China faces down Trump, Ukraine quagmire, Gaza ‘peace deal’

Donald Trump is desperately trying to reverse the decline of US imperialism. From Gaza to Ukraine to Venezuela, the past week has seen new twists and turns that all paint a similar picture: Trump, far from being able to extricate himself from world events and put ‘America first’, is entangling himself ever more deeply in conflicts across the globe.

While Trump is a product of the decline of American imperialism, he is also an accelerator of that very same process, adding his own chaotic character to the deepening crisis. In this week's Against the Stream, Fred Weston and Hamid Alizadeh delve into Trump’s contradictory policies on the world stage, drawing out the monumental shifts at play and their consequences for the class struggle.

Against the Stream is the current affairs podcast of the Revolutionary Communist International. It airs weekly on YouTube on Thursdays at 6 p.m. London time.

Recommended reading

“The meaning of the ceasefire in Gaza” – The RCI

Will Donald J Trump ever be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? – Alan Woods

“A Federal Critical Mineral Processing Initiative: Securing U.S. Mineral Independence from China” – War on the Rocks

The world turned upside down – a system in crisis  – The RCI 

Transcript

Hamid
It's been another long week in politics.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump shocked the world by announcing 100% tariffs on Chinese goods starting from November.

The trade war between the United States and China is raging and threatening the whole of the world economy.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the western project is at a total dead end, and Russian forces are steadily advancing.

Who stands to win these conflicts?

And more importantly, what does it mean for the future of American imperialism?

That is the topic of our show today.

But first, we'll start in Gaza and the peace deal there.

And the question: is this the only place where Donald Trump has been able to deliver? Has he actually brought peace to Gaza?

My name is Hamid Alizadeh. I'm here today with Fred Weston, and this is Against the Stream.

Fred, I was invited to speak on GB News a few days ago about the peace deal in Gaza.

And they asked me, 'Shouldn't we be thanking Donald Trump for bringing peace to Gaza?'

Fred
I saw it, yes.

Hamid
What are your thoughts?

Fred
I saw it. The guy that runs the show, he expects you to be grateful to Trump for what he's done.

I was listening to it and I was thinking, 'What planet do these people live on?'

I was thinking, imagine you have a family and some armed criminal comes in, shoots nine out of ten of the family members, and then offers a deal for the 10th one, and says, 'Oh, I'm not going to kill you, but you got to give me this, this and this, and you got to behave like this.'

And the guy is supposed to say, thank you. That's what you're supposed to say. It is amazing how these people can turn around situations like this.

Because the fact is this: Trump has backed Netanyahu, de facto.

He supplied the weaponry, often even the military technique. The know-how, even intelligence which has allowed Netanyahu to butcher close to 70,000 people.

There are probably at least 10,000, they say, still buried in the rubble.

We don't know how many it's going to be in the end,

I've seen scenes of these poor Palestinians have gone back to Gaza, and they're looking at total destruction.

You're supposed to thank the guy that provided the weapons, or some of the weapons, at least, and the intelligence for this.

Just a few little facts. There's a very detailed article actually on the BBC yesterday, just going into this destruction, not going to go into the article...

Just a few of the facts: $70 billion worth of destruction has been carried out in Gaza.

The level of destruction is anything between 84% and up to 92% in Gaza City itself.

There are calculated 60 million tons of debris to be cleared.

Water and sewage plants have been destroyed or partially damaged.

Power Generation, 80% of it has been destroyed. Agricultural land, 98% is unusable.

This is what they've done to Gaza.

They've killed the people.

They've destroyed anything that makes for a civilized existence, and then you're supposed to say thank you to all that.

What they've achieved is more like a temporary ceasefire than a true peace, because they've got various phases of this deal.

Phase one, the return of the hostages. We know what that is about. It has been a relatively easy one to achieve.

It's the rest what comes later that...

You see, unless you grant the Palestinians a genuine homeland, a country they can call their own, with full democratic rights, full self government, you are never going to solve this problem.

This is going to remain a festering wound in the Middle East and globally, and Trump has no powers to solve that.

Hamid
Yes, I mean, it was very surreal to see the press conference that was held to announce and to sign this deal.

People from 25 different countries. No Palestinians, as far as I could see, and I don't think they were invited either.

There were all of these people. It was... I mean...

Fred
Starmer, Meloni...

Hamid
You had Starmer, Meloni, all of these people who are complicit in this.

all their smiling, congratulating each other, hugging.

And, I mean, let's not talk about the way that Trump dealt with Starmer, which was hilarious.

People should look that up on YouTube and watch it.

Like a little pet poodle that he is.

But yeah, first of all, they're sitting there congratulating themselves as these messengers of peace, when they are the ones that have been complicit, along with Israel in destroying Gaza completely and rendering it uninhabitable for years and decades in a proper way, at least. I mean, people might have to live there.

But as you say, the other thing is, they're celebrating a bit too early, because they've now finalised the first stage of the deal, which is all the living hostages have been freed.

They're having a hard time locating some hostages that are believed to be dead, because they've been bombed and they're under rubble.

I think probably at this point, more hostages have been killed by Israel than by Hamas in terms of hostages, not people who were killed before.

But the other thing is, the second phase requires Hamas to disarm.

Now, how are they going to achieve this?

Because when you look at the news, and when you look at what's actually happening, Hamas is now coming to the surface from the underground shelters and tunnels and all that, which seems to have been working quite well and seem to be mostly intact, and they are a force to be reckoned with.

There's now reports of these criminal gangs that have that have been supported by Israel to run parts of Gaza. They're being taken down, dismantled by Hamas. Disarmed, one way or another.

And they are now taking charge. The police and the military, the armed forces are taking charge.

It's true that a huge part of the old Hamas fighters are dead, but they have replenished their forces, through what?

Through young people who wanted to fight and they could see that Hamas was the only show in town in that respect.

And the other thing, they talk now about opening aid delivery.

By the way, the Israelis are constantly sabotaging all of these efforts.

They're talking about opening up aid delivery. Who's going to organize that? Who's going to make sure that that happens in an orderly way, if not Hamas?

And that is not a problem they can solve easily.

Trump has said, if Hamas doesn't disarm the Americans will go in and disarm them.

The question remains, what more can you do than what Israel has done in the past two years? And they've not succeeded.

Fred
Well, one of the reasons they've stopped the bombing, some serious people say, is because there's actually very little left to bomb.

They've destroyed practically the whole of Gaza. Razed it to the ground.

There was even the military was saying, look, there's no more targets. What else do you want us to destroy?

But the purpose of this campaign, one of the aims was clearly to destroy Hamas completely.

And that's not the case.

it was clear the when they released the hostages and they appeared in their gear and the guns and everything, it's a clear message: 'We're still here and we're still armed.'

Now it's undoubtedly the case that the relationship between Hamas and the people in Palestine has changed.

