Author: Barry

Next week, on 24 and 25 June, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) will meet in The Hague for its annual summit – the first since Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency.

Established by the US to confront the USSR, control Germany and hold the balance of power in Europe – according to the CIA – since the fall of the USSR, NATO has been systematically widening its mandate and ambitions far beyond the North Atlantic.

As the new NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said in March, when visited Trump in the Oval Office, he was eager to ‘work together to ensure that [the NATO summit] will be a splash, a real success projecting American power on the world stage’.

Trump’s US is determined that the European NATO states step up their engagement with the US war drive, support the US-led cold war, and increase military preparations and spending for US-led hot wars.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, No Cold War and the Zetkin Forum for Social Research have produced a valuable dossier: NATO: The Most Dangerous Organisation on Earth, which can be read and downloaded from here.

By Biljana Vankovska

As NATO’s next summit looms – against the backdrop of an escalating proxy war in Ukraine and a genocidal horror in Gaza – the sane and moral world must roar in defiance, shattering ideological shackles. NATO is a zombie alliance, lurching forward despite its irrelevance, its fangs dripping with the blood of nations it claims to protect. In Ukraine, NATO’s members pour fuel on the inferno, championing escalation over peace. The United States, its puppet-master, plays a vile charade – preaching peace while strong-arming allies to bankroll its war machine. Trump’s $175 billion Golden Dome, a space-based missile defence boondoggle, is a reckless gambit that threatens global annihilation.

Without US muscle, NATO is a toothless fraud. Its true mission – past and present – is not defence but terror-mongering, fabricating enemies to feed the ravenous military-industrial complex. This hydra now entwines media, academia, and Hollywood, peddling war as entertainment. NATO is a global arms bazaar, hawking obsolete weapons and testing new ones on the corpses of the vulnerable. Its mantras – ‘peace through strength’, ‘path to peace with more weapons’ – is Orwellian poison, weaponising language to silence dissent. Those who dare question this madness are smeared as traitors to peace.

The Hague summit will churn out its tired script: skyrocketing military budgets – now potentially 5% of GDP – siphoning resources from health care, education, and the poor. Russia and China will be vilified as existential threats to justify this plunder. NATO flouts the UN Charter and its own founding charter, leaving a trail of ravaged nations and dead civilians. Its cheerleaders – think tanks, the media, and warmonger officials – demand a ‘stronger, fairer and more lethal NATO’, lusting for hypersonic weapons, preemptive strikes, and space militarisation. This is not defence; it’s domination on steroids.

The 1999 bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a turning point in NATO’s history. Launched without UN Security Council approval, it was a brazenly illegal assault, justified by a sham ‘humanitarian’ pretext. No legal basis existed; NATO’s actions mocked Articles 51 and 2(4) of the UN Charter, setting a blueprint for lawless militarism dressed in moral drag. Article 2(4) enshrines the principle of state sovereignty and prohibits unilateral use of force. Article 51, which governs the right to self-defence, provides the only explicit exception to this rule, allowing military force solely in response to an armed attack. Since NATO’s intervention was neither authorised by the UN Security Council nor conducted in self-defence, it constituted a breach of both provisions of the UN Charter.

Its 50th anniversary was celebrated with bombs on a sovereign state that did not threaten NATO whatsoever. It was the promotion of the ‘out-of-area’ doctrine – something that would prove very useful in the forthcoming interventions in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. The 1999 bombing campaign wasn’t about human rights protection – it was imperial border-carving, birthing client states like Kosovo and outposts like Camp Bondsteel, the United States’ Balkan fortress. The Kosovo conflict was complex, its suffering real, but NATO’s illegal intervention unleashed chaos, unaccountable for war crimes like depleted uranium, civilian infrastructure strikes and a significant number of ‘collateral deaths’. It gave the hegemon a blank check to redraw maps and shatter states. It de facto opened the Pandora’s box for any other great power.

