New Cold War Archives - Friends of Socialist China

Manufactured outrage: the truth about China’s ethnic unity law

The following article by Carlos Martinez, co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, responds to the coordinated storm of condemnation that greeted the entry into force on 1 July of China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress – a campaign that seeks to revive the discredited “Xinjiang genocide” narrative and extend it to Xizang (Tibet) and beyond.

Carlos examines what the law actually says, and contrasts China’s record on minority rights – rising life expectancy, the elimination of absolute poverty, and the protection and flourishing of minority languages – with the treatment of minority communities in the West.

He traces the long history of Western sponsorship of separatism in China, from the CIA’s two-decade Tibetan programme to the National Endowment for Democracy’s funding of exile groups today, and locates the current hysteria in the failure of the propaganda war: as polling shows steadily warming attitudes towards China, particularly among the young, the ideologues of the New Cold War are increasingly desperate to re-toxify China’s image. What China is building is strength through unity in diversity; what its adversaries want to see is disunity and disintegration.

NB. This article has been translated into Dutch by our friends at China Square.

On 1 July, China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress came into force – the country’s first comprehensive national law on ethnic affairs, adopted by the National People’s Congress in March.

Within days, a remarkably well-coordinated storm of condemnation had been whipped up: denunciations from Washington and Brussels, a resolution in the European Parliament, and a wave of media coverage announcing that China had ordered its minorities to “assimilate”. The thoroughly discredited “Xinjiang genocide” narrative is being dusted off and relaunched – this time with Xizang (Tibet) added to the charge sheet for good measure.

What does the law actually say? It stipulates that upholding national unity and ethnic solidarity is the responsibility of all Chinese citizens, and it prohibits discrimination and suppression against any ethnic group. It strongly re-affirms the right of all peoples to use and develop their own spoken and written languages. It directs central and local government to strengthen infrastructure, industry, public services and environmental protection in minority regions, and to ensure that no ethnic group is left behind in China’s modernisation.

As such, it continues a long-standing programme of what would be called, in Western terminology, affirmative action: preferential university admissions for minority students, bilingual education, protected minority-language broadcasting, and formal autonomy arrangements from Inner Mongolia to Yunnan – to which one might add that China’s national minorities were exempt from the one-child policy throughout its existence. Altogether, strange provisions indeed for a programme of persecution.

Trump, Panama and the Monroe Doctrine

Donald Trump has declared that the United States “will not let China take over the Panama Canal”.

Start with the obvious: China does not own, run or control the Panama Canal, and has no plans to do so. The canal is the sovereign property of Panama, operated by the Panama Canal Authority. The Chinese Embassy in Panama has stated plainly that China has never participated in the canal’s management or operation, respects Panama’s sovereignty over it, and recognises it as a permanently neutral international waterway. There is no Chinese takeover, planned or otherwise.

What actually exists is a modest commercial footprint. A Hong Kong company, CK Hutchison, won – through open bidding – the rights to handle cargo and warehousing at two terminals at either end of the canal. Terminals, not the waterway; commerce, not control. Chinese vessels transit the canal paying the same tolls, under the same rules, as everyone else.

And even that footprint is being dismantled: under relentless US pressure, Hutchison’s ports are being sold to a consortium led by the US asset manager BlackRock, while Panama has already been strong-armed out of the Belt and Road Initiative.

There’s a rich historical irony here. The one country that has actually seized and controlled the canal is the United States. Washington engineered Panama’s secession from Colombia in 1903 to build and own the canal; the US held Panama as a colonial enclave for most of the twentieth century; and invaded the country in 1989, killing hundreds of Panamanians. It returned the canal only because a mass sovereignty movement, and the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, forced it to. To this day the US retains a treaty-based claim to send troops into Panama whenever it unilaterally decides a “security risk” exists. If you want to identify the foreign power that constrains Panama’s sovereignty, there it is.

This is the Monroe Doctrine, alive and well. Trump’s own National Security Strategy states the aim plainly: to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to… own or control strategically vital assets in our Hemisphere”. Latin America is once again to be treated as the imperial backyard, and any Chinese presence – however commercial, however welcomed by the host nation – recast as a hostile incursion to be purged.

And the canal is only one piece on a much larger board. Driving Chinese investors out of Panama belongs to a broader global strategy: the same logic behind Washington’s designs on Greenland, Iceland, the Baltic and the Strait of Hormuz. The goal is to control the world’s trade routes, keep the oil trade priced in dollars, and preserve a financial system so thoroughly weaponised that the US can seize any country’s assets at will – as it has done with Venezuela’s gold, Russia’s reserves and Iran’s savings. Panama’s canal is a chokepoint on that map, and the “China threat” is simply the pretext for tightening Washington’s grip on it.

But Latin American countries are turning to China for a reason. Since establishing ties with Panama in 2017, China has helped revive stalled infrastructure and supported the country’s coffee industry through the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Across the region, trade with, and investment from, China have grown more than 20-fold since 2000, and the new Chancay mega-port in Peru is reshaping trade across the Pacific – cooperation on terms of sovereign equality and mutual benefit that Washington has never offered and never will.

The real question isn’t whether China will “take over” the Panama Canal. It’s whether Panama, and the region, get to make their own choices – or whether the empire next door still decides for them.

The USA and the CPC – a tale of two anniversaries

The following article by Carlos Martinez marks two anniversaries falling days apart – the 105th of the Communist Party of China on 1 July and the 250th of the United States on 4 July – and asks what these two political projects have contributed to the world.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

This week features two anniversaries that, taken together, tell much of the story of our age. On 1 July, the Communist Party of China marked 105 years since its founding. On 4 July, the United States celebrates 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. The two milestones invite a comparison: what have these two political projects contributed to the world?