It's not all hunky dory for Hamas. It's not as if it's there they've got, you know, the 100% backing.

There must be, there must be a lot of fatigue, exhaustion. People just want to see an end to all this.

But the only power standing that has remained in Gaza is Hamas.

And it's interesting that even some commentators were saying, you know, guaranteeing the security for the delivery is in the hands of Hamas, and they say, which is an irony of the situation.

Precisely the force you were supposed to destroy is the force you now have to count on to assure the security.

By the way, I just wanted to add, Netanyahu will use any method possible to create havoc in Gaza.

And he has been consciously backing the criminal elements, in effect, Mafia types, in Gaza. Well known criminal families. Letting arms get to them.

I've said it many times, the ruling classes of this world, the capitalist class, is prepared to unleash utter barbarism if that is what is necessary for them to maintain control of areas and keep their privileged position.

And Netanyahu would be very happy to see barbarism unleashed in Gaza, pitting the criminal organized elements against Hamas.

That's clearly is one of one of the ideas he has, because that would make Gaza ungovernable.

It's already unlivable. He wants to make it ungovernable.

But the point is, Hamas has not been destroyed.

I've got an interesting little article, actually, from the Jerusalem Post, which goes into the question.

I'd like to quote a little bit of it, if I can.

It starts off. "The war in Gaza has ended, not because Hamas was destroyed or defeated, but because US President Trump decided to put an end to it."

He did put immense pressure. He's seen as the guy that stopped this war, but to continue.

He goes on to Trump's... he says, "The idea presented by US President Trump is not a fully developed plan. There's a lot of things that need negotiating. We're nowhere near reaching that."

He actually then says, "It remains premature to declare an end to the war in Gaza."

And then it says "the Israeli army will continue to navigate a delicate balance."

And then later on, "the question of" this is how they pose it, "how to decisively defeat a terrorist organization remains unresolved."

Furthermore, it says, "with over 80% of the Gaza strip under IDF control". Now, if this first deal goes ahead completely, Israel's forces will withdraw to a line which leaves them with 53% control.

But nonetheless, it says, "despite these gains, Hamas has not been defeated. It hasn't been eliminated."

And then it says, towards the end, it actually asks the question, what constitutes a military victory?

And then it says "we must be careful not to conflate official speeches such as those by the Chief of Staff declaring we have won with the actual state of affairs."

And then it says "such statements are designed to shape public perception and national narrative and do not necessarily reflect the reality on the ground."

Now, this is written by a brigadier general, a former Israeli air defense forces commander, a guy called Zvika Haimovich.

I think he's somebody that knows a little bit about the Israeli Defense Forces, having been a high ranking officer in it.

And he looks at it from a more, you know, a military point of view, and admits the fact Hamas has not been destroyed.

It's been weakened. Its command layers have been destroyed.

But I was reading another article which looked into the new recruits they have. A lot of new recruits.

Another article actually points to, whatever you say about Hamas now, what's been done to Gaza and the young generation that has suffered this, is basically a recruiting ground for a future resistance against Israel.

So you haven't resolved the fundamental problem. You've brought a halt to the bombing for now, but it's very far from being resolved.

And Trump is now boasting a big success.

It might not be too long before he sees that he hasn't actually achieved very much.

Hamid
Yes, and just finally, I would add, at what cost?

Because if the plan goes ahead as announced, or similar to what's announced, it means America will take up the administration of Gaza, a committee headed by Donald Trump himself a private committee, would appear.

And an international force would be deployed, which would consist of so called Muslim armies, or armed forces of Muslim so called Muslim countries.

Countries like Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and so on. Pakistan, perhaps.

Which would mean, what? If that goes ahead this, first of all, we know that the insurgency and the resistance would not stop, because the resistance is not an invention of Hamas.

It's a result of the oppression of the Palestinians, which is not going anywhere.

But it would tie all of these regimes to this and would actually suck America deeper into the morass that Trump was trying to get away from.

The FT made a point is that both Donald Trump and Obama promised to pull out of the Middle East when they when they became presidents.

Both of them, got sucked more deeper into the mess that is existing there.

Fred
Trump would would be seen to be directly administering Gaza in a situation where Hamas has not been destroyed.

Whether they will hand over its guns is to be seen.

I saw interviews with some Hamas leaders saying 'We'll hand over our guns to a national Palestinian army, when we have a Palestinian state and the Hamas fighters will be integrated into the national Palestinian army.'

That's not good news for Trump and others have said, 'We don't accept any form of administration that involves Gaza being ruled by foreigners. It should be Palestinians governing Palestine somehow.

These are two very difficult sticking points for Trump to resolve.

I don't want to open it here, but it's actually getting worse on the West Bank.

That will continue for years. Israel hasn't given up.

The Zionists have not given up on their long term project of building a Greater Israel, and that's what Trump can't really remove.

Hamid
Yes. I think we have to come back to this.

We'll be following this as we go along.

But it's clear that America is stuck.

Now, another place that the US seems to be in trouble is in relation to China, which is, after all, a far more important adversary for American capitalism than Hamas is.

In fact, this is where all of the American bourgeois agree with each other, whether there is Trump, Biden, Obama.

Whoever it is, China is the main enemy, is the main opponent of American capitalism.

And over the weekend, Donald Trump made a series of tweets and announced that China is simply overstepping the mark.

I actually wanted to... I forgot to bring the quote here, but he was morally outraged at China implementing export controls on materials, products which have somehow been related to the Chinese rare earth mining and refining industry.

So anything, any company, any country that's used Chinese technology to refine or process rare earths, or any rare earths that have been through China in one way or another, been refined or processed there, or if they come from China, all of these are now subject to Chinese export controls, and they require licenses.

Donald Trump was outraged as this, and he said 'This is unheard of that anyone would implement such measures.

Of course, you think to yourself: Wait, isn't that exactly what America has done themselves when it comes to a whole series of technologies, including chip technology?

In fact, it's the exact same measures that the Americans have implemented.

And throughout the media it's more or less uniformly presented as: this was a period of truce, America and China, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, had agreed a three month truce to any retaliatory measures.

In fact, there was a de-escalation going on, and a whole series of things where they were withdrawing tariffs and barriers.

And they were going to negotiate a proper trade deal soon.

Fred
10th of November, apparently.

Hamid
Yes, or they're going to start that there. But there was a kind of a deeper trade negotiations in place...

And then China broke that by implementing these controls.

But obviously they don't explain part of it.

Fred
There's a little detail missing,

Hamid
Slight detail.

Fred
Just before this, the United States imposed an increase in port fees on Chinese ships entering American harbours.

I think it's $50 a ton, and gradually to increase over the next two or three years.

Hamid
And, and they implemented, sorry, just to add, I'm just interposing there, additional sanctions for trade with any company that's owned 50% or more by Chinese companies, which would add a whole slate of new companies to the sanctions lists of America.