In May 2000, during a lecture at the George C. Marshall Center marking the first anniversary of NATO’s intervention, I issued a Cassandra-like warning: that Macedonia – my country – would soon be drawn into military conflict as a result of the spillover effect. Nine months later, that prediction became reality. NATO, alongside the EU, imposed a logic of ethnic partition, echoing the blueprint used in Bosnia. To this day, the Balkans suffocate under the legacy of NATO’s so-called ‘military humanism’ (to borrow Chomsky’s phrase). The EU’s state-building medicines did the rest. The entire region still resembles a powder keg. Ironically, in 2018, Macedonia – renamed North Macedonia – surrendered its constitutional identity in exchange for NATO membership, seduced by hollow promises of peace, prosperity, and security. Instead, the country finds itself entangled in the Ukraine quagmire, expected to allocate up to 5% of its GDP to armaments, while more than a third of its population languishes in poverty.

NATO’s economic and social toll is catastrophic. Its demand for ever-higher military budgets – 2% of GDP, now 3.5%, or 5% – is a death sentence for social welfare. Hospitals crumble, schools decay, and citizens are crushed under austerity while NATO’s warlords feast on our taxes. Anti-NATO circles rightly decry this economic vampirism, but their calls for budget restraint or austerity tweaks are band-aids on a terminal disease. These palliative measures leave the beast intact, free to drain nations dry. The real cure is radical: disband NATO entirely and embrace a multilateralism based on the UN Charter principle: peace by peaceful means. Anything less is complicity in its crimes.

Peace movements will protest the summit in The Hague and elsewhere, but NATO’s elite, barricaded behind security cordons, will sneer, as will their media lapdogs. NATO’s complicity in Gaza’s genocide and Ukraine’s catastrophe will be buried. The ruling class, deaf to public outcry, thrives on our practicality and civility. Peace activism must be a relentless, daily rebellion, not summit-pageantry. The warmongers rule our nations, funded by our labour and taxes, making this fight local, too. In my country, Macedonia, the Levica (Left) party demands the country’s withdrawal from NATO. My 2024 presidential programme proposed a simple, defiant act: a letter to the US State Department to exit the alliance and embrace neutral status instead.

In a fractured, multipolar world, where Trump’s erratic reign has shattered order, NATO and the EU are fusing into a militarised monolith. The EU’s ReArm initiative erases their boundaries. This isn’t about ideology; it’s about survival. Like the child in Andersen’s tale, we must scream the truth: NATO is a naked destroyer, perpetuating violence (physical, structural, and cultural) while gutting the UN system and imperilling global peace.

Disband it. Leave it. Choose military neutrality and work for a shared future for humanity. Nothing less will do.

No to NATO. Yes to Peace.

The above article was produced by Globetrotter. Biljana Vankovska is a professor of political science and international relations at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, a member of the Transnational Foundation of Peace and Future Research (TFF) in Lund, Sweden, and the most influential public intellectual in Macedonia. She is a member of the No Cold War collective.

By John Ross

As Europe approaches NATO’s 24–26 June summit in The Hague, its 750 million people face a decisive strategic choice that will affect their lives for years to come – and one with far wider global impact.

The policies implemented in Europe in recent years have been disastrous socially, economically, politically, and militarily. Europe is experiencing worsening social conditions, its largest war since 1945 in Ukraine, and the biggest rise of far-right authoritarian, racist, and xenophobic forces since the Nazis in the 1930s.

The proposals to the NATO summit would worsen that situation. The key question is therefore whether Europe will continue down this destructive, disastrous path or adopt policies that offer a way out.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has proposed to the 32 NATO members that ‘the NATO summit… aim for 3.5% hard military spending by 2032’ – a 75% increase from the previous 2.0% of GDP target.

Trump calls for even higher military expenditure of 5% of GDP. Rutte opened the door to this by supporting a commitment to ‘1.5% related spending, such as infrastructure, cybersecurity, and things like that. Also achievable by 2032’. The 3.5% plus 1.5% adds up to Trump’s 5%.

The social and political consequences of such a course are already clear. Europe’s economies are nearly stagnant, with the EU’s annual per capita GDP growth averaging less than 1% from 2007 to 2024. The IMF, somewhat optimistically, projects an increase to only 1.3% by 2030. With rising inequality and reductions in social spending due to austerity policies, hundreds of millions of people in Europe have already experienced stagnant or declining living standards. Diverting more resources into military spending, already being accompanied by social spending cuts to finance it, will worsen that situation further.

The political consequences are also clear. Far right and neo-fascist forces, exploiting the worsening conditions, which are actually caused by austerity measures and increased military spending, by demagogically blaming immigrants and ethnic and religious minorities, will gain further strength.