War and peace

The US was born in a revolution against empire and has spent much of its life building one. By one widely cited reckoning, the US has been at war for over 90 percent of its history – from the wars of continental conquest to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Iran. It maintains around 800 military bases in 80 countries and spends over a trillion dollars a year on its armed forces.

China’s record could hardly be more different. It has not fought a war in close to five decades. The major conflicts it was previously drawn into – Korea and Vietnam – were in defence of neighbours resisting imperialism. It has never launched a war of aggression, never seized a colony, never carried out a regime-change operation, never imposed a unilateral sanctions regime. Its foreign policy still rests on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence – mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality and mutual benefit – first articulated in 1954. Even on the nuclear question, where Western media warn of a Chinese build-up, China holds around 500 warheads to the United States’ several thousand, and remains the only major nuclear power consistently and unambiguously committed to a policy of no first use, in place since its first nuclear test in 1964.

This difference scales up to the level of the world system. The US sits at the head of an order it designed and polices – an order of dollar dominance, financial sanctions, military alliances, and the assumed right to intervene anywhere in defence of its own economic and strategic interests. As the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman famously put it, “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist – McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas”.

China, by contrast, has thrown its weight behind a multipolar trajectory: the Belt and Road Initiative, to which three-quarters of UN member states have signed up; the expansion of BRICS; global initiatives on development, security, civilisational dialogue and governance; and an insistence on sovereign equality – that nations be free to choose their own path. One project seeks to preserve a hierarchy with a single power at the top. The other works towards a global community of shared future, in which all nations participate on equal terms.

Neoliberalism versus common prosperity

Over four decades China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty – more than three-quarters of the global total – and in 2021 declared the elimination of extreme poverty, a decade ahead of the UN’s own target. It has built the largest public medical insurance network on earth, covering essentially its entire population, extended pension coverage to all its elderly, and largely solved the problem of homelessness.

Diane Abbott: The US plan is for global domination – we have to be determined in the campaign for peace

Nearly 3,000 delegates from across Britain, Europe and further afield packed London’s Westminster Central Hall on Saturday June 20 for a conference against war and militarism hosted by Britain’s Stop the War Coalition. It was the second conference of its kind, the first having been held in Paris in October 2025.

In a day noted for numerous rousing and militant speeches, special mention should be made of that made by Diane Abbott, which, despite its brevity, was unique in its providing an insightful overview of the international situation as a whole, the various struggles against imperialism and war and the significance of China.

After referring to the situations in Venezuela, Cuba, Nigeria, Syria, Palestine and Lebanon, Diane continued:

“There is a military build-up against China, especially through AUKUS. And of course, there is the war and blockade of Iran. Finally, there is the prolonged war in Ukraine, the largest war in Europe since the Second World War, much bigger even than the NATO campaign to destroy Yugoslavia.”

All these have one thing in common, she explained. “The United States is central to them all and initiated most of them.”

Referring to the latest US National Security Strategy, she noted that some people have argued that this means that the United States is now restricting its attention to the western hemisphere. But “none of that is true… It is a plan for global domination.”

Economically, the US is on the retreat and has lost its dominance. It has “lost out to the Global South in general and China in particular.” But it is attempting to recover its position primarily through a combination of trade wars, sanctions, and military methods. In this it relies on the overwhelming dominance of the US military, the global role of the US dollar and its network of allies.

However, not everything is going to plan. The US lost the first few rounds of the trade war with China.

She concludes: “It seems clear that we are in for a prolonged fight… We have to be determined in the campaign for peace, and unite with all those governments, movements and peoples who oppose this US rampage.”

Diane Abbott is the member of parliament for Hackney North and Stoke Newington in northeast London. She was first elected in 1987, becoming Britain’s first ever black woman parliamentarian. She is now the ‘Mother of the House’ – the longest currently serving woman member of the House of Commons. Having served as Shadow Home Secretary during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, she is currently suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party, due to the discredited regime of Keir Starmer’s war against the left and to her steadfast opposition to austerity, racism and imperialist war.

Why the Chinese working class won’t pay for Western neoliberalism

The following article by Carlos Martinez responds to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s call at the recent EU summit for a new “Plaza Accord” to force up the value of the Chinese renminbi.

Carlos recalls how the original 1985 Plaza Accord was not a neutral rebalancing of trade but the deliberate kneecapping of an economic competitor – Washington strong-arming Japan, West Germany, France and Britain into driving down the dollar, plunging Japan into a “lost decade” of stagnation while failing to dent a US trade deficit that originated in Washington’s own model of high consumption and low savings, not in the exchange rate.

Carlos argues that China today cannot be treated as Japan was. Where Japan was a subordinate Cold War ally hosting tens of thousands of US troops; China is a sovereign socialist state with an increasingly prosperous domestic market of 1.4 billion people, an independent financial policy and a central bank that answers to no one in the West – it simply cannot be “Plaza’d”.

The article also takes aim at the language of “overcapacity”, which Carlos describes as a euphemism for European and North American industry failing to compete after nearly half a century of financialisation, privatisation and deregulation. Chinese competitiveness in electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels flows from a complete industrial system and sustained investment in technology – not from currency manipulation – and the EU’s tariffs of up to 35 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles are, he writes, “an act of self-harm disguised as self-defence”.

