commits the divided member states to a common geostrategic line set by Washington.⁵ This also avoids committing to a European leadership power. After all, it will be impossible to agree on any of the three contenders—France, Germany, and the UK—whose respective pasts as major powers do not evoke fond memories.In practice, in the event of a crisis, NATO has the right of first response, while the EU’s CFSP plays only a complementary role and is usually limited to “subordinate” training or crisis management missions. However, if the US under Trump does indeed withdraw largely from Europe, this could open up strategic space for the EU. At least in theory. However, EU-friendly political scientist Federico Santopinto asks: “Can the proud and sovereign nations of the Old Continent remain united in the long term without the hegemonic presence of the US at the helm?” His answer is: “History teaches us otherwise.”⁶The different national narratives and the lack of a common geopolitical culture make European unity seem like a mission impossible. Simplistic incantations—marked by a certain Russophobia—create the appearance of unity, but have nothing to do with reality. “For peace, the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Ukraine must be respected,”⁷ the European Council proclaims—regardless of the obvious balance of power on the ground. Although Ukraine is riddled with corruption, it is portrayed as an outpost of “European values” (the rule of law, democracy). Yet invoking the principles of international law would suffice to justify support against Russian aggression. What is missing, Santopinto argues, is “a realistic and courageous analysis.” A sober assessment would lead to the admission that there are only two ways out of the current impasse: “either to become even more involved in the conflict in the hope that the Ukrainians will succeed in recapturing part of their territory” or “to open a channel of negotiation with Russia.”But the Europeans have not taken either path and have thus “proved themselves inconsistent.” And also inconsistent: although the Union has been moving ever closer to Russia since the wave of enlargement in 2004, it is now surprised to find itself on Russia’s doorstep. Otto von Bismarck achieved German unification under Prussian leadership by driving France into war. Wars as a vehicle for strengthening authority—that’s old hat, but it still fits. Back in September 2008, journalist Jean Quatremer wrote: “War, or rather the possibility of war, is the prerequisite for providing the Union with the same mechanisms that once enabled the formation of nation states.”⁸Today, there are growing calls in the Commission and the European Parliament for decisions on CFSP matters to be taken by qualified majority in the name of “efficiency.” In a Union without political substance, such “armed” Europeanization would ultimately lead to the establishment of an authoritarian, bellicose bureaucracy that sees only black and white.¹ Extraordinary meeting of the European Council, March 6, 2025, Conclusions (EUCO 6/25) Point 7.² “Ce n’est pas l’Europe qui a fait la paix, mais la paix qui a fait l’Europe,” Le Monde, October 12, 2012.³ See Pierre Rimbert, “Le monde vu de Pologne,” Manière de voir, No. 194, December 2023/January 2024.4 Extraordinary meeting of the European Council, March 6, 2025 (EUCO 10/25). The declaration on Ukraine was supported by only 26 member states, not including Hungary.⁵ Wolfgang Streeck, “Overextended: The European Disunion at a Crossroads,” American Affairs, vol. IX, No. 1, Spring 2025.6 Federico Santopinto, “En Ukraine, Trump a tort et les Européens aussi”, Institut de recherches internationales et stratégiques (Iris), February 24, 2025.7 EUCO 10/25 (see note 4), point 4e.8 Quoted from Pierre Rimbert, “Si tu veux l’Europe, prépare la guerre,” Le Monde diplomatique, Paris, October 2008.Translated from French by Claudia SteinitzAnne-Cécile Robert is an editor at LMd, Paris.