The disastrous consequences for traditional left-wing and progressive parties supporting or enacting these rearmament and austerity policies, even before their support for the new NATO rearmament policies, are already known in major European countries. The SPD in Germany in 2025 saw its vote drop to 16%, the lowest since 1887. In the last elections at which they stood independently, the French Socialist Party gained only 6%. In Britain, the Labour Party, which already received one of its lowest votes since the 1930s at the last election, is now in the polls behind the far-right Reform Party.

In contrast, left-wing parties that have opposed austerity and NATO policies – La France Insoumise in France, Die Linke in Germany, the Belgian Workers Party – have maintained or significantly increased their support.

This disastrous collapse suffered by traditional left-wing parties that have supported war and austerity is extremely dangerous in the context of the rise of far-right parties across Europe.

The reason for the collapsing support for such parties is obvious. Such policies attack the population’s living standards. If parties claiming to be on the left continue to support austerity and rearmament, this trend of decline will just continue.

The only way out of this situation for both Europe’s population and the left is a complete policy reversal to one that prioritises social progress and economic development.

Following the end of the Cold War, Europe should have focused on fostering economic cooperation and minimising military tensions and expenditures. This would have created a balanced economic area, equivalent to the US, with a strong potential for growth by combining Western Europe’s manufacturing and services with Russia’s energy and raw materials. What was possible was shown in Asia by ASEAN, which, in a continent that had suffered the worst conflicts of the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam wars, became the world’s most rapidly growing economic region through a concentration on economic development and the absence of military blocs.

But, because an economically cooperating Europe could have been a successful competitor to the United States, US administrations pursued a path to prevent it – primarily through NATO’s eastward expansion, which was carried out in direct violation of US promises to then-Soviet Premier Gorbachev that NATO would not advance ‘an inch’ eastward after Germany’s reunification. Instead, in 1999, 2004, 2009, 2017, and 2020, new countries were added to NATO, and the door was deliberately left open to admitting Ukraine, known to be a red line for Russia due to Ukraine’s proximity to Russia and its position as a historical route for invasion.

Numerous US experts on Eastern Europe opposed this, led by George Kennan, the original architect of US Cold War strategy, who warned NATO expansion would be ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. But their warnings were ignored, with results culminating in the Ukraine war.

Now NATO demands rearmament and cuts in social protection to finance this war.

NATO forces simultaneously expanded outside Europe to participate in wars in the Global South, Afghanistan and Libya, set up numerous organisations and initiatives to prepare intervention in the Global South – such as the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, the Strategic Direction-South HUB, the Liaison Office in Addis Ababa – and has begun to expand into the Pacific – with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea attending every NATO summit since 2022. Such NATO expansion would involve Europe in even more conflicts and more calls for military expenditure.

What is required is the complete opposite – priority to social progress and investment for economic growth. Both require more spending and are therefore directly contrary to a military build-up.

Europe’s need for social spending is obvious. But Europe’s investment, the key to economic growth, has also collapsed. In the EU, investment, once depreciation (the wearing out of existing means of production) is taken into account, has halved from 7.4% of GDP in 2007 to only 3.5% on the latest data. International comparisons show this is enough only to generate 1% annual economic growth.

Additionally, the US is now pressing for further policies harmful to Europe and its people. The US has already enormously damaged Europe by its conscious policy of cutting off Western Europe’s source of cheap energy from Russia, achieved via the Ukraine war and the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline, which anyone who looks seriously at the matter knows was carried out by the US.

The Wall Street Journal now reports the US is seeking a ‘commitment from EU leaders to place new tariffs on Chinese industries’ – which would inevitably lead to equivalent retaliation by China, damaging Europe’s economy.

Simultaneously, the US proposes tariffs against Europe’s exports, followed by the imposition of an international trading system, replacing the extremely imperfect WTO with an even worse system in which the US unilaterally decides tariffs and rules!

Europe’s people have already suffered huge blows to their living standards because of US policy. They cannot afford more. On the contrary, Europe should, simultaneously with rejecting increases in military spending and social cuts to finance it, be seeking to regain access to cheap energy from Russia and expanding trade with China as part of a policy of economic recovery.

Faced with the disastrous proposals to the NATO summit, the left across Europe has begun to coordinate activity against increases in military spending through establishing Stop ReArm Europe. It is vital that all forces across the continent opposed to NATO’s policy further strengthen activity and cooperation.