Two roads for the world: notes from “Imperialism vs multipolarity” webinar

On 21 June, Friends of Socialist China and the International Manifesto Group co-hosted a webinar, “Imperialism vs multipolarity”, bringing together a distinguished international panel to discuss the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, the tariff and Iran wars, US military aggression across the Global South, and the emerging shape of the world order.

The discussion was moderated by Radhika Desai (Professor at the University of Manitoba and convenor of the International Manifesto Group), and brought together Ben Norton (founder and editor-in-chief of Geopolitical Economy Report); Cheng Enfu (President of the World Association for Political Economy), whose paper was presented by Professor Ding Xiaoqin; Ken Hammond (Professor of History at New Mexico State University and a founder of Pivot to Peace); Jacquie Luqman (coordinator with the Black Alliance for Peace); Mick Dunford (Emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex); Mike Klonsky (educator, author and veteran activist); Jenny Clegg (author of China’s Global Strategy: Towards a Multipolar World); and Carlos Martinez (co-editor of Friends of Socialist China).

The full livestream can be viewed at the end of this article, below our report of the discussion.

Danny Haiphong: There is reason to hope

The following article by Danny Haiphong – journalist, broadcaster and a co-founder of Friends of Socialist China – argues that, against the nihilism and pessimism spreading through the West, geopolitics and political economy offer genuine grounds for optimism. He frames US unipolar imperialism (less than a century old) and Western colonialism (about four centuries old) as brief blips in human history, met throughout by constant resistance – from Maroon societies to twentieth-century liberation movements.

The US empire, Danny contends, is in material decline: its share of global GDP has fallen from 35–50 percent in 1945 to 20–25 percent now, while manufacturing has shrunk to under 10 percent of the economy, leaving it dominated by finance, insurance, real estate and military contracting. Endless war is therefore a symptom of weakness, not strength – the warmongers can only destroy, not build.

A multipolar reality is emerging. China is the article’s prime example: from being one of the poorest countries in the world at the time of the founding of the People’s Republic, it has managed to eliminate extreme poverty and become a leader in robotics, AI, high-speed rail, renewables and reforestation, with over 90 percent public trust in government grounded in results. Danny extends the case to a resurgent, sanctions-proof Russia; to Iran, whose retaliation against US–Israeli strikes and control over the Strait of Hormuz have significantly increased its global standing; and to smaller states defying sanctions – the DPRK’s construction boom, Zimbabwe’s recovery from the crippling sanctions imposed by the west to punish the country for land reform, and Cuba’s healthcare achievements despite blockade.

Danny concludes:

The sociopathic rulers of US empire (what some have deemed the Epstein class) are committed to taking everyone down with their collapsing system of empire and neoliberal capitalism. Endless war and theft masquerading as economics is the only path left in front of them. US-Israeli genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, not to mention the dozens of other deadly wars and the imposition of abject poverty for more than half the planet to enrich just eight ultra-rich individuals, understandably fuel despair and disgust amongst those in the collective West who detest this reality. But there is reason to hope. We can find it in the billions of people struggling to build a better world.

Webinar: Imperialism vs multipolarity – The US and China’s clashing visions of the international order (21 June)

📆 Sunday 21 June 2026, 2pm Britain, 9am US Eastern, 9pm China

A discussion of the Trump-Xi summit, the tariff war, US military aggression across the Global South, and the prospects for the world to come.

When Donald Trump arrived in Beijing in May for talks with President Xi Jinping – the first visit by a US president in nine years – the observant could detect a major shift in the international order. Successive US administrations’ increasingly desperate efforts to maintain dominance – through tariffs, sanctions, military aggression and technology warfare – have been failing as China’s economic might and diplomatic influence have grown. The trip Trump had hoped to make in triumph had to be made amid the disaster of his failing war on Iran, on top of the earlier failure of his tariff war against China.

Rather than projecting power, Trump was left with no alternative but to treat China as a peer. China now accounts for roughly 30 percent of global manufacturing output; the Belt and Road Initiative spans continents; and a growing majority of the world’s people are orientating away from US hegemonism and towards a pluripolar future. Xi’s quietly confident offer of “a new paradigm of major-country relations” and a “constructive relationship of strategic stability” went largely unchallenged.

Trump will undoubtedly flail against this new reality, and that flailing will bring further misery to the world. But there are signs that a critical corner is being turned in the journey towards a multipolar world order based on sovereignty, development and peace.

Join our panel of analysts, activists and scholars for a wide-ranging discussion of the Trump-Xi summit and its aftermath, the tariff war, US military aggression across the Global South, and the prospects for the world to come.

This webinar is organised by Friends of Socialist China and the International Manifesto Group.

Confirmed speakers

Cheng Enfu (President of the World Association for Political Economy)
Ben Norton (Founder and editor-in-chief, Geopolitical Economy Report)
Carlos Martinez (Co-editor, Friends of Socialist China)
Jacquie Luqman (Black Alliance for Peace)
Jenny Clegg (Author and peace campaigner)
Ken Hammond (Professor of History, New Mexico State University; Pivot to Peace)
Mick Dunford (Emeritus Professor, University of Sussex)
Mike Klonsky (Educator, author and activist)
Moderator: Radhika Desai (Convenor, International Manifesto Group)

Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port and the complete collapse of the “debt trap” narrative

For years, Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port was the textbook example of what Western politicians called Chinese “debt-trap diplomacy” – the claim that Beijing lures poor countries into unpayable loans and then seizes their strategic infrastructure. In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez shows how comprehensively that story has collapsed.