Fred
So the Americans quietly, surreptitiously apply what amounts to an act of aggression in the trade war.

China responds, and then the news is splashed all over the world about China's aggressive position on rare earths.

It's distorting somewhat the reality.

If you listen to the serious representatives of the Chinese government, they always say, we don't want a trade war, but we're not frightened of one.

What they're saying to the Americans is, you think you can pressurize us? No, we're not Luxembourg. We are China.

And China is a big economy, and you can see it. They are prepared to hit back with equal measure.

They've said, you target our companies, we will target your companies.

And Trump. He's used to this idea of the Trump deal, you know, the art of making a deal. He pushes

But you see, it's one thing when the bully pushes the little kid on the playground.

But when another bully turns up who's almost as strong as the big bully, you can try pushing him around, you risk getting hit back and losing out big time.

That is the scenario we have globally now. The big bully, who's used to being a bully for decades and getting away with it has suddenly found somebody's turned up who's able to challenge him.

Hamid
Yeah, I was just gonna quote. I read this in Fortune Magazine.

They're quoting Besant who is a US official.

They say, "Beijing's new export controls on rare earth minerals, which the US is dependent on, are" this is quoting Besant, "a sign of how weak their economy is, and that they want to pull everyone else down with them.

"Maybe there is some Leninist business model where hurting your customers is a good idea, but they are the largest suppliers to the world. If they want to slow down the global economy, they will hurt the most.

"They're in the middle of a recession slash depression, and they're trying to export their way out of it. The problem is they're exacerbating their standing in the world."

Now, this does not sound like a confident official of the strongest superpower on the planet able to push its will onto the rest of the world.

Fortune Magazine adds in brackets – that's why I brought this from them – "In fact, China is doing very well. Its exports rose 8.3% in September, and the World Bank expects China's GDP to grow 4.8% this year."

Six months ago, they were saying only 4%, so it's actually up in relation to what they expected.

"US growth forecast is at 1.4%"

This sounds like the big bully being punched back in the nose and saying, 'Oh, you're fighting unfair!'

Fred
Have you seen, have you seen the effects of the this policy?

There has been a significant fall in Chinese exports the United States, I think I read a figure, It was 27%.

But there's also the figure for Latin America and Africa.

In Latin America, Chinese exports have increased by 15% and in Africa by 56%.

And that explains why, globally, as you said, over 8% growth in Chinese exports.

So who's hurting who? That's the point, and what is Trump's policy achieving in terms of trying to regain the influence and the control over the world economy by the United States?

You know you can't pass laws on productivity. You can't pass laws on competition and prices.

You can try and impose tariffs, but you can't change the nature of the productivity.

You can't change the level of technological innovation in companies.

The Chinese have one of the most modern industrial apparatuses in the world.

The big share of robots globally are in China, and growing.

China is a huge, productive machine and very competitive.

You can't decree law against that, just like you can't order inflation to stop

It's a law of economics.

Trump thinks you can just sign a decree, and that's it. Job done.

Well, the reality of the world doesn't correspond to his degrees, and that's what's happening here.

China is very competitive.

In fact, it's flooding the world with cheap goods at the moment.

I was looking at one of the figures. It is the country with the highest level of investment in industry.

The highest percentage of GDP, it's like 40% reinvested. And that's continuing.

So its industry is constantly growing in capacity and in productivity.

That explains the strength of China and what it can do.

But it does also mean that this is going to lead to a conflict, because China is inundating Latin America with cheap goods. Africa.

Latin America in particular was considered the backyard of the United States.

Now practically the whole of Latin America does more trade with China than it does with the US.

This is creating tension across Latin America, even inside these countries.

And globally speaking, China's influence is growing.

The latest I saw is this latest news about Europe, in trade relations with China, wanting to receive technology back.

And I'm thinking, so who's the advanced capitalist economy here? Is it Europe, or is it China?

You're asking the Chinese to cede some of their technology to you.

This shows you the relationship has been reversed between China and Europe in particular.

Hamid
Well, exactly. I think a case in point is this question of rare earths.

China sits on the vast majority of the rare earth market. 90%, some people say, of refining capacity and also mining.

Now, a lot of people in the bourgeois press have said, 'Oh, this is fine. It's okay that China is restricting American access to rare earths, because now we can build our own. This gives us an incentive to build our own.'

Just to say, rare earths are incredibly important.

Without rare earth minerals, we cannot have modern chips, modern weaponry, radars, everything. The most important things. AI, which is now the cutting edge of science and technology, military technology and software and computer technology is completely dependent on rare earths to survive.

Now I've been looking into it. There is a very interesting article in a magazine called War on the Rocks, which is called 'The federal critical mineral processing initiative: securing US mineral independence from China'.

Sounds very boring, but it's actually very revealing. It's from April of this year,

But just before that: now I didn't know this, but in rare earth mining, there's like a whole series of processes.

There's mining, there's separation, which I guess is what's called processing, separating the rare earths from each other, and the normal rock.

Refining, alloy formation and manufacturing.

These five steps are all incredibly capital intensive, quite difficult and requires a lot of technological advancement and very little profitability, in fact, and very difficult to achieve.

China has the upper hand in every part of this because they've been investing in it for 30-35 years.

Now this article lays out the problems that the West has, and the problems that the West has in this field, I think, just points to the general picture.

It says if we were to get refining in the US right, it says "domestic refining expansion remains slow, with new processing plants and smelters taking 10 to 20 years to become operational."

That's one thing.

"For example, the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine", which is all they talk about now that company is really shot up in the...

"which reopened after Chinese 2010 export controls, still sent 98% of his raw materials to China in 2019 process to be processed," because there's no processing capacity.

"Investors are hesitant to fund US refining and processing due to uncertain returns, shifting federal policies, political instability and environmental opposition."

This is also incredibly damaging to the environment.

"High capital expenditures make mining and processing less attractive to investors, especially when compared to tech sectors that require minimal upfront investment and offer high returns."

This is the key thing. They go down and they paint a damning picture, and they basically say, in order for America... I think everyone should read this.

In order for America to achieve parity, it would require tens of billions of dollars of investment. But also, there are small rates of return, as long as the prices are high.

For instance, now that China is restricting them, the price of rare earth minerals go up.

but when they come down again, it becomes incredibly difficult.

It means that American companies should invest hundreds of billions of dollars in this industry and then operate at a loss for decades, until they have successfully out competed the Chinese companies.

Because that's the point, the Chinese are at the highest level. And then they might have some profit. Who wants to do that?

Fred
Well, this brings home the question of the way the market works, the way capitalism works.

One thing would be the general long term interest of the United States, which would be billions of investment in the mining of rare earths, and, more importantly, the processing.

As you said, the processing plants actually can take 10-20 years before they get functioning.

So it requires a massive long term investment with no immediate or even short term return.

So it means having available huge amounts of capital, and before you start to see any profit coming back, you got to wait years.