The above article was produced by Globetrotter and No Cold War. John Ross is a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He is also a member of the international No Cold War campaign organising committee. His writing on the Chinese and US economies and geopolitics has been published widely online and he is the author of two books published in China, Don’t Misunderstand China’s Economy and The Great Chess Game. His most recent book is China’s Great Road: Lessons for Marxist Theory and Socialist Practices. He was previously director of economic policy for the mayor of London.

It has been nearly a month since the Trump administration announced the imposition of so-called “reciprocal tariffs” on U.S. trading partners – thereby provoking a global trade war. But the development of the situation has greatly exceeded the expectations of the U.S.. Not only did the Chinese government take the lead in showing a clear attitude of being willing to respond to the U.S. “to the end” but the anti-bullying positions of the international community have become louder.

Due to a focus on this situation in which the U.S. is fighting indiscriminately, and China is responding to each move, the trend of China’s domestic public opinion is also changing. The views once put forward in some places of a “China must lose theory” and the “surrender at the speed of light theory” are disappearing. More and more people realize that China “knows what it is doing and it has cards to play in its hands”.

But at this time, however, new misconceptions have also appeared.

One is “quit while you are in the lead”, thinking that China’s “tough stance” will eventually be difficult to maintain. Now the Trump administration seems to be softening it is necessary to stop at the right moment, claim that a small loss is in fact a victory, and make concessions and compromises as soon as possible to reach an agreement to avoid entering a stage of a difficult strategic stalemate.

The other view is that “victory is in sight”. which, seeing the US’s chaotic actions and softened rhetoric, then thinks that “the U.S. is afraid”. This view optimistically predicts that the outcome of the trade war has already been decided and China will soon be able to achieve a complete victory.

So, why are these arguments wrong, and how can we rationally view this present round of Sino-US struggle?

The “Biography of Mao Zedong”, compiled by the Literature Research Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, wrote: “The work ‘On Protracted War’ is full of dialectics and materialism and it has universal value in the methodology for analysing things.”

In May 1938, after defeat in the battle of Shanghai, the loss of Xuzhou, with Wuhan in a critical condition, Chinese society was in chaos and with loud discussion. At this critical moment, Comrade Mao Zedong calmly analysed the situation at home and abroad, and spent seven days and seven nights writing a speech “On Protracted War”. In this article, Comrade Mao Zedong did not use many obscure and difficult concepts to reason with. The whole article uses dialectical materialism and historical materialism to analyse the War of Resistance against Japan, and forcefully refutes various false arguments, clearing away confusions for the Chinese people to win the War of Resistance against Japan.

To understand the correct path it is necessary to first study history. Although today’s Sino-US struggle cannot be equated with the War of Resistance Against Japan in its character, the results of both are related to the direction of the country and the dignity of the nation. Amidst the chaotic clouds  it is a good idea to reread “On Protracted War” in order to understand the dialectical thought that “danger and opportunity coexist” as well as China’s strategic vision of why it will “secure a final victory”.

The Trump administration, which has existed for less than a hundred days, has unleashed a storm of tariffs. The aim was to secure a rapid victory, using huge pressure to force its opponents into defeat, and to reach rapid unequal deals in order to harvest the maximum benefits.

Facing this butchers knife, many countries have fantasized about ”feeding themselves to the wolves” in order to secure a moment of peace. But for China, it is simply unworkable to “ask for mercy”.

As the world’s second-largest economy China’s size cannot be concealed. even if  China lowers its posture, cold war thinking would still see it as an enemy to be eliminated. The Trump administration wields the stick of tariffs to try to extort and blackmail. Its overbearing and cruel methods are unprecedented. This is an extreme provocation against China’s national sovereignty and dignity. We have no room for concessions, let alone any reason to give in.

This round of U.S. tariffs covers more than 180 countries and regions around the world, which constitutes serious damage to the world trading system. As a responsible power, China resolutely opposes the US bullying tariff behaviour, not only in order to defend its own sovereignty, security and development interests, but also to defend multilateralism and justice in the world trading system.

Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics and a famous American economist, once satirically wrote: “U.S. members of Congress rely on the money of the 1% for re-election, serve the 1%, and even rely on the 1% to reward them when they leave office.”