Drawing on studies by Chatham House, the Johns Hopkins economist Deborah Bräutigam and Sri Lankan officials themselves, Carlos sets out the facts: the port was a Sri Lankan initiative, not a Chinese one; Washington and Delhi were asked to fund it and declined; and Chinese loans made up just 9 percent of Sri Lanka’s government debt. As the country’s then ports minister put it, “We thank China for arranging this investor to save us from the debt trap.” Sri Lanka’s debt crisis “was made on Wall Street, not in Beijing.”

Far from a predatory white elephant, Hambantota has become one of the fastest-growing trans-shipment hubs in the Indian Ocean, drawing the largest foreign investment in Sri Lankan history. The real debt trap, the article argues, is sprung by the IMF, the World Bank and Western bond markets – and the campaign against the Belt and Road is “a blatant act of self-projection.”

Socialist and anti-colonial movements laid groundwork for multipolarity

The following article, by Gregory E. Williams, argues that we can’t understand multipolarity through an international relations or geopolitics lens alone; it is primarily a class question.

The post-1991 “unipolar moment” wasn’t simply the absence of a rival superpower. It was a counter-revolutionary opening for the global capitalist class – Wall Street ascendant, the IMF and World Bank disciplining the Global South, Reagan and Thatcher austerity at home, an unbroken line of attack on the working class running from there down to Musk’s DOGE cuts.

And the multipolar trajectory we witness today has its origins in the revolutions of the twentieth century: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the wave of national liberation movements from Algeria to Vietnam, Bandung 1955, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the long resistance in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen. China’s industrial power today is the inheritance of 1949. Iran’s defiance is the inheritance of 1979.

The class character of the two camps isn’t symmetrical. The forces driving towards the defeat of US-led imperialism represent the working class and the oppressed peoples of the Global South.

China and DPRK reject Quad moves to stoke tension in the Asia-Pacific

The foreign ministers of the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) met in the Indian capital New Delhi on May 26. This US-led body which also comprises Japan, Australia and India plays a provocative role in US imperialism’s attempts to encircle and contain China as well as other socialist countries and anti-imperialist forces in the Asia-Pacific region.

On May 27, the Xinhua News Agency released a commentary stressing the need to guard against what it called the Quad’s “bloc politics”, noting that its members had “again hyped maritime issues related to the East and South China Seas.”

It added: “In recent years, nearly every joint statement issued after Quad foreign ministers’ meetings has reiterated these themes. Yet such patronising rhetoric about safeguarding so-called ‘freedom of navigation’ cannot obscure the reality that the bloc itself has become a source of turbulence, fueling tensions and deepening confrontation in the region.

“At a time when most Asia-Pacific countries are focused on economic recovery and regional integration, the Quad appears to be moving in the opposite direction by unveiling a raft of new measures — a move widely seen as driven by a Cold War mentality aimed at containing China’s development.”

According to Xinhua: “While the Quad foreign ministers voiced concern over regional peace and stability, few will overlook the irony that the war against Iran launched by Washington is itself undermining supply-chain resilience across the Asia-Pacific.

“Regional economies such as India — also a Quad member — are already bearing the brunt of the resulting turmoil in global energy markets. In the meantime, the still-undecided date for the Quad leaders’ summit offers a glimpse into the grouping’s growing disarray.”

However, it warned that “the world should still stay vigilant against countries like Japan [attempting] to use this bloc as a cover to hype up groundless security concerns in the region for its own militarist agenda… What the region needs is cooperative frameworks that prioritise development, mutual trust and shared prosperity over ideological alignment and geopolitical calculation. The Quad should recognise that Asia’s future lies in cooperation, not confrontation.”

The following day, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported the answers given by a spokesperson for the foreign ministry of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) regarding the meeting.

The spokesperson noted that the joint statement issued by the meeting “not only seriously distorted the immediate and urgent challenges and threats faced by the countries in the Asia-Pacific region but also clearly exposed the hostile intention against specific countries.

“Quad talked about the strengthening of cooperation while expressing ‘concern’ over the situation in the South Sea and East Sea of China. It is aimed at justifying Japan’s moves for rearmament and Australia’s possession of a nuclear submarine, which are arousing concern of the international community.”

They continued: “In particular, the US-led Quad members took issue with the DPRK’s legitimate exercise of sovereign rights, calling for ‘denuclearisation’. This goes to prove that Quad is nothing but a political and diplomatic tool serving the US strategy for unipolar domination… The Foreign Ministry of the DPRK resolutely denounces and rejects the US-led Quad’s hostile stand against the DPRK and other regional countries and strongly demands that it drop its attempt to escalate inter-camp confrontation destroying regional peace and stability.”

The Trump-Xi summit: stalemate or stabilisation?

In the following article, which was originally published in the Morning Star, Jenny Clegg assesses the recent state visit to China by US President Donald Trump and argues that, “for all the ceremony and general bonhomie there seemed in the end to be little for Trump — who asked for the meeting in the first place — to show for it.”

Referring to Trump’s talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Jenny notes that: “Xi’s opening remarks were then apposite, warning in no uncertain terms about the dangers of war as he referenced the Thucydides Trap — the scenario when a rising power and a declining power go to war — the subject of much debate recently in US foreign policy circles.

“Xi then drew the red line on Taiwan, his eyes on Trump in an effort to impress upon him the importance of laying off the island. He, in effect, was telling Trump: don’t make a mess of relations with China like the mess you’ve made in the Middle East.”

Having reviewed the steadily mounting US hostility in the nine years since a US president – also Donald Trump – visited China, Jenny concludes:

“Meanwhile China’s popularity with the American people has grown even as Trump’s approval rating drops: 72 per cent of the US public now say they don’t see China as an enemy.”

