“Every time Trump or members of his administration have lashed out at Europe, including Ukraine, Europeans have absorbed the blow with a forced smile and bent over backwards to flatter the White House.” (…)
“While a systemic answer to Europe’s security conundrum is not in sight, Europeans do have the levers to prevent Ukraine’s capitulation and create the conditions for a just peace.”
No, “they” are not alone because those “Europeans” discussed here are not on Europe’s side but exclusively their own.
Just like the <1% everywhere else they will simply throw the population under the bus to be on the authoritarians good side as one of them.
Are we -the European populations- alone? Yes, very much so. But that’s okay because propaganda-induced brain-damage is for a long time preventing us from even recognizing reality. So we will happily keep voting people into power that are only there to enrich themselves and their buddies while blaming imaginary scape goats… immigrants in most cases still, then LGBTQ+ -as we can see in those countries without relevant immigration already-, probably followed by everyone with another political opinion (if history is any indication), then intellectuals in general because people still thinking on their own -even if they keep quiet- are a risk. And once we reached the “random people have to be the scape goat today”-stage they will all cry out and ask how it could have come that far.
Yup. This idea of geographical, ideological alignments or lack thereof between blocs or countries entirely misses what’s actually going on. It’s why it’s rarely revealing and it fails to create useful predictions. Instead I find that looking at the owner class as acting against the working classes domestically and internationaly provides a much better picture of the world.
Wouldn’t the US working in ever deeper cooperation with both China and the EU be better for business? Billionaires move pretty easily between all three anyway.
By all appearances they’ve never fully committed with China because of the ideological gap, and are cutting out the EU now do to new, emerging ideological differences.
Lots of US and EU billionaires are working in deep cooperation with China. Tesla’s, Apple’s, NVIDIA’s (until they got cut off recently), Ford’s, VW’s, and many many others. Heck, Taiwan’s billionaires are all-in with China. There is however an intra-class competition for profits. If Elon was able to buy up all the major American and Chinese companies and collect profits from them, he would. Their current owners wouldn’t like that. My claim is that this is the major driver behind what sometimes appears as ideological or geographical misalignment. Depending on who’s billionaire political reps get in power, there’s a “shift in ideology” which serves to legitimize the state promoting that billionaire’s interests.
“EU is too far left. It’s overregulating AI and not paying its fair share for NATO” - an ideologically structured message that translates to Big Tech and the American MIC currently own this government. They want access to the EU market for cloud services and they want the EU to buy more weapons. If you pay close attention you could even catch how the ideological disagreements change depending on the state of negotiations.
At the same time this class works to reduce the share of profits labour gets among other class war fights anywhere they operate since that’s a common interest. Another common interest is not paying taxes. Or offloading negative externalities on the working class.
I recall recently when the EU decided to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs, VW started lobbying against the tariffs. I was initially baffled. VW said that the tariffs, protecting EU workers, many of which VW workers, would hurt VW’s bottom line because of expected losses in China, due to likely counter-tariffs. Think about that. There’s no Western values VW cares about. They’re ready to throw out meausres that would save their European factories in order to keep their Chinese factories running and selling product. They act internationally and prioritize cooperation with whichever jurisdicrion yields the highest profits. In this case cooperating with China and their Chinese competitors.
This is why leftists and unionists say that labour organization has to work internationally to be truly effective. Because the owner class cooperates across borders.
For me, this theory of the world has given me explanations with fewer contradictions and significantly better predictions. That’s a sign of a good theory and I’m sticking with it until it breaks. 😊
See, that just seems like “it’s ideology, but also billionaires are there”. European businesses don’t want tariffs, but there’s still European tariffs. The simplest explanation would just be that it wasn’t their call.
It feels like you’re starting with your conclusion and then building a story about it to end at whichever facts are appropriate for the instance. It’d be more convincing if you could put it in a form agnostic of where and when it’s being applied. Like, when do billionaires want tariffs, and when don’t they? Then, does it actually predict policy decision?
It’s an essay format, not a deductive argument so the thesis is stated, then it’s given support. Not saying you should be convinced, just explaining why it seems like this. It’s also a light year away from an exhaustive analysis. I can’t do that here and now. It takes books to do this.
To this point, I’ll restate that there is competition for profit (not in a single market but profit making overall) and therefore state control between billionaires since state control modulates profits. What tariffs are good for some are bad for others. E.g. lumber tariffs are great for the lumber industry billionaires but bad for the construction ones due to increased cost of lumber. They both compete for making profit because if say lumber makes a lot more than construction for a while, they could buy construction. Cross-industry consolidation happens all the time. So when a billionaire doesn’t want tariffs but there are tariffs anyway - then it probably wasn’t their call. Instead it’s either the call of another, or an uninfluenced politician. I think the latter is an endangered species given how much billionaires spend on lobbying and I don’t think it’s a more complicated explanation. In fact given how capital-intensive political campaigns are, the existence of an uninfluenced politician that rose to a position of power where they got to set industry tariffs might be more complex. Obviously there are regional differences, e.g. US vs Canada vs EU. I think the tendencies are the same but the degree is different at any point in time.
To be clear I am not excluding ideology entirely, I think the owner class is a much bigger driver, including significantly driving the ideology of the day at a given place and time.
E: In the hypothetical where the tariff-profiting lumber billionaire buys construction, their attitude towards tatiffs may change depending on how the profit maximization formula works now that they own both lumber and construction. It may turn out that getting rid of the lumber tariffs yields higher profits overall, in which case that billionaire and the politicians who represent them would become anti-tariff.