The various contradictions which have accumulated in American society today are ultimately caused by the deterioration of the capitalist system. As spokesperson for the interests of capital, the U.S. government is absolutely unable to “self-revolutionize” and solve the root causes of these conflicts. It has to utilise suppression, extortion, exploitation and other means to transfer its conflicts to the outside world. This means that whether it is a trade war, a tariff war, or some other war, what the U.S. resorts to is risky behaviour, a gambler mentality, with an attempt to divert attention from its own irreconcilable contradictions. It is destined to act against the trend of human history.

In contrast, today’s China, as an “enabling power”, has always adhered to the development concept of a community of human destiny. It firmly stands on the side of maintaining globalization and a normal trade order, advocates mutual benefits and a win-win situation, and opposes unilateralism.

At the same time, China’s development has never been the result of gifts from others. It is the result of hundreds of millions of people’s self-reliance and hard work. For more than 70 years since the establishment of New China, China has always broken through blockades and overcome attempts to suppress it and has accumulated a wealth of experience in these struggles. This determines that China’s “carrying through to the end” is not purely words but is in line with historical laws. It is just, progressive, and a just cause enjoys abundant support. “The times and the situation are on our side, and victory ultimately belongs to China.”

The people are the true creators of history. In “On Protracted War”, Comrade Mao Zedong summed it up as “the soldiers and the people are the foundation of victory.” In the contemporary context, this thought can be extended as “the whole people are united and concentrating on doing their work well”. That is, in the protracted struggle between China and the United States, the most critical issue is to achieve China’s own development, improvement, progress and growth.

From the perspective of national strategy, this can be seen in the proposing of a new development pattern with the large domestic economic cycle as the main force, and the mutual promotion of the domestic and international twin cycles; to propose the development of new quality productive forces, shaping the development of new kinetic energy and advantages for growth; to deeply promote the construction of a unified large market across the country. Regarding the long-term nature of the Sino-US competition the Party Central Committee has already predicted that it will take the initiative to lay out a plan for the competition of major powers. This is the root of our confidence in dealing with attempts to contain and suppress China.

From the perspective of industrial development, both the Trump and Biden administrations are addicted to imposing technological sanctions, but they in reality imprison themselves, and even give rise to what might be called China’s “crisis dividend”. In recent years, China has concentrated its most advanced resources to break through the technological “chokepoints” and accelerate the domestic progress of key link industries such as artificial intelligence, big data, integrated circuits, and new energy. These have grown rapidly, showing strong capabilities in the strategic mobilization of resources and concentrated breakthrough capabilities.

At the social level, having dealt with various shifts, Chinese people have become more and more aware that the words the “imperialists desire to destroy China never dies” is not a hollow phrase. Only by daring to fight, and being skilful at fighting, can we turn danger into opportunity and secure  safety. After the Trump administration launched this round of trade war, many patriotic stories have unfolded: such as e-commerce platforms helping companies reliant on foreign trade to shift to domestic sales, consumers strongly supporting domestic production, shareholders following the “national team” to protect the country, and students declaring “scientific research serves the country”. Mainstream public opinion is highly united and has shown a strong awareness of the historical situation. This national ability of self-awakening, self-regulation, self-pressure, and self-optimization is the core support for the ultimate victory in the protracted struggle. .

Comrade Mao Zedong once emphasized: “The Chinese people are ambitious and capable, and they will catch up with and surpass the world’s advanced level in the far from distant future.” Today’s China is step by step turning that into a reality.

“Each generation has its own war of Resistance” [against Japan] and “each generation has its own Battle of Triangle Hill” [a major victory by China over the U.S. during the Korean war], these are popular comments on China’s internet after the United States provoked the new round of trade wars. History never repeats itself, but it always rhymes. Today, revisiting “On Protracted War” is not only because it provides us with a clear framework for strategic understanding, but also because the methodological wisdom, dialectical materialism, and mass line thinking it contains offers great enlightenment for international struggles in the new era.

By always adhering to sober strategic judgment, scientific methods of thinking, and a firm will to act, we will definitely be able to successfully complete this “long march in the new era”.

The above article, analysing China’s response to the tariff war launched by the U.S., was originally published in Beijing Daily under the title “Today, it is necessary to reread ‘On Protracted War’”. It was also published online here in Chinese.