Referring to the large number of top US capitalists who accompanied the president, she notes: “The fact that Trump, fielding the better part of the top echelons of the US ruling class, came away with so little is remarkable.

“More than anything he was looking for a big economic win to take back to the US electorate — but discussions about China’s purchase of Boeing aircraft and those millions of tons of soya beans are only ‘preliminary.’ Such was the disappointment that as the summit ended Boeing’s shares fell.”

China’s view that the Hormuz strait should reopen and Iran should not have nuclear weapons is nothing new and whilst Trump’s threats and wars may continue and even intensify elsewhere, greater stability in relations between the world’s two major powers may also create breathing space in other areas, easing pressure on countries to choose between the US and China. Jenny concludes that:

“As space for manoeuvre among Global South countries increases, their growing autonomy will keep driving the multipolar trend forward.”

The eyes of the world were on Beijing and the much-hyped Xi-Trump meeting last week, but for all the ceremony and general bonhomie there seemed in the end to be little for Trump — who asked for the meeting in the first place — to show for it.

It is of course a good thing that the leaders of the two largest economic powers met, and Trump’s invitation to Xi to visit the White House in September – which Xi accepted — indicates a certain degree of stability amid the international chaos he has wreaked elsewhere. So rather than pass by on the event as much ado about nothing, it is worth taking stock.

A successful visit to Beijing: is the US ruling class starting to face reality?

In the following article, our co-editor Carlos Martinez assesses Donald Trump’s 13-15 May state visit to China, arguing that the positive mood music between Trump and Xi Jinping reflects a (slowly) growing understanding in US policy circles that a hawkish anti-China strategy simply is not working. The semiconductor war has accelerated Chinese self-sufficiency rather than slowed it; Trump’s 145 percent tariffs collapsed within days of Beijing tightening rare-earth export controls; and the US-Israeli criminal war on Iran has strengthened, rather than weakened, the multipolar trajectory.

The deeper meaning of this summit is that the US ruling class is having to, very reluctantly, start to come to terms with the world as it actually is. It does not “hold the cards”. As Xi put it at the Great Hall of the People, “the world is big enough to accommodate both countries, and one country’s success is an opportunity for the other.” The Chinese have been consistently saying this for years. The difference now is that, as a growing number of US analysts are admitting that they’re right: win-win cooperation between major powers is possible; what isn’t possible is the indefinite extension of unipolar US hegemony.

NB. An expanded version of this article, including analysis of Vladimir Putin’s visit a few days later, has been published in Beijing Review.

Donald Trump’s 13-15 May state visit to China has produced a raft of headlines that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. “This time, Trump and Xi meet as equals”, declared The Times. The White House spoke of a “constructive relationship of strategic stability”.

A delegation of CEOs – Nvidia’s Jensen Huang (who joined at the last minute), Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook and more – accompanied the president to Beijing, signalling that the decoupling project has, at least for the moment, run its course. Trump publicly defended the right of half a million Chinese students to attend US universities. He called Xi a “great leader” and said “the relationship is a very strong one”. The Times columnist Gerard Baker, who has spent years cheerleading for the China hawks, conceded that “the unipolar moment was fleeting” and that “there are two true superpowers”.

This is a remarkable shift. Trump has cast himself as a China hawk since at least his 2016 campaign. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country”, he infamously told a rally in Indiana. He pledged to label China a currency manipulator on day one, accused Beijing of “stealing our jobs” and made tariffs on Chinese goods a centrepiece of his platform. Once in office, he initiated the trade war, banned Huawei from US 5G networks, expelled Chinese journalists, signed bipartisan legislation funnelling weapons to Taiwan, and oversaw the 2017 National Security Strategy that designated China as a “strategic competitor”.

Working people around the world look for Cold War reset as Xi and Trump meet

As Chinese President Xi Jinping sat down with his US counterpart and guest Donald Trump in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on May 14, the US publication People’s World published an article issued in the name of its editorial collective, saying that “the eyes of working people around the world are fixed on this two-day summit with both urgency and hope.”

It went on to note that the “relationship between the United States and China has deteriorated badly in recent years. Military posturing in the Asia-Pacific and the signing of new war pacts like the AUKUS nuclear submarine scheme have raised the specter of catastrophic conflict. A ‘new Cold War’ framework—driven by Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment—has pushed the two largest economies on earth toward confrontation rather than cooperation… This summit is an opportunity to step back from the brink and push the reset button.”

According to the US comrades, in his opening remarks addressed to Trump, President Xi posed the right question: “Can the United States and China avoid the ‘Thucydides Trap,’ the historical pattern in which a rising power and an established one blunder into war? That question deserves a serious answer, and it demands more than diplomatic pleasantries. It demands concrete commitments.”

We reprint the article below.

As U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping sit across from one another at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, the eyes of working people around the world are fixed on this two-day summit with both urgency and hope.

The relationship between the United States and China has deteriorated badly in recent years. Reckless tariff wars have disrupted global supply chains and squeezed workers and consumers in both countries with inflation and layoffs. Military posturing in the Asia-Pacific and the signing of new war pacts like the AUKUS nuclear submarine scheme have raised the specter of catastrophic conflict.

Shield of the Americas: The pinnacle of subordination in the silent war against China

While the world’s attention has been focused on Washington’s wars of aggression in the West Asia, the Trump administration has been quietly advancing a parallel offensive in Latin America – one whose real target, as Oscar Rotundo makes clear in this incisive analysis (originally published in English on the website Internationalist 360), is China.