But as you said, China has such a massive control of the of the mining, the processing, etc.

Now it's restricting the exports, and it's doing that as a weapon to hit back at Trump in his tariff wars.

But if China wanted to hurt future American investors, all it has to do is flood the market with rare earths, and the price would come collapsing down.

So even the prospect of long term profits would disappear. You're actually asking private capitalists in America to literally throw away billions of dollars for the state, for a long term interest of the United States.

Because it's also important from a military point of view, because a lot of their technology is based on this.

It brings home the idea, well, you know, the private market, even in this, the center of global world capitalism, the United States, the epitome of the market economy, if there's any....

When it comes to its core interests, it's failing. It would require the state to do it.

Trump would have to against his own policy.

The only way they can achieve this really is massive state control, massive state spending.

Take over control of the development of this industry.

And are they going to do that? Have they got the resources? They haven't. They're in a shutdown at the moment over spending.

The American debt has reached sky high levels. They need to massively cut.

Where are they going to get the public, state resources to do such a thing?

You see, what a dilemma they're in in this situation?

But if you look at the process as a whole, Trump's trade war is actually backfiring big time.

Inflation is starting to feed into the system, because every time...

See, you restrict the import of cheap goods, what that means is you're removing cheap goods from the market.

Who benefits from the cheap goods? Ordinary working people. They buy Chinese goods because they're cheaper. That's why.

By removing them, putting tariffs on them, putting fees on the ships coming in, they actually are reducing massively the imports of goods which they need because they can't produce them.

And one of them, the rare earths is one, but there's a lot of other goods they can't produce themselves, or they can only produce them at a much higher cost.

So they're actually hurting themselves.

China, on the other hand, although it's been hit in the American market, has redirected.

The other effect of the tariff wars is that Trump is actually pushing some countries closer to Russia and China.

India is the big one.

He thought he could bully India by putting the 50% tariffs.

What does Modi do? Makes a trip to China makes a public display of the improving relations with China and Russia.

It's actually producing a realignment globally of all those countries that are feeling the effects of Trump's tariffs and are looking for ways of getting around them.

And how? Well you trade with other people, and that is what is happening.

Hamid
Yeah. It's completely backfiring.

The world is not responding to American bullying in the same way.

And that is precisely because you have a new element now in the equation, which is China, which is a far more dynamic power, is a younger capitalist power, and from that point of view it's more dynamic

These rare earths. Actually at the end of this article, this is a long article that's developed by these think tank people as a policy proposal.

This is what America should do, and they should invest here, here, here.

But right at the end of the last paragraph, they say, 'Oh, by the way, there's another problem. Is that we don't have the technology that the Chinese have.'

Because actually, there's a technological disparity now in China's favor.

Why is that? That is because since the 90s, investment in research and development in the West has significantly declined, and where it remains, it's been reduced to very few areas such as tech.

Why? Because here you have high return margins, high returns for low investments, right?

But in the majority of industries, you have monopolies that don't have any interest in developing technology, don't have any interest in developing the means of production, the productive forces, and therefore, just sit back and rely on old achievements.

This is a basic development of capitalism.

But whereas China didn't have this problem 35 years ago.

Anything they did, had a higher return than anything else.

And therefore gradually, as well as using the centralized state, the centralized power that the state in China has, to circumvent capital in certain areas... but they now come to a place where they are more advanced in a whole series of industries, than America.

And at the end of the day, that's decisive.

Fred
Well, look, we have a very sharp decline of the European powers.

We've had discussions before where we've talked about, for instance, the deindustrialization of Germany and other countries in Europe.

The old historical imperialist powers in Europe are in steep decline.

US imperialism remains still the big guy but not as strong as he was. They're in decline.

And when you impose import controls, what you are doing, de facto, is protecting less productive companies at home.

From the point of view of the logic of capitalism globally, I mean the ideal captialism, the invisible hand of the market, which works everywhere and pushes for maximum development and development of technology and productivity, etc, because the most competitive is the one that sells the most, obviously, it's a basic idea that we can understand.

But if you've got industries which have fallen behind, like in Europe or in America, and you have industries in a place like China which have grown with the more advanced technology and are more competitive, the only hope you have of stimulating some kind of investment in America or Europe in technological innovation is if they are faced with the direct threat of Chinese goods.

If you impose tariffs – like the Europeans are now doing on steel, for example, to protect themselves from the Chinese – you are, in effect, protecting the less productive. S you are, in actual fact, protecting the milieu in which your decline actually continues over time.

And in the end, you can't escape the real relations of between the levels of productivity or the growing levels of productivity, let's out it that way, because Chinese productivity is growing at a much faster rate.

There are still more productive companies in America and even in Europe, in some sectors, but globally speaking, China is accelerating its rate of productivity, and the others are stagnant.

This can only lead to a change in the balance of forces globally, and China is getting stronger, and it's inundating the markets with cheap goods, and that means that it's going to create conflict.

This doesn't solve any problems for humanity as a whole.

What it's doing is increasing the level of tension between the two major powers, the US and China, and there's no solution to it on the basis of capitalism.

If it was a completely free market, China would just outcompete at this stage. Industries would close even more in United States and Europe.

If you impose import controls, you only protect your own slow down at home, and you don't fundamentally change the relations between the powers.

And this is going to increase the level of tension between the powers.

That's the inevitable outcome, which will lead to more local conflicts, more local wars, regional wars.

Trump's threat to actually bomb Venezuela is part of this conflict.

It's the global conflict, and he's hitting, in effect, Chinese and Russian interests in Venezuela. That's what it comes down to at the end of the day.

So you can see how they can't solve the problems. They're actually exaggerating, exacerbating them.

Hamid
Yeah, we're told that this is the most innovative system that allows for the highest rate of development for humanity.

You know, as you say, free competition and all of that.

But here you have a power who has actually innovated for the first time in decades in a whole series of industries:

EVs, solar power, nuclear power. Even AI it's innovated to certain extent. High speed rails. 5G or 6G that they are now introducing in China and many other things.

And what is the response? It's actually having the opposite effect.

They're actually shutting down, as you said, and protecting the less competitive, the heavy, ossified industries of the West.

Now, there is another problem here, which is that China is now a capitalist power.

It moved towards capitalism in the 90s, and by moving towards, by implementing, by adopting a capitalist system, a market system essentially.

They call it a socialist market economy. Nevertheless, it's the market economy.

There is a fundamental flaw here, which is that you don't produce for the benefit of society.

You produce for a profit and for a market, and therefore there is always a tendency towards overproduction.

And that's what we see now in China, across a whole series of industries.

In EVs, for example, massive overproduction. In steel, in solar panels, in a whole series of industries that huge overproduction, or over capacity, as it's called today, which, with the loss of the American market, which is the biggest market in the world, leaves China with a problem.

They need to dump this onto the world market.

