AND Editorial: Trump, threats as blackmail

We hereby share an unofficial translation of the latest Editorial published by A Nova Democracia:

Trump’s real protectionist choleric attack, especially the imposition of high tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from all over the world, as well as the trade war with which he intends to blackmail Chinese social-imperialism and the rest of the world, in short, is a prove of the critical situation of Yankee imperialism’s decline, as is the case always that a superpower uses threats to blackmail. Even though this same Yankee imperialism continues in its condition of the sole hegemonic superpower.

Such tariffs are the admission that, in mere monopolistic competition, the Yankees cannot overcome China’s trade power – sustained by the maximum exploitation of the Chinese proletariat, corporatized and subjected to multiple forms of political domination by the revisionist and anti-communist system of the billionaire clique headed by Xi Jinping. An example is the Chinese steel industry, today responsible for half of the world’s steel production, which is invading the North American market, to the despair of the large North American industrialists of this sector. Even with the previous tariffs, Chinese steel is cheaper than U.S. domestic production, as it is in other countries, such as Brazil.

However, and secondly, tariffs – although they have an economic reason in themselves – are much more means than an end. With them, Trump intends, in relation to China, to negotiate his withdrawal from the war in Ukraine, to immediately reach a base agreement with Russia to create the situation of undermining his alliance with China in order to isolate this which is its main economic competitor, as it has the same objective trying to regain control of the Panama Canal, to bar China’s commercial advance there to impose the conditions that ensure the maintenance of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and others as their spheres of influence in the Asia-Pacific region. He also has the emergency of dealing with the critical situation in the Middle East. For its part, Chinese social-imperialism, so aware of Yankee objectives and now with Trump in the baton of command, will not make it any easier, on the contrary, it shrewdly plays the strategies it has prepared, moving the many pieces that it has patiently accumulated on the global chessboard, in decades of crisis of the system. It is obvious that the longer war zones persist and the sharpening of contradictions in other zones with the Yankees, the more embarrassed and bogged down they will be. While China wields the bloc of economic interests apparently in opposition to the Yankee world domination (BRICS) – in fact, an arena of China-Russia imperialist collusion that seeks to postpone as much as possible the outbreak of its latent struggles – it feeds illusions of having the disposition to impose a new world order on the Yankees, when it is nothing more than a smokescreen over the real correlation of world forces, to carry out its strategy of world commercial domination, which has as its solid base the great complex of the New Silk Road, in addition to other derivatives already underway in Africa and penetrating Latin America. The immediate consequence, as already expressed, is a large-scale trade war, therefore, causing shocks and disorders in the global market, interspersed with temporary collusion.

Moreover, Trump’s tariffs are also ways of forcing oppressed countries to follow his dictate, as in the case of Mexico and Colombia; the same will be true for Brazil, soon enough, to further subdue and trample on the government of the day, and favor Bolsonarism in 2026.

With the tariff measures, Trump intends to blackmail China and all the weak points in his zone of influence and semi-colonies to maintain his positions, but if he miscalculates, he may favor other powers to take his place in each zone. Today, the volumes of Yankee tariffs are approaching the levels of the Second World War: more than a curiosity, this is a sign of the volume of contradictions that such tariffs seek to handle. It is a dangerous game, to which the imperialists resort at delicate moments of their crisis, now greater and more stormy.

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The speech of the new president of the Chamber of Deputies, Hugo Motta, Lira’s son, about January 8, does not surprise anyone, except fools. Not even to the government supporters who, cynically, staged being frightened by the statement, as if they did not know. Everyone, including the government, knew that Hugo Motta was in favor of amnesty and critical of the trial conducted by the STF – just like any Bolsonaro supporter. The surprise staging of the government is just playing to the public: after all, if the PT parliamentarians and government ministers said they already knew, everyone would ask, with justice, why they supported this same Hugo Motta as president of the Chamber.

The fact is that the “Amnesty Bill” for the “green chickens” tends to advance; It will be the most resounding demonstration that this traditional, parliamentary right has all the vocation to be a parliamentary base to endorse fascism – as soon as the conditions for this are presented. It is still a perfect portrait of “Brazilian democracy”, whose regime resurfaced in 1988 has always fed the far right and given shelter to fascism so that it could reproduce itself from its entrails. Governing with these people and for these people – as Luiz Inácio is doing – demoralizing the masses, the symbols of the left and stirring up the rank and file of the right, can only result in guaranteeing a new rise of the far right.

Democrats and revolutionaries, workers, peasants, indigenous leaders, remnants of Quilombolas, women, students and many others must, all the more so now, tirelessly mobilize the popular masses. This, which is a permanent task, is now even more important. Only mobilized in the struggle to conquer economic and political rights, the broad popular masses can distinguish the reaction and its true vanguard in demarcation with all the electoral opportunism painted by the reaction as left-wing and communist: not to do so is to guarantee the best terrain for the offensive of the far right. Cast away illusions and prepare for struggle!