The “Shield of the Americas” summit, hosted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem at Trump’s Doral golf resort in Miami, brought together twelve compliant Latin American governments and committed them to a Washington-monitored protocol covering security, economic and digital cooperation. As Rotundo shows, this is nothing new: the US has long used regional proxies to advance its interests while making others pay the bill. What’s relatively new is the explicit anti-China dimension.

Every country invited to Miami has significant economic ties with China – ties that are, in most cases, irreplaceable. China is the largest trading partner of Chile; it is Bolivia’s largest creditor; a key investor in Ecuador; and a key destination for much of the region’s commodity exports. The Chancay megaport in Peru, Chinese EVs and green energy investment are all in Washington’s crosshairs.

But as Rotundo argues, the US has nothing comparable to offer. It brings no investment, no infrastructure, no technology transfer – only threats, sanctions and hegemonism. China, by contrast, “builds quality infrastructure and incorporates cutting-edge technology” without demanding political submission.

“The train of the future,” Rotundo concludes, “has left Trump stranded.”

The so-called “Shield of the Americas,” which includes Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago , met at a golf club in Doral, Miami, and was hosted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem, former Secretary of Homeland Security, who will now serve as special envoy for the “Shield of the Americas.”

The idea behind this meeting is to commit those present to a regional control protocol in security, economy, and digital cooperation, monitored from Washington.

Just as the United States once turned to private contractors such as DynCorp International (now part of Amentum), a US security and aviation contractor for the Pentagon and the State Department, who operated in “Plan Colombia,” it is now turning to the military forces of these countries to act as police officers under its command.

Sending migrants to prisons in El Salvador or Guantanamo in Cuba, the kidnapping of the sitting constitutional president Nicolás Maduro and the deputy Cilia Flores in Caracas, Venezuela, the threats of invasion or overthrow of the legitimate government of Cuba, the constant extortion against Mexico, are all part of the same package to which the cohort of lackeys is added.

The United States, with the same zeal with which it bombs boats under the pretext of drug trafficking, taking the lives of people who cannot be held responsible for any crime; under this cloak of suspicion, it intends to implement a regional security policy with military forces paid for by each State to multiply the protection of its interests in the region.

What is hidden beneath that shield

Supposedly a shield protects, but not always. We could say that the TIAR (Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance) – a mutual defense pact signed in 1947 by countries of America, under the principle that an armed attack against a member state is considered an attack against all, obliging cooperation – was also a shield promoted by the northern hegemon, which, when it came to intervening and discouraging the aggression of an extra-continental force like Great Britain, which since 1833 has illegitimately occupied the Falkland Islands, a territory belonging to Argentina, a member country, did the opposite and joined the aggression by logistically supporting the colonialist force.

Under this shield, “friendly” countries agree to hand over natural resources and sovereignty over these and over the territories where interoceanic passages are located, so that the United States can exercise control over the movement of goods and military resources that can be moved from one place to another, as Donald Trump has just proposed regarding the Strait of Hormuz, which he is “considering taking control of,” a strategic maritime passage through which 20% of the world’s crude oil and also significant quantities of liquefied natural gas (LNG) circulate.

Also, as seen in Ecuador with the presence of Erik Prince, founder of the private military company Blackwater, who in 2025 collaborated with the government of Daniel Noboa to combat organized crime and drug trafficking, participating in operations in Guayaquil and in the training of security forces, it would not be surprising if contractors of this nature were to occupy the ground and the operation of this purported fight against Narcoterrorism, under the auspices of this “strategic protection” in the associated countries.

The claws of a dying beast: US imperialism’s existential quagmire

As the US-Israeli war on Iran enters its second month, a striking vulnerability has emerged that the mainstream media has largely chosen to ignore: the Pentagon’s ability to replenish its rapidly depleting weapons stockpiles is now to a significant degree dependent on China’s rare earth exports, which are essential to everything from jet engine coatings to precision guidance systems. Alternative supply chains are three to five years away at best. China’s leading position in critical minerals processing gives important leverage in any confrontation with Washington.

In the following article, Ileana Chan, Director and Producer at Empire Watch, illuminates this contradiction, situating the criminal war on Iran within the broader imperial logic of a system that is simultaneously dependent on China and desperate to contain it – recognising that China will have surpassed the West in most economic and technological measures within the coming years, and calculating that the window for action is closing.

Ileana highlights the role of China’s steady, principled diplomacy as a counterpoint to US belligerence – a model of sovereignty, development and mutual respect that meets the needs of a rising Global South.

While we grieve for lives lost today and those to come, we know the Global South is building something new. A world defined not by bombastic slogans, but by the steady, even-keeled diplomacy China exemplifies, where sovereignty, development, and mutual respect are paramount.

This article was first published on the Empire Watch Patreon.

The latest US-Israeli war on Iran exposes the desperate belligerence of an empire in inevitable freefall.

It is a war decades in the making, completely aligned with Washington’s geopolitical maneuvering to perpetuate a unipolar world. This empire demands fealty from its vassal states and allies, without being able to articulate a rational strategy and objective. It claims self-defense while committing war crimes and breaking international law with impunity. Yet, somehow, behind the shock and awe tactics and tired propaganda tropes, the US seems utterly unprepared for the reality it has unleashed.

Stop the War Coalition reaffirms campaigning priorities and highlights heightened danger of war in the Pacific

Several hundred people packed central London’s Hamilton House on Saturday March 14 for the annual conference of Britain’s Stop the War Coalition (StW).