What is dumping? It means selling your goods under the rate of the value.

In fact, in China now you have deflation.

Inside China, cars are being sold at a fraction of the price of production, because all of these industries are developing rapidly, and there's so many people coming to get a piece of the pie, so to say, that there is a bigger capacity of production than the actual market.

So they're flooding the world market, as you said, in Africa, in Latin America and in Europe, by the way.

And there is a response to that, which is the raising of tariffs, steel tariffs. Europe has now raised 50% tariffs on on anything more than 18 million tons of steel sold.

EVs. Last year, they introduced 30 or 35% tariffs against Chinese EVs, or Chinese produced EVs.

Although they're still gaining in market share in spite of that.

And now, the Chinese, in the struggle against the West, what are they doing? They're advancing. They are investing more in industry.

Robotics. The past two years, China has installed more robots than the rest of the world combined.

Last year 54% of all robots were installed in China.

The year before, there was 51%.

China, from this year on, has taken the lead from Japan as the biggest producer of industrial robots, and now you have these humanoid robots, which is also now a growing industry, which is mainly being produced in China.

All of these innovations in robotics and AI, which is now rapidly being implemented in Chinese industries, will mean what?

Will mean even more overproduction.

And that's the paradox of capitalism, that all of these advances for humanity, instead of allowing us to share this technology with everyone, raise our technological abilities, lower working hours, raise living standards. What is it leading to?

It's leading to complete, massive dislocation of the world economy and clashes between the nations, where every nation, every capitalist class, is trying to defend its own market, its own capitalists, – not of its own workers, but its own capitalists – at the cost of the other, and trying to sabotage the development of the others.

So it's the exact opposite of what they're claiming.

Now I don't know if you have any more comments to this, but otherwise we can continue.

Fred
Just very briefly. I mean going back to the very nature of capitalism.

Capitalism inevitably means competitive investment, obviously,

Capitalists have to constantly stay in the market, or try and stay in the market.

In order to stay in the market, obviously you've got to make the goods of the same quality more cheaply, which means you must save, to go back to Marx, on the socially necessary labor time to produce a good.

China, with all the robots and all the technology, is massively reducing the socially necessary labor time.

And Marx made the point. The necessary labor time is established globally.

If you are a capitalist that has workers that take a lot longer to produce because the technology is more backward, you can't sell based on what it costs you.

You've got to sell according to the average necessary labor time. That's necessary.

China is putting massive pressure on global capitalism, the way it's developing.

And although it's is drawing an advantage from it, at the moment, it's growing faster than most economies and becoming stronger.

In the end, it does lead to overcapacity, and it does lead to the preparation of a steep crisis in the whole system. That is where they're moving.

Nobody can remove that perspective. You can't say exactly how long it will take, but you can see the outlines of that crisis developing.

And this is going to hit the working classes of the world. In every country. It's already being felt.

The weaker links are feeling it massively. That explains all these revolutionary upsurges from Madagascar to Indonesia and Nepal.

But it also explains what we discussed the other week, last week, on Italy, the social conditions there.

Italy is one of the countries which is actually suffering massively the consequences of these contradictions.

A lot of its industry is being closed. A lot of factories are sitting idle. Workers are laid off.

They don't have a market while the Chinese goods are coming in.

This is inevitably going to affect living conditions, relations not just between the nations. It will affect the relations between the classes in each country.

And it will actually have an impact on the class struggle. That's what we have to keep in mind and not forget that element.

Hamid
I will add to that, just as a closing remark, that the capitalists in Italy and elsewhere are using China as a scapegoat.

But the fact is that China's development is a damning condemnation of their own behavior, because for the past 40 years, what have they been doing?

They've been sitting on their asses, living off the profits and of the investments of the past, not investing.

Privatizing and devouring everything in the private sector, undermining all the infrastructure of society, without actually making any new productive investments.

And now that another capitalist class has actually invested, for whatever reason, they're blaming it on them.

They are the ones to blame, really speaking.

Fred
Just one little addition to that. You see, the Europeans had an extreme – had, let's say, both from historical point of view, and if you want to compare it to the parts of the world – very advanced welfare states that, for decades, granted pensions, free education, health care.

Several generations got used to that and accepted it as their right to have free hospitals, free education.

That was possible on the back of the enormous boom that took place, starting at the end of the 40s and ending in the 70s.

They still have that left. They've been whittling away at it.

But the material base upon which the welfare state was based is now being destroyed.

The power of the economies of Europe is being whittled down.

China's competition, global competition, is forcing the capitalists to try and cut back on all of this.

So it's also increasing the pressure to take away from the workers what they conceded in the past.

That is a strong element that explains the conflicts we're in at the moment.

It explains the paralysis of the French government. It explains the movement in Italy and many other movements around Europe, and the political instability.

That's what's behind it, and that's what we are facing ahead of us in the coming period.

Hamid
Yes, well, I think that makes a very good segue to the next topic, which is Ukraine.

Because you see, in Europe, we're told that the Russians are coming. They're coming for us.

And Ukraine has a big impact in all of this.

For instance, the steel production in Europe is severely hampered by what?

High energy prices, which is direct consequence of the war that the Europeans have started in Ukraine and went along with and are now leading, in fact, in Ukraine.

And we haven't discussed this situation in Ukraine, but this is a key conflict, if not the key, the center point of world politics, along with the trade war with China.

Because here, American imperialism and the West is facing off, is again trying to bully another nation, Russia.

But Russia is not responding as it used to. It's been fighting back, and it has been gaining the upper hand.

And the battlefield situation does not look very good.

A year ago, after the fall of Avdiivka, we saw the Russian troops were advancing very fast towards the city of Pokrovsk, which is a key logistical hub in the whole of Donetsk, which is the main area of operations of the war.

Now we said back then, if Pokrovsk falls, or once it falls, there is no prepared defensive between Pokrovsk and the Dnieper River, which would mean, if the Russians get to that, that's the end of Ukraine as we know it.

And Pokrovsk was very close to falling. Now that hasn't happened.

And of course, that requires a little bit of reflection to understand why hasn't it happened?

And I think, well, the result of that inquiry is quite interesting.

First of all, I think we have to say that there has been a complete shift in the technological situation in Ukraine.

The drones have completely changed modern warfare.

And we went from the start of the war, where drones were kind of a novelty and used in certain areas.

Now drones are the most important part. The most important element of the war.

It means that you have tens of kilometers where nothing can – we call it a dead zone – nothing can really exist. It's completley turned the war from being a trench war to being...

You can't really be in the trenches anymore. You can only be in tiny, isolated dugouts.

So people go in, one or two or three or four of them, sit in the dugout, and they can sit there for weeks and even months, be resupplied by other drones.

As soon as they go out, there's hundreds and thousands of drones in the air at all times. They will see you, boom and they will they will strike you.

But also drone production has become quite important.

