Thursday, February 13, 2025

Trump’s Sphere-of-Influence Tariffs

By trying to weaponize the U.S. tariffs on America’s big trade partners against China, President Trump is basing bad economics on worse geopolitics. It could prove a costly prelude to a global downturn.

On February 1, President Trump imposed 25% tariffs and 10% duties on energy products on Canada and Mexico, and 10% tariffs on China. The three countries are America’s greatest trade partners and the United States has a trade deficit with each.

The Trump tariffs could cause Canada’s GDP could fall as much as 3%, while Mexico’s could suffer a 2% drop, by some estimates. A trade war between the U.S. and its two largest trading partners would also hit U.S. income, hurt employment and increase inflation.

Just two days after his tariff war proclamations, Trump took a back step. Following talks, levies against Canada and Mexico will be delayed for 30 days. But as Trump’s tariffs went into effect against China, Beijing announced a broad package of economic measures targeting the United States on February 10 – and more will follow if needed.

So, will Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum be talking about economics with the White House? Perhaps in part. But the Trump administration would also like to build a North American trade bloc against China.

Spheres-of-influence games in the Americas

The Trump tariffs are legitimized by a victimization narrative in which America is depicted as a target of wrongful economic and geopolitical measures. Consequently, the White House portrays itself in a rightful crusade and the rest of the world as prime destabilizers.

This time the tariff wars started with Trump’s heated exchanges with Colombian President Gustavo Petro. After Colombia refused to accept two US military aircraft with Colombian citizens deported from the US, Washington threatened tariffs and sanctions on Bogota. Since the US is Colombia’s largest trading partner, the potentially lethal battle ended with Colombia agreeing to accept deportees and Trump claiming victory.

The Colombian row was timed to take place before the major tariff wars with Canada, Mexico and China, as a demonstration effect to other trade partners, with the tacit message: “This is what will happen to you, too, unless you succumb.”

Trump is playing tariff chess. The White House hopes to use geopolitics to force the two countries into a US-controlled North American bloc, to undermine China’s economic role in the Americas. Hence, too, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Panama and President José Raúl Mulino’s decision to end a key development deal with China, to avoid Trump’s threat to retake Panama Canal and “many casualties” as Rubio warned.

As the victors of World War II divided Europe in Yalta in 1945, Trump is paving a new spheres-of-influence trajectory in which U.S. dominance would extend across Central America, from Mexico to Panama – into Colombia.

The fentanyl story

According to Trump, the Mexico and Canada tariffs were imposed because these countries had not halted migration and drug trafficking over U.S. borders. Both countries rushed to assuage Trump’s border concerns, yet only to face diffuse, lingering demands. These tensions are not due to economic causes. They are dictated by geopolitics.

Trump also continues to blame China over America’s fentanyl crisis. In the US, synthetic opioids (mainly fentanyl-related substances) may have resulted in over 78,000 US overdose deaths between September 2022 and August 2023. Yet, China’s imposition of class-wide controls over all fentanyl-related substances changed trafficking patterns after 2019. According to congressional research, direct flows of such substances from China to the US have largely ceased since then.

Again, according to congressional research, around 2019 Mexico, as a primary source of, and transit country for, illicit drugs destined for the United States, replaced the China as the primary source of U.S.-bound illicit fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, and fentanyl analogues.

Yet, US government has unilaterally addressed China’s role in fentanyl and precursor trafficking. U.S. administrations seem to favor foreign scapegoats over the cold realization that America has a decades-long drug crisis in which the primary problem is the lucrative demand.

So, what’s the rationale for the tariff wars with these three countries? Trump has pledged the duties will prevail until the three countries halt fentanyl smuggling and illegal migration. It was a stunning admission that the Trump tariff wars are not about economics but about the weaponization of unilateral economic coercive power.

Trump tariff failures in the past

Since 1950, tariffs have never accounted for much more than 2% of US federal revenue; last year, the figure was 1.6%. Though these decades, Congress has delegated extensive tariff-setting authority to the President, who has been seen as more insulated from domestic protectionist pressures. Hence, the progressive decline in tariff rates. But today those days are gone.

In Trump’s view, the low-tariff, rules-based global trading system works against America. So, in his first term, duties paid on U.S. imports doubled to $74 billion in 2020.

Since tariffs no longer have effective economic rationales, they are today used selectively to protect certain domestic industries, advance foreign policy goals, or as negotiating leverage in trade negotiations.