Amidst the most dangerous international situation in the lifetime of most if not all of the delegates, the day’s proceedings represented a powerful, united and militant expression of determination to do everything possible both to end the brutal imperialist wars currently being waged against Iran, Palestine, Lebanon and elsewhere and to prevent the outbreak of a third world war that would threaten the very existence of humanity.

Stop the War’s website reports that during the opening session, Mustafa Barghouti, the renowned Palestinian figure, thanked StW for its solidarity with the Palestinian and Iranian people and drew attention to the devastating attacks Israel is currently conducting against Lebanon.

Jeremy Corbyn MP spoke of StW as a voice for peace, and of UK complicity in the destruction of Gaza, noting how the UK continues to send weapons to Israel.

Maryam Eslamdoust, railworkers’ union TSSA general secretary, who has family in Iran, reminded conference of the human tragedy of war. Maryam said Trump’s attacks were designed to strike fear and terror into civilians to achieve an uprising, fast victory and regime change. However, she believed Iran would not crumble as the imperialists hoped, and that the US would face a Vietnam-style defeat.

A motion on opposition to British foreign policy, moved by Stop the War deputy president and founding chair Andrew Murray, in an exceptionally fiery and impassioned speech, notes that:

The Trump administration has embarked on a rampage of aggression that is imperilling the entire world.

It has launched a barbaric and illegal attack with Israel on Iran (including murdering its leader) and Lebanon, kidnapped the President of Venezuela, bombed Yemen and Nigeria and is trying to bring down the government in Cuba. It has also threatened Panama, Colombia and Greenland. It has embarked on an intensification of the nuclear arms race.

All this is aimed at reversing the relative decline of US imperialism, particularly in the face of China’s growing strength, and securing a new redivision of power and profit in the world to its advantage. It threatens a third world war.

Keir Starmer has committed the British government to support for this reckless and bloody policy. All his professed support for international law disappears in the face of Washington’s illegalities. He is craven in his appeasement of Trump when he is not actually joining in with his wars.

Instead of aligning with most of the world in condemning this war drive, Britain backs the aggressors. This policy also threatens to beggar the British people with entirely unsustainable and unnecessary increases in military spending, on a scale which will make urgent social improvements all-but impossible.

The government also works to prolong the dangerous conflict in Ukraine and to engage in military provocations directed towards China in the Far East.

This is all accompanied by a war psychosis designed to condition the population to the inevitability of an impending great power war.

Conference resolved:

Interview: Understanding China’s foreign policy

In the video embedded below, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez joins Roger McKenzie for a detailed exploration of China’s foreign policy, its domestic progress, and the geopolitical strategies shaping the 21st century. The two discuss the importance of understanding China’s rise, the global shift towards multipolarity, and the need for solidarity against imperialist pressures.

Some of the key ideas put forward include:

• China’s foreign policy rests on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, first formulated by Zhou Enlai in 1954 and adopted at the Bandung Conference the following year. These principles – mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence – elevate what Lenin conceived as a tactical necessity into a principled theoretical framework. The core insight is that countries with fundamentally different social systems can and must coexist, and that all non-imperialist countries share a common interest in opposing domination and pursuing their own development paths. Today these principles find expression in China’s vision of a community with a shared future for humanity, underpinned by the Belt and Road Initiative, BRICS (which now surpasses the G7 in GDP, population and landmass), the SCO, and the G77. Multipolarity – a negotiated international order in which no single power can impose its will – is not only urgently needed to address existential challenges like climate change and nuclear war, but is, as Samir Amin argued, the necessary framework for the possible overcoming of capitalism itself.

• The United States is not accepting this shift passively. Brzezinski identified the nightmare scenario decades ago: a grand coalition of China, Russia and Iran. US responses have included proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, military encirclement of China through AUKUS and Pacific buildups, unconditional support for Israel, tariff wars, semiconductor controls, the kidnapping of president Maduro, the suffocation of Cuba, the reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, and now open war on Iran. The US is losing economic and technological primacy but retains overwhelming military power, and the danger is precisely that of a declining empire reaching for military solutions.

• The war on Iran must be understood in this context. It is not about nuclear weapons – nobody believes that. It is not about women’s rights – women’s rights are improving in Iran and deteriorating in the West. It is a criminal attack, carried out by presidential decree without reference to international law or domestic legal process, against a sovereign state that supports Palestinian resistance, maintains public ownership of its energy resources, and is a key node in the multipolar project – a crucial link in the Belt and Road, a member of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and an important energy partner for China. The attack is simultaneously an attempt to seize control of energy flows, to develop strategic chokepoints that could be used against China in a hot war, and to destroy the axis of resistance across West Asia. It is the empire striking back.

• China is supporting Iran to the best of its abilities – diplomatically, economically, and with military cooperation – but does not have the capacity to project military power into the region. Nonetheless, Iran is a fiercely independent country with formidable military capabilities. The US and Israel will not achieve their objectives: they will not install a puppet regime, will not destroy the Palestinian resistance, and will not seize Iran’s strategic position.

• The task for progressive forces in the West is to oppose the war on Iran, oppose the New Cold War on China and the propaganda war that sustains it, and build the broadest possible united front against imperialism, racism and neoliberalism. We are not the vanguard – that role belongs to the socialist countries and the peoples under direct attack. But everyone has a part to play, and we must do what we can to build solidarity and make war untenable for the imperialists.

China chokehold: Long-term goal of the US war on Iran

Why is the United States waging war on Iran? The official justifications shift by the day – nuclear weapons, Israeli security, bringing “democracy” – but CJ Atkins, writing in People’s World, cuts through the noise to identify a deeper strategic logic.