And in fact, one of the ways that the Ukrainians overcame the lack of manpower, which is a very serious thing in Ukraine, was by rapidly increasing drone production, and they managed to do that before the Russians did last year.

But what we see now is that Russia has caught up and overtaken Ukraine in the production of drones.

Not just the small drones, but also larger drones, which are now being being produced at the rate of about 60,000 a year. Huge. Even more probably by now. This is from a few months back.

But that had a major impact. And then there's the actual battlefront.

There is a very interesting article in the magazine called Medusa. It's a pro-Ukrainian magazine.

And I'm just going to read the introductory parts of it.

It says, this is an article called 'A high-stakes gamble Ukraine has successfully slowed Russia’s advance in central Donbas — but at the cost of its defenses elsewhere'

It says, "over the last month, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have succeeded in slowing the Russian army's advance in central Donbas.

"However, this achievement has come as a steep cost.

"In August, Ukraine redeployed significant forces from other fronts to reinforce defenses around Russia's breakthrough between Pokrovsk and Konstantinovka, leaving other sectors more vulnerable.

"For example, Russian troops have advanced towards Sloviansk along both banks of the Siverskyi Donets river, capturing the Kreminna forest, an area that the AFU had held since the fall of 2022.

"Meanwhile, another Russian force is advancing, almost unopposed, westwards along the Dnipropetrovsk–Zaporizhzhia regional border.

"This is in addition to smaller scale crises in the Ukrainian defenses near Orikhiv, south of Zaporizhzhia, and around Kupyansk in the eastern Kharkiv region."

In other words, what we're talking about is that obviously the Ukrainians realize this is a crucial point of inflection for the war, and if Pokrovsk falls, it can put the whole of the defense of Ukraine in danger.

And they reinforce those areas massively at the expense of other key areas reporting significant setbacks.

Now, I don't know. I think maybe our technician can put in a map as we talk about this, he's nodding his head over there.

But I think that would be a good thing because it is good to look at this in a map.

Because, first of all, stopping, or how do you say slowing the advances of the Russians around Pokrovsk has not stopped the advances.

In fact, the Pokrovsk agglomeration is now almost entirely surrounded.

And the Russians have had a significant breakthrough north of Pokrovsk, a 20 kilometer salient.

Then they have almost entirely surrounded the city of Kupiansk in Kharkov, which puts at risk a whole swathe of land east of the Oskil River.

There's a big bulge of land that the Ukrainians control, which is now at risk now because Kupiansk is falling.

The Kreminna forest that they mentioned here. I've been following this conflict quite closely, and that was the only place that the Russians had almost no success.

It was very, very difficult. The Ukrainians have had developed quite efficient ways of defending it since 2022.

So this is an area the Russians had no success for years and years, and it collapsed over the course of a few days over the summer.

In the Dnipropetrovsk region, there's daily advancement. Village after village. They're just advancing. Because this is an area where defenses are much less advanced and well built, as the main central areas where defense have built over years.

Siversk, which is a very important town east of Sloviansk, and Kramatorsk, one of the last strongholds east of those towns, is now surrounded.

Lyman , actually, in this article, if you look at Lyman on the map, it doesn't seem surrounded, but actually the way that they're cut off, they've actually managed to cut off most of the roads leading into Lyman

Lyman is a key, again, stronghold northeast of Sloviansk, defending that town which is one of the key goals of Russia. Kostyantynivka is surrounded.

And if these towns fall, there's only the major towns in the Donbas and Zaporizhzhia left.

There's only left Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and Zaporizhzhia, and the Russians are advancing towards those.

So this is a situation which is not looking very good for Ukraine, while at the same time, they have now expended the most advanced elite units to defend Pokrovsk and the salient around Pokrovsk at any cost.

So in effect, it's not looking very good.

Fred
No.

Hamid
Donald Trump has now said, Oh, he might send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine. Do you think that's going to help do help?

Fred
No. This is the man that wanted the Nobel Peace Prize because he's thinking of sending tomahawks to Ukraine, and he's thinking of bombing Venezuela, and he's threatened Hamas with total destruction if they don't...

This is the man that wanted the Nobel Peace Prize. It's laughable.

But you see what's happening in the Ukraine.

I mean, if we pull back a bit, you've given a quite a detailed account of what's happening on the front and the source you quote.

I read it earlier. It's not a pro Russian source. It's pro Ukrainian.

It does not defend the interests of Russia. It just details what's actually happening in a kind of honest, straightforward way.

And it doesn't make good reading for anybody in the West, any of the bourgeois in the West.

What it shows is what you were saying. In order to bolster the defenses at Pokrovsk, they've had to weaken them elsewhere.

And this highlights a point we've maintained for a long time.

There's an unequal balance of forces between the Ukraine and Russia when it comes to:

1. Manpower, Russia has a bigger army and has bigger reserves.

Even if the war were to last for years, eventually, one side, the weaker side, is going to run out of forces.

And this is a war of attrition. We shouldn't look at it simply from the point of view of how many kilometers they advance in a day, which is an important part, obviously, of war.

But it's how much they actually destroying the military ability of Ukraine to defend itself, and that is being weakened by the day.

And Putin hasn't even mobilized his full army, just a part of it. So there's that.

The resources of the country, I mean, Russia is, three times or more than three times bigger in terms of population? In terms of territory and resources, it's much bigger.

It has a much stronger rear guard. Let's put it that way. What's at the back of the of the fighting,

And it has made up for lost time in things like drones and other things.

People ignore the fact that the Russians have one of the most powerful missiles you can imagine. These hypersonic missiles that can travel at incredibly high speeds and cause enormous destruction.

And to this day, nobody has actually developed a defense system against them, because they're so fast, undetectable.

So if you send in Tomahawks, which are a direct threat to Russia, you might see Putin using some of these missiles.

Even if it's just as a warning. Maybe one massive destruction in one corner. It could happen. It could happen.

But Trump keeps promising. I think they're weighing up their bets.

See, this is one of the big failures of Trump. Trump went and met Putin, best of friends. They met in Alaska. They met in other places.

He thought, yeah, he's like me. He can make a deal. He can make a deal.

Putin is out for his own aims, and they're not the same as Trump's.

Now going back to the general picture of the Ukraine and Russia, the media in the West like to present it as Ukraine, the defender of democracy, human rights, and the liberal European Western culture, and Russia and Putin is this terrible monster from from the east.

When, in actual fact, we've said it many times, we got articles on it, NATO has been gradually encroaching on Russia.

They even spoke at one time, some of the American leaders spoke of the possibility of defeating Russia and breaking it up.

They wanted to actually destroy Russia as a power.

Now, if you go down that road, you're going to create a Putin in Russia, which is what happened.

The strong man appears. Russia recovered from its economic crisis of the 90s, has been strengthened economically.

Its links with China have been strengthened.

