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this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
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I’ve said this before: these countries aren’t stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing.
Trump’s tariffs against China is curbing exports to the US, and unlike in 2008, China’s property market bursting means that it can no longer turn to massive infrastructure investment to drive economic growth like it used to, and the Internal Circulation strategy that was supposed to promote domestic consumption has ended with a whimper. The post-Covid consumption spending did not happen, and we’re actually getting deflation, which is even worse than inflation.
France knows this. It knows that China is now more dependent on export than ever before, because the surplus export goods have to go somewhere that is not America. The EU will be forced to absorb them, and France also knows that if they just let China dump all their cheap goods inside the EU, it will also be the end of their domestic industries.
With Europe in austerity since Nord Stream bombing, France has even more incentive to take maximum advantage of China’s current predicament.
These countries know exactly what they’re doing. They are all calculating to position themselves as the winners of Trump’s global tariffs.
Instead of forging a new alternative to neoliberalism, both Europe and China have chosen to become the true defender of global free trade, claiming that it is the US (Trump) that has violated the mythical sanctity of free trade agreement. And so, a mercantilistic fight it is.
And while trying to screw one another up, they also secretly hope to get a good deal from Trump behind each other’s back so they can be the winner of the race. This is the true goal of Trump’s global tariffs - to unleash a dirty mercantilist war while it hides itself behind tariffs so as to reap the harvest from the fallout, with the ultimate aim of controlling and reshaping the global supply chain to the interest of the declining empire. It was never about re-industrializing America.
All the “haha European leaders are so stupid, they’re just vassals of the US” takes that we often see on online anti-imperialist spaces aren’t grounded in material reality, as if building Nord Stream itself wasn’t an act of defiance to assert their energy independence from the US. They are only “stupid” in the sense that they are guided by the ideological indoctrination of neoliberalism. Once you understand this, Europe’s and China’s actions will make sense.
No one is secretly hoping to get a good deal from Trump. Everyone expects Trump to leave office at the end of his term and the precedent has now been set that the USA cannot be trusted to stand by any deals. Everyone is having to do the math of what to do about America's military because its economy is becoming less and less relevant by the month. When the only thing stopping economic disruption is tradition, and you actively destroy the tradition of stability, no one gets to make long term plans that involve economically stable relationships.
The US makes almost nothing. The vast majority of its GDP is artificially created markets involving intellectual property, military arms, insurance, finance, and the massive service industries that have been built around these industries and around navigating US government bureaucracy. There are only a handful of reasons why anyone cares about the USA:
Speed run these 4.
Number 1 - I claim this is the only thing the US has keeping its hegemony relevant at every single turn. The rest can all be obviated.
Number 2 - this one is the one that Europe is fucked by. They can't fix this without aligning with BRICS and specifically China and Russia. That's because China and Russia are aware that the 3 pillars of their national liberation are military security against the US, domestic production with strong trading partners, and the ability to decouple from the US dollar. They are actively navigating the process of decoupling from the dollar and Europe will have to join them or be completely dominated by US financial institutions.
Number 3 - the US consumer market is utterly collapsing and has been for decades. The contradiction is very far advanced at this point, with average Americans putting medical costs on 17% interest credit cards. For decades the only reason the US remained a strong consumer market was because of the unfettering of debt and usury domestically. This is running its course. There is no real consumer economy that isn't 100% predicated on debt, and there is no debt that isn't 100% predicated on the dominance of US finance capital globally, and there is no globally dominant US finance capital without violence.
Number 4 - Europe is fucked. Their internal contradictions have reached their end stage. The only way they could continue their existence this long was through colonialism, and when the USA took over colonialism from European powers, it found that a distinct form of neocolonialism could be turned against them through finance capital and dollar hegemony. This form of neocolonialism didn't extract from European land, that was alread exhausted before the US rose to power. Instead, this form of neocolonialism was an extraction from the people. NATO is a tribute system to the US. Greece's dismemberment by German financiers was an echo of what US finance capital has been doing to the 3rd world for a century. The EU is trapped by its own unsustainable social relations and decoupling from the USA means social collapse into chaos and civil war between socialism and barbarism, a war that the US will enter on the side of barbarism. All the US has to do is cut off their supply of energy, and they already did a doozie with Nord Stream 2.
It all comes down to material violence, realpolitik not ideology. It's not because everyone's a neoliberal that they're acting like this. They're acting like neoliberals because the material conditions are requiring this behavior. For the European leaders, abandoning neoliberalism will result in dramatic violence and social collapse. For China, abandoning neoliberalism will accelerate the West's movement to world war.
You've got base and superstructure inverted.
The fact that america blew up nordstream 2 essentially setting the largest manufacturing power on the euro continent (which is also full of us military bases and flooded with think tank selected politicians and propaganda) into its death rows AND essentially got even the government to further sanction one of its largest trading partners as a response to an us planned terror attack —- is proof enough that european states are vassals. Being a vassal state doesn’t mean there are no lack of ambitions or chaffing against the us, in fact that france wants to be the winner of trump tariffs and not go against the us, only further highlights the vassal status.