Attributing its tariff policies to the trade practices of US trading partners and the US trade deficit, the first Trump administration imposed tariff increases under three U.S. laws:

Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 on U.S. imports of steel and aluminum, presumably due to concerns over “national security”;
Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974 on U.S. imports of washing machines and solar products, due to concerns over domestic U.S. industry;
Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 on U.S. imports from China and from the European Union (EU), presumably due to intellectual property and subsidies concerns, respectively.

Ironically, Trump used the first law to shrink US trade, whereas the Kennedy administration originally relied on it to expand trade. The two other laws were used in the US against Japanese exports in the mid-‘70s, without success.

The objective of the Trump trade wars was to “bring jobs back to America.” But that has not happened and can’t happen with misguided economics.

Far bigger economic stakes

Half a decade ago, Trump tariffs on U.S. imports from China accounted for $396 billion or more than 90% of the trade affected. However, the first round of the Trump tariffs with Canada, Mexico and China would cover far more trade in dollar value.

Trump’s four tranches of tariffs on Chinese goods in 2018-19 covered imports valued at $360 billion at the time. Today Canada and Mexico and China supply currently more than two-fifths of all US imports. New tariffs on the two countries plus additional tariffs on China could cover imports valued at over $1.3 trillion in 2023.

That’s over 3.5 times more than half a decade ago. And it is just the opening salvo in a series of U.S. tariff moves that are anticipated in the coming weeks. Factor in the potential/likely retaliation rounds by US tariff targets and the final toll could prove far, far higher.

The second front of the trade wars could ensue in mid-February, when the Trump administration plans to impose tariffs on computer chips, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas imports, and steel, aluminum, and copper. The Trump administration is also hiking tariffs on the European Union, which has “treated us so horribly.”

And other trading powers with which the US has a major trade deficit, including Germany, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam, could be next in the firing line.

Darkening global prospects

U.S. inflation, at 2.9% in December, is still running higher than the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. The Peterson Institute has estimated that U.S. inflation would be 0.54 percentage point higher with the tariffs this year than without.

The threatened wave of tariffs could worsen trade tensions, lower investment, hit market pricing, distort trade flows and disrupt supply chains, and undermine consumer confidence. And that’s just an overture for what could ensue in the next four years.

At first, tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation may seem to boost the US economy. But they could set the stage for an inflationary boom followed by a bust. That’s when Trump’s economic policies “could hit the rest of the world, as the International Monetary Fund has warned.

The original commentary was published by China-US Focus on Feb. 7, 2025

Dr Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/.

A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises

Reprinted from TomDispatch.

Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers – Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego – to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors – Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman – posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.

For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.

The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Ever since, debate over the MIC’s accumulating power has roiled American politics. A number of politicians and prominent public figures have portrayed U.S. entry into a catastrophic series of foreign wars – in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere – as a consequence of that complex’s undue influence on policymaking. No such claims and complaints, however, have ever succeeded in loosening the MIC’s iron grip on Pentagon arms procurement. This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.

Over time, the competition for billion-dollar Pentagon contracts has led to a winnowing of the MIC ecosystem, resulting in the dominance of a few major industrial behemoths. In 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) – claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. (Anduril and General Atomics didn’t even appear on a list of the top 100 contract recipients.)

Typically, these companies are the lead, or “prime,” contractors for major weapons systems that the Pentagon keeps buying year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, is the prime contractor for the Air Force’s top-priority F-35 stealth fighter (a plane that has often proved distinctly disappointing in operation); Northrop Grumman is building the B-21 stealth bomber; Boeing produces the F-15EX combat jet; and General Dynamics makes the Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines. “Big-ticket” items like these are usually purchased in substantial numbers over many years, ensuring steady profits for their producers. When the initial buys of such systems seem to be nearing completion, their producers usually generate new or upgraded versions of the same weapons, while employing their powerful lobbying arms in Washington to convince Congress to fund the new designs.

Over the years, non-governmental organizations like the National Priorities Project and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have heroically tried to persuade lawmakers to resist the MIC’s lobbying efforts and reduce military spending, but without noticeable success. Now, however, a new force – Silicon Valley startup culture – has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.