It's been proven that the sanctions of the West have no impact on Russia or very little. Let's put it that way.

In actual fact, it's the same again. Europe being forced to put the sanctions on Russia or to reduce, at least, its consumption of Russian oil and gas.

Rather than hitting the target, which was Russia, they've hit themselves.

They've massively increased the cost of energy. And it's a contributing factor to the big crisis in Europe, the Ukraine war.

And yet the Europeans continue to insist. I was looking at the figures, one of the problems the Ukraine is facing it's not just manpower, resources, etc.

It's actually money. Funding the war. It has a huge budget problem, huge financial problems.

It's asking for more and more money from America and Europe.

The problem they face with Trump is, Trump has said, 'you can have the guns, but you got to pay for them. I'm prepared to give. But you got to pay for them. And if you haven't got 'em, get the Europeans to pay.'

And the Europeans are funneling billions into Ukraine. They're throwing money down the drain, literally, in a desperate attempt to hold on to the situation.

But if you look at it in the long term, it's not looking good for the Ukraine.

If you give this time, nobody can say exactly how long, Ukraine is being worn down.

What is scandalous on the part of the Western liberals, I find, is the way they all pretend to defend poor little Ukraine.

They have used Ukraine in a calculating manner.

They have thrown the Ukraine against Russia to try and expand the influence of NATO, to maintain its base and to weaken Russia.

And they destroyed the Ukraine in the process, that's what they've achieved. They have destroyed Ukraine.

Ukraine has lost a chunk of its territory. How that's going to get that back, nobody can say that.

Putin is taking what he's taken.

But it's not just the effect it's had in terms of loss of territory.

Mass migration, destruction of infrastructure. The whole economy is in a mess. The whole of the societies is in crisis.

The Ukrainian people are victims of imperialism. They've been used .

One day, this is going to dawn on people.

They're going to look back at this and realize what was done to them.

The Europeans and the Americans have cynically used them.

But what's now happening is that, because Russia is advancing, this is used as a threat by the West.

Russia is coming for us. The idea that Putin would invade, I don't know, and take over the Colosseum in Rome and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, I don't know, maybe La Rambla in Barcelona and beyond...

First, it's beyond his ability in conventional warfare.

It's not in his interests to do that.

Putin is pushing back on NATO and showing them that in that part of the world, he's boss.

This is his sphere of influence.

And they didn't want to make a deal before. Now he's forcing it onto them, but they're using the advance of Russia to build this massive scarecrow to the European peoples.

Russia is coming for us.

This is the other side of this equation. The Europeans are not in a position today to defend themselves.

I was looking at the different armies.

The Italian Army, it's incredible the situation it's in.

It could not defend Italy against a Russian attack. But Russia is not interested.

But they're using it to massively increase rearmament spending.

This 5% pressure from from Trump.

And they're all saying yes. In one way or another, they're pushing up military spending.

That means all across Europe, they are also having to increase the cuts in social spending.

It's a question of welfare versus financing the war and rearmament.

And this also, some people say, 'Well, why do you discuss geopolitics? Why do you discuss these international questions? And you don't discuss the class struggle?'

This is discussing the class struggle because these situations will impact massively on the class struggle.

We discussed Italy last week. Why is there such a big eruption? Why is it that the French government can't be formed again? It's in crisis.

They can't pass the budget. That's what it comes down to, the budget.

The budget's coming in Britain too.

The budgets that are coming this financial year and the next financial year across Europe are going to see massive attacks on the working class in terms of social spending.

That is a key element in the resentment across Europe, and it's leading to a growing class consciousness, and it's leading to mass movements.

The events in Italy, why have they echoed across Europe?

Because people recognize that what they're fighting against in Italy is the same problems we're facing here.

And it is connected to the Ukraine war, and it is connected to the conflicts between the powers, but it's now translating into, not just a crisis of the capitalist system, but of growing class struggle.

Hamid
I think they're definitely using the war in Ukraine as a means to prop themselves up.

Because they're so unpopular.

And they say, 'Oh, no, you need us in order to defend you, because the Russians are coming.'

Although increasingly, is falling to deaf ears.

But you see that there is another problem, as you said in Ukraine, which is the question of money.

Because one thing is the European powers, they want to cut benefits, they want to attack the working class, they want to rearm themselves.

The other thing is funding the Ukraine war after Trump has pulled out.

There's an article in a website called Strana, which is a Ukrainian page, which is relatively honest in it's appraisal of things. It's very honest.

This is Google translated, so it might not be exact, but it says 'Trump's refusal and the Chinese flood: why money is becoming Ukraine's main military problem.'

And they say, look, Ukraine has a budget problem.

First of all, normally, it would get around 60 billion a year. That's what next year's budget is. From its own revenues, taxes and fees and so on.

That is approximately half of the total budget. Then it would get around 50 or 60 billion in arms donations that the European and Western powers would donate for free, more or less, to Ukraine.

And then there is partner countries financing the Ukrainian budget deficit, so another 60 billion to fund soldiers, wages, state functionaries and so on.

So that is 180 billion.

But from out of these 180 billion, only 60 billion comes from normal Ukrainian revenues.

So there's 120 missing.

But it says "on all three counts, the situation has worsened significantly. Firstly, because Donald Trump has effectively abandoned continued aid.

"Secondly, the European Union, which has now shouldered the entire burden of financing, is itself experiencing mounting economic difficulties.

"A case in point is that the fund created to finance the purchase of US arms for Ukraine since August, the amount has remained unchanged, just 2 billion."

They create a fund, they make a big deal out of it. There's only 2 billion in that fund.

And then there's another problem, which is, before they used to gift weapons Give them free to Ukraine.

But now, first of all, their stockpiles are low.

And secondly, the most important weapon now are drones, which the Europeans do not produce.

The majority part of the drones components come from China, and they have to be bought. They have to be paid for.

Which means they need this money.

Now on top of that, by the way, is the destruction of industry.

Russia by advancing it's drone technology is coming down harder on the industries, the electrical network of Ukraine, and is having a significant impact on the general economy.

So that also affects the revenue of Ukraine, although that's not easily quantifiable.

The point is they don't have the money to continue the war.

120 billion is missing. And what are they trying to do?

Fred
There's that idea of taking Russian funds.

Hamid
They want to take... You see, Russia has around 200 billion euros in the ECB, in something called Euro clear.

Which is Russian money deposited in an account in Belgium, and they've frozen it.

They've now frozen it, but now they're talking about confiscating it, right?

And they're having a whole series of hoops that they're jumping through to make this legally viable.

Because what is this? This is Russian money in a bank in Belgium, essentially, that they're trying to steal.

But because they don't want to call it stealing, they say, 'No, Russia has to pay reparations to Ukraine after the war.'

'So we are taking a loan in euro bonds against this money, and then paying Ukraine. And then once the war is finished, it'll be part of the the general agreement, right?'

But in actual fact, it's just stealing.