By Abdul Rahman

Speaking in an informal meeting of the UN Security Council on Wednesday, April 23 China’s permanent representative Fu Cong questioned the unilateralism pursued by the US in international trade claiming it “severely infringes upon the legitimate rights and interests of all countries” and violates the rule based multilateral trading system.

Cong claimed a multilateral approach remains the only option for the advancement of all countries and affirmed “no country has the right to put itself above international law” and dictate terms to others. He offered Chinese cooperation in dealing with the situation to the countries which are willing to stand for free and fair international trade.

China’s reaction was a response to the “tariff war” unleashed by US President Donald Trump ever since he began his second term in January this year. Under the so-called reciprocal tariff regime, the US announced high tariffs against imports from most of the countries in the world.

The implementation of the “reciprocal tariffs” has been postponed for 90 days for all countries except China, whose exports to the US currently face a 145% tariff. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has offered bilateral negotiations to reach agreements with the countries that want to avoid the announced reciprocal tariffs.

In response to the steep tariff against its goods, China announced a 125% tariff on imports from the US. It also vowed to fight Trump’s strong arming tactics and has so far refused to sign a bilateral agreement. It has also called the arbitrary tariff hikes a violation of international trade laws and demanded the reversal of the policy.

Amid the flurry, China has proposed that countries make a coordinated response to Trump’s tariff war, citing that individual agreements may harm global trade.

Chinese Finance Minister Lan Fo’an and the Governor of China’s Central Bank (the People’s Bank of China) Pan Gongsheng reiterated their country’s position during the G20 finance minister’s meeting in Washington DC which concluded on Thursday, April 24.

Claiming that trade tensions, created by Trump’s arbitrary policies, “are disrupting global industrial and supply chains, undermining the momentum of global economic growth,” Pan claimed trade and tariff wars have no winners. He pushed for greater economic and financial coordination. Lan called for strengthening multilateral cooperation to face the difficult times ahead, Global Times reported on Friday.

No appeasing the bully

China said earlier this week that to “safeguard legitimate rights and interests” and to “defend fairness and justice” in international trade all the affected countries should coordinate their moves warning that dealing with it individually may lead to compromises harming the global trade as a whole.

The coordination of their moves is the way to deal with the “hegemonic politics” and “unilateral bullying” adopted by the US which attempts to deprive opportunities for development to a large number of countries across the globe, the spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Commerce said during a press conference on Monday.

Since Trump announced the reciprocal tariffs and their postponement, there has been a rush of affected countries seeking bilateral deals with the US as a way to avoid the high tariffs. Some of them are close neighbors of China such as Japan and South Korea. China cautioned these countries against the temptations to appease Trump’s hegemonic moves in their haste. It particularly warned against “selfish” compromises with the US which can harm third countries.

Various media reports have indicated that the Trump administration is pressuring countries seeking bilateral agreements with the US to reduce their trade ties with China and impose barriers.

China maintained that it respects every country’s right to safeguard its interests and negotiate deals with the US. However, it warned that such deals should not come at its own cost. It warned that if China’s interests are harmed, it can take reciprocal measures as “it is determined and capable of safeguarding its own rights and interests.”

“Sacrificing others’ interests to obtain so-called exemptions for temporary selfish gains is akin to negotiating with a tiger; it ultimately leads to failure for both the parties and harms everyone involved,” the Ministry of Commerce spokesperson said.

“Appeasement cannot bring peace, and compromise will not earn respect,” China warned, claiming that, “If international trade reverts to the ‘law of jungle’, all countries will become victims.”

China said it expects all countries to stand “on the side of fairness and justice, on the side of historical correctness” as no one is immune to “unilateralism and protectionism.”

The above article was previously published by Peoples Dispatch.

By Vijay Prashad

On April 22, 2025, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its annual World Economic Outlook report, which has a quiet but decisive subtitle: A Critical Juncture and Policy Shifts. The report, once more a hefty piece of work by the IMF economists and their associates, rushes to make sense of the tariffs first threatened by US President Donald Trump and then delayed, and then, as if the flurry was not sufficient, retained and increased against China. The IMF attempts to make the case that through 2024, “global growth was stable” and that the current downgrade to global growth is largely a factor of the Trump tariff “uncertainty” and “unpredictability”.