Along Came Anduril

Consider Anduril Industries, one of two under-the-radar companies that left three MIC heavyweights in the dust last April by winning the contract to build a prototype of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Anduril (named after the sword carried by Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a virtual-reality headset designer, with the goal of incorporating artificial intelligence into novel weapons systems. He was supported in that effort by prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and the head of another defense-oriented startup, Palantir (a name also derived from The Lord of the Rings).

From the start, Luckey and his associates sought to shoulder aside traditional defense contractors to make room for their high-tech startups. Those two companies and other new-fledged tech firms often found themselves frozen out of major Pentagon contracts that had long been written to favor the MIC giants with their bevies of lawyers and mastery of government paperwork. In 2016, Palantir even sued the U.S. Army for refusing to consider it for a large data-processing contract and later prevailed in court, opening the door for future Department of Defense awards.

In addition to its aggressive legal stance, Anduril has also gained notoriety thanks to the outspokenness of its founder, Palmer Luckey. Whereas other corporate leaders were usually restrained in their language when discussing Department of Defense operations, Luckey openly criticized the Pentagon’s inbred preference for working with traditional defense contractors at the expense of investments in the advanced technologies he believes are needed to overpower China and Russia in some future conflict.

Such technology, he insisted, was only available from the commercial tech industry. “The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who nevertheless do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need,” Luckey and his top associates claimed in their 2022 Mission Document. “These companies work slowly, while the best [software] engineers relish working at speed. And the software engineering talent who can build faster than our adversaries resides in the commercial sector, not at large defense primes.”

To overcome obstacles to military modernization, Luckey argued, the government needed to loosen its contracting rules and make it easier for defense startups and software companies to do business with the Pentagon. “We need defense companies that are fast. That won’t happen simply by wishing it to be so: it will only happen if companies are incentivized to move” by far more permissive Pentagon policies.

Buttressed by such arguments, as well as the influence of key figures like Thiel, Anduril began to secure modest but strategic contracts from the military and the Department of Homeland Security. In 2019, it received a small Marine Corps contract to install AI-enabled perimeter surveillance systems at bases in Japan and the United States. A year later, it won a five-year, $25 million contract to build surveillance towers on the U.S.-Mexican border for Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In September 2020, it also received a $36 million CBP contract to build additional sentry towers along that border.

After that, bigger awards began to roll in. In February 2023, the Department of Defense started buying Anduril’s Altius-600 surveillance/attack drone for delivery to the Ukrainian military and, last September, the Army announced that it would purchase its Ghost-X drone for battlefield surveillance operations. Anduril is also now one of four companies selected by the Air Force to develop prototypes for its proposed Enterprise Test Vehicle, a medium-sized drone intended to launch salvos of smaller surveillance and attack drones.

Anduril’s success in winning ever-larger Pentagon contracts has attracted the interest of wealthy investors looking for opportunities to profit from the expected growth of defense-oriented startups. In July 2020, it received fresh investments of $200 million from Thiel’s Founders Fund and prominent Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz, raising the company’s valuation to nearly $2 billion. A year later, Anduril obtained another $450 million from those and other venture capital firms, bringing its estimated valuation to $4.5 billion (double what it had been in 2020). More finance capital has flowed into Anduril since then, spearheading a major drive by private investors to fuel the rise of defense startups – and profit from their growth as it materializes.

The Replicator Initiative

Along with its success in attracting big defense contracts and capital infusions, Anduril has succeeded in convincing many senior Pentagon officials of the need to reform the department’s contracting operations so as to make more room for defense startups and tech firms. On August 28, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, then the department’s second-highest official, announced the inauguration of the “Replicator” initiative, designed to speed the delivery of advanced weaponry to the armed forces.

“[Our] budgeting and bureaucratic processes are slow, cumbersome, and byzantine,” she acknowledged. To overcome such obstacles, she indicated, the Replicator initiative would cut through red tape and award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry. “Our goal,” she declared, “is to seed, spark, and stoke the flames of innovation.”

As Hicks suggested, Replicator contracts would indeed be awarded in successive batches, or “tranches.” The first tranche, announced last May, included AeroVironment Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones (called that because they are supposed to crash into their intended targets, exploding on contact). Anduril was a triple winner in the second tranche, announced on November 13th. According to the Department of Defense, that batch included funding for the Army’s purchase of Ghost-X surveillance drones, the Marine Corps’ acquisition of Altius-600 kamikaze drones, and development of the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle, of which Anduril is one of four participating vendors.

