From Roosevelt and Stalin’s “Big Two” to Putin and Trump’s ‘Odd Couple’, history might not be repeating itself, but it does feel like it’s having a laugh at our expense.
What happened in Alaska felt less like the deliberations from an encounter between two warring figureheads, and more the choreographed delivery of a joint position statement long held and worked out.
A big reveal of the commonality between capitalism’s war mongers usually lost in the facade of rival narratives. As such, an actual sneak peek behind the veil.
Is it conceivable that Trump is imagining an axis with Putin ultimately against China? Disregarding Europe, already treated as a backwater on the one hand and aligning their own strategic objectives on the other, may well be the best last-ditch superpower throw of the dice for Russia and the necessary counterweight the US needs to fully pivot East.
Together, they meet on a strategic level over their relationships to Europe, and Putin cannot regain the central Asian ‘Stans against Chinese opposition without US support.
Similarly, detaching Russia from its Chinese chaperone leaves the latter surrounded and alone to face the US in the Pacific. In this region and potential future conflict theatre, the US has just concluded its biggest war game since the cold war, it involving hundreds of aircraft and 50 locations thousands of miles apart.
The former ‘partnership’ of Europe has seen the writing on the wall. It has not been idle, though possibly futile, in its efforts to respond.
It has been buying time telling Trump what he needs to hear. While talk of increased defence spending and rearmament might look like dancing to the US tune, they are more likely a gallop towards an attempt at defence autonomy in the anticipation of the abandonment that is their likely fate. The realities of the global power competition they’re about to confront alone.
Back to the future? “Thank God for the French army!”, Churchill said in 1933. History tells us we are really in trouble when the Anglo-French entente is the answer to a crisis!
Yet here we are again. Prime Minister Starmer and President Macron held in early July what was effectively billed as a nuclear summit. They declared a mutual combining of their nuclear capacities against unspecified yet forthcoming, “extreme threats”.
French President Macron declared this both, “.. a message to our partners, and our adversaries”. This begging the question: is an Anglo-French nuclear deterrent a salvation or does it bring us closer to war?
If a pragmatic alliance against populism and multi-polarism could find its own slogan of provocative militancy, it might be:
What do we want? Pragmatism! When do we want it? Within an appropriate timescale when circumstances are optimally aligned!
Now maybe, the circumstances are urgently aligning for Starmer and Macron. A patriotic toast in the last chance saloon of Europe making its last mark as a global defining entity.
Each successive conflict seems to dwarf the other in horror. From Ukraine to Gaza, from Gaza to Sudan; to name only a few. Whilst they all risk becoming sidelined footnotes on the march to a superpower reckoning. The horizon of which could be accelerating towards us.
There will be no history nor analysis after that. Tragically, given all the potential we have as a species, here will exist, just the ashes of tyrannical hubris.
Whatever our analysis or speculation, we are revolutionaries not journalists. It is not our role to idly conjecture or to excite the debate. Our purpose here is to emphasise that whatever the twists and turns may appear to be, no matter how unlikely, the trajectory remains the same.
Capitalism and war are two wheels of the same bike driving inexorably towards global destruction in a compulsive competition for power and resources. Its detail becomes secondary to the primacy of our solution: Class war!
The focus for their rivaling attentions may chop and change. Ours, however, remains the same – them and this existing nightmare of a socio-economic system! Them, the exploiting capitalist class who run the economies and nations in their interests and at our expense. The system that has no interests except profit, and which exploits and oppresses us to this end.
We are the world’s producers, the global working class. Without frontiers and beyond borders, we are used as the cannon fodder of their wars of exploitation and domination. Without us, all wealth and our world, would not exist. Without them as a ruling class – war, famine, environmental degradation, exploitation and oppression will cease to exist.
Our choice and our task is a fore gone conclusion. It is also in reality no choice at all. Fight for survival but also for the creation of a truly human community beyond exploitation and destruction.
AnarCom Network 