The IMF releases this report during the annual week of meetings of the Fund and the World Bank. At the start of the meetings, IMF Director Kristalina Georgieva reflected on the situation in the global economy and claimed that the turbulence is largely due to “an erosion of trust”. No longer, she said, do countries trust each other as they once did, nor do they trust the international system. Apart from the reversal of the tariffs, the IMF says that what needs to be built once more is trust in international economic affairs.

Whispers in the corners of the IMF and World Bank meetings are all about the irrationality of the Trump administration, and – in particular – the unpredictability of Trump’s own statements. With the head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) beside him, Trump told a press conference in the White House that Canada is not a real country but would be an excellent state within the United States. That sort of comment creates fodder for the hushed giggles at the edges of this meeting, when otherwise serious men and women in business suits maintain a rictus look of concern for high affairs of state.

Errors in judgment

One of the significant errors in the assessment by the IMF is that everything in the Western economies had begun to look stable last year. While it is true that the threat of the tariffs and then the anti-China tariffs themselves created “a major negative shock to growth”, it is not true that growth rates had been expected to reach new heights this year.

Growth in the US has been significantly below its historic trend since the 2007-08 subprime mortgage crisis-induced financial crisis – indeed, US growth since then has been cumulatively lower than in the Great Depression. In the 17 years after the Great Crash of 1929, US annual GDP growth averaged 3.7%, whereas in the 17 years since the International Financial Crisis, US annual growth averaged only 2.0%.

In October 2024, the IMF projected that the United States would grow at 2.2%, and since reduced its forecast to 1.8%. Meanwhile, in October last year, it suggested a rate of 4.5% for China and 6.5% for India, far higher than for either the US projected rate or the advanced economy projections (1.8%). The Trump tariffs certainly compounded the problems for the US, but they are not the cause of the problem. Sluggish growth has been the situation for almost two decades.

On that sluggishness, the IMF’s new World Economic Outlook is remarkably bland. It suggests that the “core macroeconomic policy challenge” of the United States is its federal government debt. This debt, which is 36.2 trillion, is 124% of GDP. Ten global north countries are in the twenty countries with the highest debt-to-GDP ratios: Japan (266%), Greece (193%), Italy (151%), United States (124%), Portugal (122%), Spain (117%), France (112%), Belgium (111%), Canada (109%), and the United Kingdom (105%). Cutting the deficit might make good macroeconomic sense, but it does not by itself propose a way back to growth for the United States. Lower social welfare spending will further deplete private consumption. And Trump’s dream of revitalizing US manufacturing is not going to work merely through a reduced federal government deficit without a massive, massive release of resources for industrialization. Without an attack on living standards, this could only come from measures such as a reduction in excessive US military expenditure or reform of the country’s grotesquely inefficient private health system. These are policies Trump will not adopt.

In fact, the IMF gives notoriously poor advice to the Chinese government. It suggests that China should emulate the United States rather than the other way around. China, the IMF says, should “boost chronically low private consumption” and “dial back industrial policies and pervasive state involvement in industry”. In other words, abandon its long-term growth profile and become like the slow-growing United States!

In November 2024, the IMF released an interesting paper by its economists (Dirk Muir, Natalija Novta, and Anne Oeking) called “China’s Path to Sustainable and Balanced Growth”. The paper and the World Economic Outlook together make the case that China’s strong economic performance comes from its COVID stimulus, its high exports, a high domestic savings rate to finance public infrastructure, its banking system that directs liquidity to small and medium-sized enterprises to generate productive activity rather than property speculation, and an emphasis on high-quality productive forces. This is a fairly good summary of the structure of Chinese growth over the last period. But it is totally counter to the suggestions that the IMF then gives to China: which is to liquidate everything that allowed it to stave off the long term sluggishness of the advanced industrial countries (including to pressure the renminbi to appreciate, as the US would like so that its trade imbalance can be rectified by a foreign exchange shift rather than by greater productivity in the US itself).

The IMF is right. There is great uncertainty ahead. But there is also certainty in its own reports and in its charts. High domestic savings and better sovereignty of resources (including the financial system), alongside canalization of these finances to the productive sector (for infrastructure and industrialization), produce more stability in the long run than an excessive reliance on private financial markets and the whims of the billionaire class. But the IMF does not close its new report with that news. It prefers to look out of the window and see the storms in the Western skies rather than the calm in the East.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.