Just as important, perhaps, was Hicks’ embrace of Palmer Luckey’s blueprint for reforming Pentagon purchasing. “The Replicator initiative is demonstrably reducing barriers to innovation, and delivering capabilities to warfighters at a rapid pace,” she affirmed in November. “We are creating opportunities for a broad range of traditional and nontraditional defense and technology companies… and we are building the capability to do that again and again.”

Enter the Trumpians

Kathleen Hicks stepped down as deputy secretary of defense on January 20th when Donald Trump reoccupied the White House, as did many of her top aides. Exactly how the incoming administration will address the issue of military procurement remains to be seen, but many in Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, have strong ties to Silicon Valley and so are likely to favor Replicator-like policies.

Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who recently won confirmation as secretary of defense, has no background in weapons development and has said little about the topic. However, Trump’s choice as deputy secretary (and Hick’s replacement) is billionaire investor Stephen A. Feinberg who, as chief investment officer of Cerberus Capital Management, acquired the military startup Stratolaunch – suggesting that he might favor extending programs like Replicator.

In a sense, the Trump moment will fit past Washington patterns when it comes to the Pentagon in that the president and his Republican allies in Congress will undoubtedly push for a massive increase in military spending, despite the fact that the military budget is already at a staggering all-time high. Every arms producer is likely to profit from such a move, whether traditional prime contractors or Silicon Valley startups. If, however, defense spending is kept at current levels – in order to finance the tax cuts and other costly measures favored by Trump and the Republicans – fierce competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could easily arise again. That, in turn, might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.

Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction. Vance, a former Silicon Valley functionary who reportedly became Trump’s running mate only after heavy lobbying by Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires, is likely to be encouraged by his former allies to steer more Pentagon contracts to Anduril, Palantir, and related companies. And that would hardly be surprising, since Vance’s private venture fund, Narya Capital (yes, another name derived from The Lord of the Rings!), has invested in Anduril and other military/space ventures.

Named by Trump to direct the as-yet-to-be-established Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, like Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, fought the Department of Defense to obtain contracts for one of his companies, SpaceX, and has expressed deep contempt for the Pentagon’s traditional way of doing things. In particular, he has denigrated the costly, generally ill-performing Lockheed-made F-35 jet fighter at a time when AI-governed drones are becoming ever more capable. Despite that progress, as he wrote on X, the social media platform he now owns, “some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.” In a subsequent post, he added that “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway.”

His critique of the F-35 ruffled feathers at the Air Force and caused Lockheed’s stock to fall by more than 3%. “We are committed to delivering the world’s most advanced aircraft – the F-35 – and its unrivaled capabilities with the government and our industry partners,” Lockheed declared in response to Musk’s tweets. Over at the Pentagon, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall had this to say: “I have a lot of respect for Elon Musk as an engineer. He’s not a warfighter, and he needs to learn a little bit more about the business, I think, before he makes such grand announcements as he did.” He then added, “I don’t see F-35 being replaced. We should continue to buy it, and we also should continue to upgrade it.”

President Trump has yet to indicate his stance on the F-35 or other high-priced items in the Pentagon’s budget lineup. He may (or may not) call for a slowdown in purchases of that plane and seek greater investment in other projects. Still, the divide exposed by Musk – between costly manned weapons made by traditional defense contractors and more affordable unmanned systems made by the likes of Anduril, General Atomics, and AeroVironment – is bound to widen in the years to come as the new version of the military-industrial complex only grows in wealth and power. How the old MIC will address such a threat to its primacy remains to be seen, but multibillion-dollar weapons companies are not likely to step aside without a fight. And that fight will likely divide the Trumpian universe.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

Indonesia Joining BRICS Is a Huge Deal That Went Unnoticed

On January 6, Indonesia formally entered BRICS as a full member. It was an important geopolitical shift that went largely unreported and little discussed in the mainstream media.

BRICS is an international organization whose primary purpose is to balance U.S. hegemony in a new multipolar world. Its roots go back to 1996 and the emergence of the core group of Russia, India and China (RIC). In 2009, along with Brazil, BRIC held its first summit. In 2010, South Africa joined, and BRICS was formed, making it, perhaps, the only major international body in which representatives of Africa and Latin America have an equal voice.

The group is neither an alliance nor a bloc, and it is not against the United States: many of its members have good relations with the United States. But it does seek to end the American led unipolar world and replace it with a world with many poles and many nations with equal voices.