Ironically, it has fallen to the far-right, pro-Trump, Falun Gong-affiliated Epoch Times to spell it out most clearly. The war on Iran, like the January invasion of Venezuela, is to a considerable degree a move against China. Iran supplied 13.4 percent of China’s seaborne oil imports last year, Venezuela a further 4.5 percent. Combined with Russia, sanctioned suppliers accounted for a third of China’s entire crude import mix in 2024. Neutralising Iran – and with it, threatening Chinese access to the Strait of Hormuz, through which 37.7 percent of China’s crude oil flows – is a bid to put Beijing in an energy chokehold.

Atkins writes: “Iran sits alongside that chokepoint and, as recent days have made abundantly clear, is capable of threatening access to it. It is the one independent actor in the region that can seriously complicate shipping through the whole corridor. That’s a power the U.S. government would prefer to have in its own hands.”

As such, the criminal aggression against Iran and Venezuela forms part of the US-led long-term campaign of containment and encirclement of the People’s Republic of China.

This is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the deeper architecture of US imperialism’s current offensive. It makes clear that the wars on Iran and Venezuela are not separate conflicts but coordinated moves in a single grand strategy: not only a war on Tehran or Caracas, but a war on the multipolar trajectory. Such a strategy must be resolutely opposed.

There’s an angle to the Iran War that the cable news anchors, retired generals-turned-commentators, and corporate-owned newspapers are barely talking about, if at all. They report on the shifting justifications proffered by Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, or Donald Trump, but few in the press are doing anything to illuminate the bigger picture.

The United States isn’t attacking Iran simply because of Tehran’s nuclear program, or out of concern for the welfare of the Iranian people, or even purely for Israel’s security. The Trump administration’s decision to launch its war was motivated by a goal that goes well beyond nuclear non-proliferation. Nor is the war a case of Tel Aviv telling Washington what to do, regardless of what some of Netanyahu’s most intense critics want to believe.

It has fallen to the far-right, anti-communist outlet The Epoch Times—the newspaper associated with the Falun Gong cult—to offer the truth about what the U.S. is up to. “A key strategic dimension of the Iran conflict,” wrote James Gorrie, a regular columnist for the pro-Trump paper in its March 13 issue, “involves Washington’s efforts to control and even restrict Iranian oil flows to China.”

Marco Rubio and Wang Yi offer vastly contrasting visions of international relations

The two articles collected here, by Paweł Wargan and Sevim Dağdelen, approach the same moment in world politics, arriving at a shared conclusion: the international order is entering a period of profound transition, marked by the decline of Western hegemony and an increasingly open struggle over what comes next. Both writers use the recent Munich Security Conference as a lens through which to examine this shift, arguing that the language emerging from parts of the Western establishment reflects not confidence, but profound anxiety about the changing global balance of power.

A central thread running through both analyses is the contrast between two competing visions of international relations.

On one side, they see a US-led Western bloc seeking to preserve its dominance through military power, sanctions, and coercive diplomacy. The speech by Secretary of State Marco Rubio attempts to provide an ideological framework for this posture by openly promoting white supremacism and colonial nostalgia (“We are part of one civilisation – Western civilisation. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilisation to which we have fallen heir”). Rubio flaunted Washington’s willingness to abandon international law and the basic norms of relations between states in support of reviving and furthering Western hegemony.

On the other side stands a different vision, associated above all with China and the broader Global South. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s speech represents a contrasting emphasis on multilateralism, sovereign equality and cooperation among states. Both Paweł and Sevim’s articles suggest that China’s growing influence – economically, diplomatically and institutionally – has become central to the emerging multipolar order. Rather than viewing China simply as a rival, these articles frame it as a key actor in building alternative institutions and partnerships that challenge imperialism and uphold the principles of the United Nations Charter.

Together, the two texts explore the stakes of this historical turning point. Is the world moving toward renewed confrontation and bloc politics, or toward a more multipolar and democratic international system? The answer, they imply, will depend not only on the decisions of major powers but on the unity and coordinated action of countries throughout the world, and particularly the Global South.

Paweł Wargan is Political Coordinator at the Progressive International. Sevim Dağdelen was a member of the German Bundestag from 2005 to 2025 and is currently a member of the Federal Executive Board of the German party BSW (Bundnis Sahra Wagenknecht / The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance).

Adults in the Room

February 20 (Valdai Club) – The 62^nd Munich Security Conference concluded with a funereal mood. For three days, heads of state, diplomats, and military officials gathered between the Hotel Bayerischer Hof and the Rosewood Munich to take stock of a world system that is, by their own admission, fracturing. The conference report, titled Under Destruction, acknowledged what has long been obvious to those watching from the periphery of the imperial system: the post-1945 US-led international order is coming apart at the seams.

In more ways than one, the Conference revealed the contours of the world order that is emerging in its place. It exposed a diminishing and desperate Europe and a revanchist and atavistic US — two parts of a weakening bloc determined to rescue its position on the international stage with force. But it also revealed an alternative: a determination to build a new international order that could finally overcome the inequities of a global system structured by centuries of colonial rule and violent domination.

European leaders rehashed a well-worn liturgy of contradictory claims and feeble appeals. War was at the forefront of their minds. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, spoke of a Russia that was simultaneously “broken” and “no superpower”, and an omnipotent Russia that could “cripple economies through cyberattacks, disrupt satellites, sabotage undersea cables, fracture alliances with disinformation, [and] coerce countries by weaponising oil and gas” — a narrative designed to shore up support for Europe’s re-militarization.