And one of the problems they have with the stealing is, first of all, Belgium is now saying, 'Well, we are not going to sign off on this unless everyone agrees that if Russia sues us, we'll all pay, not just Belgium.'

Because Belgium is standing to pay. This will completely bankrupt a country like Belgium.

But, you see, they are so short sighted, these people, and so desperate to keep this war going that they're actually undermining themselves.

Because one thing it's not just taking this money.

It's undermining the trust in the financial institutions of Europe.

Who, in their right mind, would put hundreds of billions of euros in European banks in the future, if they can just be taken like that?

Fred
That's actually what a lot of them are saying. They're don't have a clear cut policy on what they're going to do with this, because some of them are saying this undermines, actually, the confidence in the European Union itself.

I.E. in the European Union your money is not safe.

And think about it. These are the defenders of private property. That money is the private property of the Russians, and they've frozen it.

But there's another element, even if they were to go ahead.

Hamid
They will go ahead.

Fred
I looked at the figures with this, right.

At the very most, it would finance the present level of conflict for another two years, maximum.

That's the maximum, right?

So they would exhaust...

The irony would be, if it goes ahead like this, you then declare that this is reparations, and the Russians... Well you've paid for reparations, but it hasn't helped the Ukrainians in any way.

Imagine two years down the road, there's $200 billion just gone up in smoke.

Hamid
It's actually ensuring that the country will be destroyed even more.

Fred
Russia could easily say, 'Well, that money was taken, right? I don't owe you anything.'

Ukraine will be an absolute mess. The Europeans will have spent a pile of money, and they will still be facing a loss in the war.

You're in a hole, and they're digging. They keep digging and making that hole deeper and deeper and deeper.

Eventually this has got to come to an end.

What they're doing is they're actually making it so the end will be far worse than anything they could have had.

Had they had the intelligence to make a deal right at the very beginning, which could have been done...

But the mentality of these people is such. 'European influence, European power'. No, we're standing up.'

It's like trying to defend their prestige globally when it has been massively reduced, and they won't come to terms with it.

And that is an important factor in their politics, in their foreign policy, and what they're doing with the Ukraine war.

Hamid
Yeah, and I would even broaden this out and say, this is the policy of US imperialism.

You know, Trump promised a different foreign policy.

I guess it is quite it is different than anything we've seen before.

But by by carrying out this policy of bullying they've actually successfully antagonized a whole part of a whole layer of the countries in the world that used to be close to them.

They've actually , as you said, they've undermined their own position.

Now, one thing I was thinking about before this show is, if you read any of the American kind of geopolitics, these theories of the post war period and the Cold War period and so on.

It was all about the Eurasian continent.

If Eurasia was ever united against America, it could defeat it.

And especially if Russia and China were united, they would command such a level of resources that in a military conflict or a prolonged conflict of any sort, they could actually defeat America in one way or another.

And their whole policy was always, in particular, after the decline of the Soviet Union, to keep these powers apart from each other.

And one of the arguments for provoking the war in Ukraine was: we're going to weaken Russia. Once it's weak, we'll flip it to our side, and then we'll use it to attack China.

But actually, it pushed Russia into the arms of China.

Their relationship has improved dramatically on the back of this.

You said that they recently done the same thing with India, and they've done the same thing with China.

China is now... China didn't want the war in Ukraine, but actually China is benefiting from this.

And in all of these kind of war scenarios that they drew, the biggest danger, the worst danger, they always said was, we cannot fight a war in two theaters.

But what is the picture we're actually seeing? There's a war in Ukraine which is draining western resources, draining rare earth minerals, if anything.

You know, this is what they use in their weapons, and, weapon systems and so on,

Draining industrial capacity, weapons production and so on and so forth.

And now they're fighting a war with China.

An economic war, but nevertheless, a war, a military, a conflict, a war in a way which is draining the resources and undermining them.

And together, these two things are actually supporting one another.

The war with Russia is undermining what? European capitalism by reducing its access to cheap gas and so on and so forth.

The conflict with China is undermining, again, western industry, the western economies.

And what is the outcome of this?

We talk about the relative decline of the US. There has been a relative decline.

But what we're looking at, as you said, the more they dig themselves into these conflicts, the bigger the defeat is going to be.

And what we're talking about is the bringing down of American imperialism from that position as the number one power.

It's not, there now, but it's the process of a significant defeat being inflicted on American imperialism, which is bound up in insoluble contradictions.

In Gaza, in the Middle East, it's not out. It's deeper in.

In Ukraine, Trump thought he was pulling out. He's still there, even though he's not giving any money.

But that is still American imperialism paying a price for it.

And in China, he's now dug himself in.

He'll come out of it again. But at what cost?

Fred
Well, if you look at Trump's foreign policy.

In the Ukraine, he's failed to achieve anything,

We're no closer to the end of this war than when he was elected.

In the Middle East, he hasn't pulled himself out. He's been sucked in, as you say.

And he hasn't solved the contradiction. It's going to be a festering wound for a long time.

On the trade war, we can see how, in many ways, it's backfiring on the US, not having the effect they want.

China is continuing to grow and get stronger. Russia has emerged stronger, and Trump, with his policies, as you said, he's pushed India towards China.

Now India, China and Russia, together, are very powerful force, both in terms of population, also in terms of its economy and the resources these countries have.

I read, right at the beginning, a serious analyst was saying that Trump, with his policies, would go down in history as the president who managed the final decline of US imperialism.

Hamid
I think he's right.

Fred
So rather than achieving the strengthening, he's actually confirming the weakening.

Now that is the final outcome of all this.

And also, we haven't spoken about it, and we don't have time here, but it opens up the perspectives for the United States itself internally as well, because this decline will have an effect on ordinary working class people in the United States.

Their living conditions, their daily lives, their wages, their jobs, their purchasing power.

And nothing is being resolved.

The hopes that were raised will eventually be dashed.

His popularity ratings have already, you know, are slowly going down.

It opens up again the prospect of renewed class conflict in the United States.

Once it becomes clear that all of these policies which are supposed to make America great again are achieving the opposite, you can see some very sharp changes taking place in the United States.

Just as Trump was presented as this new phenomenon, inexplicable phenomenon, etc. you can see the flip side to that, which will be enormous, class struggle erupting in the United States as a consequence of this.

So Europe is in deep crisis, and is producing an acute political crisis in one country after another, and producing class struggle.

The same will happen in the United States.

That's what this global conflict, in the end, is going to produce.

And the working class will emerge as an actor globally. That's the period that we've entered.

All of this is is preparing that in the coming period.

Hamid
I think those are perfect words to end this show with.

Thank you very much, Fred and thank you for everyone else tuning in.

Don't forget that we have a reading list with the materials that we've been through today and other suggested reading for these topics.

And other than that, we'll be back again next Thursday, 6pm UK time.

Thank you very much. Bye.