Indonesia joining BRICS is significant both because another country joined BRICS and, specifically, because Indonesia jointed BRICS.

Indonesia is the fourth largest country and the seventh largest economy in the world. Three of the four largest countries in the world are now members of BRICS. BRICS now represents half the population of the world and 41.4% of GDP.

At its fifteenth annual summit in 2023, Egypt, Iran, the United Arab Emirate and Ethiopia joined BRICS. Now Indonesia has joined, and “more than 30 more states are showing interest in participating in” BRICS.

The continued expansion of BRICS is a loud expression of an increasingly confident and vocal global majority’s support for multipolarity and dissatisfaction with American hegemony. There is a growing feeling that the American led unipolar world order has failed them. It has protected neither their economic development nor their sovereignty. They have too often been the victims of neocolonialism and coups.

As Sarang Shidore, director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute, told me, “Indonesia joining adds to the push for a more equitable world order, but is also a signal that states across the Global South… are concerned about the serious shortcomings in the current global system, in which the United States remains the most powerful actor.” In its statement, Indonesia said that joining BRICS “shows Indonesia’s increasingly active role in global issues and commitment to strengthening multilateral cooperation to create a global structure that is more inclusive and fair.”

The U.S. seems to have caught glimpses of the inevitability of the emerging multipolar world that the BRICS members have pointed to. In 2023, then CIA Director William Burns grudgingly acknowledged that “the United States… is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc. And our position at the head of the table isn’t guaranteed.” Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia.”

But it is not just that Indonesia is another country to joint BRICS. It is significant that it is Indonesia that joined BRICS.

Indonesia is not only the world’s fourth largest country, it is the largest country in Southeast Asia. After Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE expanded BRICS into the Middle East, Southeast Asia remained one of the few regions in the world that BRICS was not represented. Indonesia has now made BRICS a truly global organization. And Malaysia and Thailand are preparing to follow Indonesia.

But the significance goes beyond the geographical to the political and the cultural. The addition of Indonesia challenges the American narrative of democracies versus autocracies and explodes the leading U.S. criticism of BRICS, that it is a gathering of dictators. With the addition of Indonesia, BRICS is now home to three of the four largest democracies in the world, and Indonesia joins India, Brazil and South Africa as one of four democratic members of the ten nation BRICS.

Indonesia is also the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

So, Indonesia changes the regional, political and cultural face of BRICS, making it more global and more democratic.

Like many members of BRICS, Indonesia is hostile to the U.S. unipolar world but is not hostile to the United States. Indonesia enjoys good relations with the U.S. and sees its membership in BRICS as the “embodiment of Indonesia’s independent and active foreign policy.”

But Indonesia’s willingness to join BRICS changes things. In 2024, Indonesia’s trade with BRICS nations was $150 billion. Indonesia is now considering importing oil from Russia, saying that “an opportunity to acquire oil from Russia emerged after we joined BRICS.” Upon being offered membership, Indonesia expressed “appreciation to… Russia for their support and leadership in facilitating Indonesia’s entry into BRICS”. And Indonesia has gone from placing tariffs on Chinese imports and banning Chinese online retailers to joining the Chinese-Russian led BRICS.

One of the goals of BRICS that the U.S. is most concerned with is the emancipation from the hegemony of the U.S. dollar that has been an instrument in allowing the U.S. to coerce ideological, economic and political adjustment form other countries and that has allowed it to be the only country in the world that can effectively sanction its opponents. U.S. president Donald Trump has recently threatened the BRICS counties that “they will face 100% Tariffs” if they challenge the hegemony of the U.S. dollar.

Another significance of Indonesian membership in BRICS is that it has a history of supporting that goal. Joko Widodo, the previous president of Indonesia, once explained an Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ decision to reduce dependence on the U.S. dollar and “reinforce financial resilience… through the use of local currency” with the warning, “Be very careful. We must remember the sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Russia.”

Though the mainstream media gave little coverage, and less discussion, to Indonesia’s entry into BRICS, it is a major event that expands BRICS’ size, its inclusive regional coverage, its representation of democratic nations and the power of the global majority’s challenge to the U.S. led unipolar world.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.

From Gaza to the West Bank: Israel’s Unyielding War Machine

“A year of combat” – this is how Israel’s new Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, described 2025 at a conference organized by the Israeli ministry of defense.

