PRESIDENT of the European Council Donald Tusk yesterday issued a desperate plea for Europe, China, America and Russia to ‘work together’ and ‘prevent conflict and chaos’ on an international scale.
In an unprecedented warning that economic catastrophe was looming and that the world is being ripped apart by the crisis of capitalism, Tusk warned: ‘We are all aware of the fact that the architecture of the world is changing before our very eyes and it is our common responsibility to make it change for the better.’
Tusk, speaking at the opening of a summit between the EU and China being held in Beijing, added that trade wars can turn very quickly into ‘hot conflicts’ before going on to plead: ‘There is still time to prevent conflict and chaos.’
Tusk’s appeal for these countries to work together was aimed squarely at the US and he was clearly shaken by the pronouncement on Sunday by US president Donald Trump that the EU is one of his ‘greatest foes’, just before he met with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s outburst occurred when he was asked in a TV interview to name his ‘biggest foe globally right now’ and he started by naming the EU before going on to list traditional US rivals Russia and China. Tusk had immediately responded to Trump naming the EU as his greatest foe and claiming that the US is mercilessly exploited by its allies by insisting: ‘America and the EU are best friends. Whoever says we are foes is spreading fake news.’
Just how friendly American capitalism is towards the EU was demonstrated in a letter sent to European nations by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week dismissing contemptuously the appeal from the EU for EU companies to be exempted from US sanctions against Iran.US sanctions against Iran were imposed in May after Trump unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Under their terms, any company that has financial dealings or investments in Iran will be subjected to penalties by the US, a move that will cost EU companies and banks tens of billions of euros and pounds. The EU had gone on bended knees begging for exemption from sanctions, only to be brutally told by Pompeo that waivers would only be given on national security or humanitarian grounds.
We can forget the ‘humanitarian’ grounds as US imperialism has no interest in humanitarianism. The only grounds for waver from the dictats of Washington is if it is in the economic interests of US capitalism. In other words, Trump is determined to turn the world into mere vassal states of US imperialism only allowed to exist as long as they open themselves up to the exploitation and subjugation of American capitalism.
A global trade war has been declared by Trump, a trade war that Tusk correctly worries will soon escalate into a ‘hot’ war for survival in the rapidly unfolding world crisis of capitalism. It is this crisis that is shattering all the old relationships between capitalist nations, pitching former allies against one another in a life or death struggle to be the sole survivors in a world crash and all Tusk can do is issue impotent pleas for American imperialism to work in harmony with its rivals.
The architecture of the world is indeed changing before our eyes, capitalist crisis has torn apart all the old relationships and now is on the brink of a worldwide crash in which the capitalist classes will wage war not just on one another but on their own working class to dump the crisis on their backs.
The working class will not sit back and see its lives destroyed in this crash. It has emerged forcibly across the world to deal blows against the old bourgeois political order and the austerity imposed to save the bankers and bosses from collapse.
With world capitalism in a state of chaos and collapse, the working class internationally is the only force that can resolve this crisis by putting an end to this bankrupt and historically outmoded capitalist system once and for all through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