The exact sentence, translated from Hebrew, was: “The year 2025 will continue to be a year of combat.” The word ‘continue’ is crucial, suggesting that Israel will resume its wars, despite ceasefire agreements signed with the Lebanese government in November and Palestinian groups in January. In other words, it seems that Zamir is signaling that Israel will reopen these two fronts, even in the face of ceasefire deals.

Despite Israel’s insatiable appetite for war, it is hard to imagine what the Israeli army could achieve through renewed violence when it has already failed to accomplish its objectives in nearly 14 months in Lebanon and over 15 months in Gaza.

Israel launched thousands of airstrikes on Lebanon, destroying entire towns and villages and killing and wounding thousands. It also dropped over 85,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, leading to the unprecedented genocide and the killing and wounding of over 170,000. Despite this, Israel has failed on both fronts. In Gaza, as reported by Reuters, Hamas alone managed to recruit up to 15,000 fighters just before the end of Israel’s 471st day of relentless warfare.

Furthermore, the return of nearly one million Palestinians to northern Gaza has reset Israel’s so-called tactical or strategic achievements. These efforts, aimed at depopulating northern Gaza to create permanent military buffer zones, were reversed by the population’s return.

The war also came at a staggering cost to the Israeli army. Ironically, during the same ministry of defense conference, Zamir revealed the actual costs of Israel’s wars in the past year. He stated that the ministry “now provides care for 5,942 new bereaved family members,”, adding that the “Rehabilitation Department has taken in over 15,000 wounded service members, many bearing both physical and mental scars from the war.”

These figures were not broken down by category or war front and did not include casualties from October 7, 2023, to the end of the year. However, they represent the highest estimate of Israeli casualties provided to date, raising the question: Can Israel afford to return to war?

Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who was dismissed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on November 5, offered clues about Israel’s military crisis during an interview on Channel 12. Gallant recalled a conversation he had with Netanyahu after the Hamas assault on the Gaza Envelope region in southern Israel.

“The prime minister told me that we would see thousands of dead in the offensive in Gaza. I told him: We will not see thousands of dead,” Gallant said. Zamir’s numbers, however, have now validated Netanyahu’s estimates, not Gallant’s.

Another early fear of Netanyahu was that “Hezbollah will destroy everything if we hit it,” referring to the city of Tel Aviv. While that particular prediction did not fully materialize, the stalemate in Lebanon ensures Israel will remain haunted by similar fears.

So, will 2025 be a year of combat for Israel?

Netanyahu faces a twofold challenge: if all war fronts officially end, his government will collapse; but if he returns to active war, he will fail to claim any decisive victory.

It is possible that Zamir’s “year of combat” doctrine is aimed at saving face – projecting strength without reopening major war fronts. Israel may continue to create crises in Gaza and Lebanon without fully engaging in war, perhaps by delaying scheduled withdrawals, adding new demands, and so on.

But this may not be enough for Netanyahu to stay in power, especially in the face of growing dissatisfaction. This is where the Iron Wall, Israel’s ongoing military operation in the West Bank, comes into play.

Though Israel has launched numerous raids in the West Bank, the January 21 campaign was directly linked to the war in Gaza. It began two days after the latest ceasefire, signaling that a large deployment of Israeli forces in the West Bank was meant to offset reduced combat in Gaza.

It also served to distract from Israel’s sense of failure in Gaza, as described by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who quit Netanyahu’s coalition on January 19.

The war in the West Bank, centered in the refugee camp of Jenin, has used tactics similar to those employed in Gaza. Tens of thousands have been displaced from Jenin, Tulkarm, and other northern West Bank regions; hundreds have been killed, wounded, and had their homes demolished. The Israeli army seems to be attempting to compensate for its failure to ethnically cleanse Gaza by displacing entire communities in the West Bank.

If Israel persists in making 2025 a “year of combat” focused on the West Bank, the consequences could be dire, especially for an army that has already suffered unprecedented losses on multiple fronts.

If Israel continues on this path, an all-out uprising may become imminent, and new, unexpected fronts could open up simultaneously.

Israel must be reined in. It is acting like a wounded animal and, in doing so, it continues to kill Palestinians in the name of security while destabilizing the entire Middle East. Netanyahu must be stopped.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out. His other books include My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

Middle East

Palestine: In Gaza and the West Bank, the ceasefire does not stop Israel’s colonial machine

Sunday 9 February 2025, by Theo

On Sunday 19 January 2025, the ceasefire in Gaza and the release of prisoners came into effect. Within a very fragile framework, 1,967 Palestinian political prisoners from all over Palestine were to be released. Released but, as is often the case, only to be re-arrested. Since 1967, according to the UN, 800,000 Palestinians have spent time in Israeli jails. In the first phase, 69 women and 21 children were released, while 70 of those released in the second phase were sentenced to deportation and exile.

For the mainstream media, there are, on the one hand, the Israeli ‘hostages’ who are much talked about and, on the other, the Palestinian prisoners who are called ‘terrorists’. They don’t really know the term ‘political prisoners’ or ‘imprisoned children’. Nor do they know anything about the conditions of detention: often imprisoned without trial, by administrative decision, hostages to a practice inherited from British colonialism and perpetuated by Israeli colonialism, mistreated, tortured, sometimes killed or killed in prison.

Israel continues in the West Bank

The hypocrisy and cynicism of Israel and its allies know no bounds. At the same time as the Zionist state is signing the ceasefire for Gaza, it is deploying even more of its army in the West Bank. In the occupied territories, the Palestinians are suffering, at an intensified pace, the violence of fascist settlers accompanied by the repression and brutality of the Israeli army. The reports we hear from journalists are terrifying. As for our friends in the West Bank, they tell us about the prevailing fear but also ask us to continue our solidarity actions. Hundreds of new checkpoints are being set up at the entrances to towns, villages and refugee camps. They are closing off all access and turning the West Bank into a mousetrap. Arrests of Palestinians of all ages have become massive.

Jenin, one of the bastions of Palestinian resistance, is under attack: bombings, destruction of roads and infrastructure, demolition of homes, forced displacement and massacres of the inhabitants. Trump has lifted financial sanctions against the most virulent settlers in the West Bank and is calling on Egypt and Jordan to take in Gazans.
Israel’s right to flout international law

This is a serious time. If Israel, with the active help of the United States and the complicity of Western countries and certain Arab countries, pursues its plan to annex what remains of the Palestinian territories, after the genocide in Gaza, a new and even more dramatic Nakba is in the offing.

This situation will continue to be treated by the mainstream media, the government and Europe as Israel’s perpetual ‘right’ to defend itself with impunity, in other words as an apartheid colonial state that flouts international law and UN resolutions. And ignores the decisions of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

Only the Palestinian resistance, together with international solidarity, can stop Israel and the United States. Let’s continue to mobilise and put pressure on governments, let’s step up the campaign to boycott Israel, its products and the companies that are complicit. Let’s step up solidarity with the Palestinian people for their right to resistance, for their right to remain on or return to their land, for their right to life, freedom and justice. Let’s broaden our solidarity so that the massacres, genocide, occupation and colonisation stop.

L’Anticapitaliste 30 January 2025

Attached documentspalestine-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank-the-ceasefire-does-not_a8848-2.pdf (PDF - 905.4 KiB)
Extraction PDF [->article8848]

Theo

International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.

Trump’s Tariff Schemes Hurt Even More When He Flip-Flops

As January bled into February, Lora Kelly notes at The Atlantic, US president Donald Trump “announced 25 percent tariffs on the country’s North American neighbors, caused a panic in the stock market, eked out minor concessions from foreign leaders, and called the whole thing off (for 30 days, at least).”

Cue collective sigh of relief, but the title of the piece – “How the Tariff Whiplash Could Haunt Pricing” – tells an even more disturbing tale.

Yes, tariffs are terrible (btw, they’re not taxes on “the country’s North American neighbors,” but on the American consumers who buy goods from those neighbors), but there are worse things.

One of those worse things is regime uncertainty.

In his 1997 paper published under that title (and subtitled “Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed after the War”), economist Robert Higgs explains:

“[T]he insufficiency of private investment from 1935 through 1940 reflected a pervasive uncertainty among investors about the security of their property rights in their capital and its prospective returns. This uncertainty arose, especially though not exclusively, from the character of federal government actions and the nature of the Roosevelt administration…”

A long-term tariff is certainly economically damaging. It both raises prices on imports and enables domestic producers to raise THEIR prices on the same kinds of goods. It makes everyone (except the politically connected domestic producers who lobbied for it) poorer.

But at least a stable tariff can be planned for. Investors just factor it in to their decisions.

Suppose, however, that tariffs were set on a daily basis by spinning a roulette-type wheel. One day the tariff on, say, imported cars was 0%. The next day, 100%. The day after that, 29%.

Existing auto manufacturers would factor the maximum POSSIBLE tariffs into their prices rather than risk losing money on sudden changes, and few would invest in the risky business of building new plants to build more cars.

Consumers would get screwed on car prices every day; investors wouldn’t risk getting screwed on profitability going forward.

The actual effect of Trump’s tariff shenanigans might not be as stark as the daily roulette wheel hypothetical, but uncertainty will inevitably drive consumer prices up and interest/investment in producing potentially tariffed goods down.

“In this world,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1789, “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Tariff roulette removes even that second element of certainty. And all we get in exchange is reduced general prosperity.

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Author: Thomas Knapp

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism, publisher of Rational Review News Digest, and moderator of Antiwar.com’s commenting/discussion community. View all posts by Thomas Knapp

AMERIKA

Mentally Ill or Criminal? Jails Have Become Mental Health Facilities Say Experts

by Martha Rosenberg / February 10th, 2025

To many, it is an unseen problem. People denied mental health services who end up homeless or incarcerated as criminals. A few year ago, the Kennedy Forum at Chicago’s Palmer House Hilton, addressed this and other aspects of the lack of a functional community mental health system in the United States.

The Kennedy Forum was founded to enlist business leaders and government agencies in fully implementing the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, which was amended by the Affordable Care Act, to guarantee equal access to medical care and help patients understand their rights.

According to former US Representative Patrick Kennedy and others who spoke at the event (called “The Cost of Doing Nothing”) untreated people with mental illness may be the most salient public health problem there is. “I have been out to Cook County Jail myself,” Rep. Kennedy told me in a one-on-one, exclusive interview. “It is the largest mental health facility in the nation.”

Chicago’s notorious Cook County 10,000-person Jail may be the largest in the nation, but “every jail in America” is a de facto mental health facility Rep. Kennedy told me because community mental health support in the US, outlined 50 years ago with President Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963, “never got implemented.”

Patrick Kennedy is the youngest son of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy and served 16 years as Rhode Island’s Democratic representative in Congress. “If the nation wanted a good answer to Sandy Hook and Aurora” it would make a commitment to providing mental health care to any American who “suffers a psychotic break,” he said. We are not doing “what we know works.”

There is overwhelming evidence that mental health affects overall health, said Rep. Kennedy and US medicine needs to start doing a “check up from the neck up.” Currently, we have “a two-tier system”—one for health care and one for mental health care, he said, and the latter is “poorly reimbursed and poorly respected within the medical community.”

Others at the conference agreed. We have “under-funded and eliminated” community mental health services and people with mental illness are, not surprisingly, ending up in jail and prison said then Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart who participated on a panel called Models for Change: Addressing Mental Illness and Addiction in the Justice System.

The number of women with mental health issues is “exploding” in the judicial system said Sheriff Dart with as many as “18 out of 20 women [who are arrested] acutely psychotic.”

No one is sure why. Mentally ill people, like the growing wave of disturbed women, have usually been arrested for “misdemeanors” said the sheriff which means they are not dangerous criminals and probably require mental health services which are currently almost absent as opposed to incarceration.

Another problem with the underfunded system are patients who tell the sheriff they don’t want to leave jail because it is the “best treatment they have ever had,” said the sheriff. People who are in jail and do not have mental illness usually want to talk about their case and the fact that they are innocent, he said. Conversely, people who have mental illness often beg for help when they are released such as in housing. They are literally “craving a place to live,” said Sheriff Dart.

“Insurance companies have regularly and routinely denied benefits for people with mental illness” whether severe disorders or people who have alcoholism, addictions, eating disorders, panic attacks and more Rep. Kennedy told me in our interview. Addiction diseases may be diseases of denial in which a person will try everything before they seek help but acquainting them with resources, like anonymous, Twelve Step programs increases their chance of getting better and is a strong example of early intervention, Rep. Kennedy said.

This is an excerpt from the recently published book Food, Clothes, Men, Gas, and Other Problems.FacebookTwitterReddit Email

Martha Rosenberg’s humor has appeared in the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, other dailies and the original National Lampoon. She served as editorial cartoonist at the Evanston RoundTable for many years. She can be reached at: martharosenberg@sbcglobal.net. Read other articles by Martha.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment