By Alex Lantier
9 November 2019
Intractable divisions between
the imperialist powers that twice in the 20th century exploded into world war
are again undermining international alliances key to the affairs of world
capitalism. This was the content of a long, deeply pessimistic interview French
President Emmanuel Macron granted to Britain’s Economist, declaring the
NATO alliance between America and Europe to be dead. The interview contained
statements virtually unprecedented for a French president in living memory.
Macron first expressed his
bewilderment at the world situation and his frustration at US policy. “I’m
trying to be lucid, but look at what is happening around the world,” he said.
“It would have been unthinkable five years ago. Exhausting ourselves with
Brexit this way, Europe having so much difficulty advancing, an American ally
that turns its back on us so quickly on strategic issues—no one would have
thought it possible.”
Stressing the danger of world
war, Macron indicated that he sees US policy on a broad range of topics from
the Middle East, to Russia, China, and global finance as threats to vital
French interests. He attacked Trump’s pull-out of US troops from Syria,
green-lighting a Turkish attack on Kurdish militias that were serving as
proxies for the NATO war in Syria.
“What we are seeing, I think,
is that NATO is brain dead,” Macron said. He indicated his concern that Article
5 on collective NATO self-defense could drag France into a war launched by its
nominal NATO ally, Turkey, against Syria and Syria’s main ally, Russia: “What
does Article 5 mean tomorrow? If (Syrian President) Bashar al-Assad’s regime
decides to counterattack against Turkey, will we commit ourselves militarily? …
From a strategic and political standpoint, what has happened is an enormous
problem for NATO.”
Macron also attacked US policy
towards Russia, a major nuclear-armed power: “When the United States is very
harsh with Russia, it is a form of governmental, political and historical
hysteria.”
Macron stressed that US policy
could provoke all-out war with Russia, calling instead to develop an alliance
with Moscow: “If we want to build peace in Europe and rebuild European
strategic autonomy, we must reconsider our position towards Russia.” He added
that France can “talk to everyone and so build relations to prevent the world
from going up in a conflagration.”
Macron also warned of “the
emergence, in the last 15 years, of a Chinese power that raises a danger of
bipolarization and clearly marginalizes Europe. The danger of a US-China ‘G2’
is added to that of the return of authoritarian powers near Europe,” such as
Russia and Turkey. Just back from a trip to China, where he signed $15 billion
in contracts and denounced US trade war tariffs against China and Europe,
Macron said he was “neutral” on Huawei, a company Washington has tried to keep
from setting up European and global internet architecture.
Macron highlighted the bitter
struggles over markets among the leading capitalist states. Pointing to fears
of a US financial collapse dragging Europe down with it, he attacked US trade
war policies, declaring: “Europe is a continent with a lot of savings. Much of
these savings goes to buy US debt. So our savings finance the future of the
United States, and we are exposed to its fragility. This is absurd.”
Stressing that he views US
trade war policies as unacceptable, Macron added: “Trump … poses the question
of NATO as a trade issue. For him, it’s a plan where the United States provides
a kind of geopolitical coverage, but in exchange, there is an exclusive commercial
relationship. It is a reason to buy American. But France did not sign up for
such an alliance.”
Macron repeatedly stressed
that he and other European heads of state are drawing far-reaching conclusions
on the viability not only of ties to Trump, but the 70-year-old NATO alliance
with America.
Citing Trump’s dismissals of
his concerns over the Middle East with private remarks that “This is your
neighborhood, not mine,” Macron added: “When the President of the United States
says that, to act responsibly we cannot fail to draw conclusions from it, or in
any case to start to reflect, even if we do not want to... Some alliances or
the reliability of certain ties are in question. I believe many of our partners
have seen this, and that things are starting to move on this issue.”
Though the Economist hid
its English translation of Macron’s interview behind a pay wall, it caused
consternation among NATO officials. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in
Europe for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, replied to
Macron, “I think NATO remains an important, critical, perhaps historically one
of the most critical, strategic partnerships in all of recorded history.”
German Chancellor Angela
Merkel called Macron’s remarks “drastic words,” adding, “I don’t think such
sweeping judgments are necessary, even if we have problems and need to pull
together.”
In fact, however, broad
sections of the European bourgeoisie agree with Macron. In a column titled
“Macron is right,” Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine wrote, “The French
president has declared NATO brain dead, and there is much outrage. But
essentially, Macron’s analysis is correct.”
It continued, “The body of a
brain-dead person seems to live, but in fact he is dead and any form of therapy
is meaningless. This is what France’s president thinks of NATO.” Dismissing
Merkel’s criticism of Macron’s “sweeping judgment” on NATO, Der Spiegel declared:
“In reality, this is a quite tepid defense of NATO. It is clear also to Merkel
that the patient really does find himself in such a situation.”
Discussion in ruling circles
of the collapse of a 70-year alliance between imperialist powers that twice in
the 20th century plunged into world war points to a very dangerous crisis. The
capitalist system is again threatening humanity with a global conflagration,
this time fought with nuclear arms.
Significantly, Macron himself
stressed that what is emerging is not a passing spat inside NATO, but a
deep-going breakdown of international relations prepared over decades of
imperialist wars since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The International Committee of
the Fourth International (ICFI) explained that the liquidation of the Soviet
Union was not the product of the bankruptcy of Marxism, but of the nationalist,
autarkic and anti-Trotskyist economic program of Stalinism. The Stalinist
regimes were overtaken by capitalist states able to directly engage with the
world market’s resources, thanks to capitalist globalization. Faced with
growing working class militancy in the 1980s, the Stalinist bureaucracy
restored capitalist property and established close ties with imperialism.
After the dissolution of the
Soviet Union in 1991, the ICFI opposed bourgeois propagandists like Francis
Fukuyama who claimed this spelled the “End of History,” the death of Marxism
and the final triumph of capitalist democracy. In fact, the dissolution of the
Soviet Union was one reflection of an intensifying crisis of the nation-state
system in which capitalism is rooted. This crisis was also undermining the
capitalist states, particularly amid the wave of NATO imperialist wars across
the Middle East and Africa.
Macron, the banker-president,
is undoubtedly a ferocious opponent of socialism, but this analysis is clearly
discussed inside his government. He told the Economist: “There was a
pervasive conception that developed in the 1990s and 2000s around the idea of
the End of History, an endless expansion of democracy, that the Western camp
had won and would universalize itself. It was the history we were living in
until the 2000s, when a series of crises showed that it was not true.”
Macron admitted, “Sometimes we
committed mistakes by trying to impose our values and change regimes without
getting popular support. It is what we saw in Iraq and Libya… and maybe what
was planned for Syria, but that failed. It is an element of the Western
approach, I would say in generic terms, that has been an error since the
beginning of this century, perhaps a fateful one, due to the convergence of two
tendencies: the right of foreign intervention and neo-conservatism. The two
meshed, with dramatic results.”
Macron is admitting that the
policies of the major NATO governments over the last 30 years were all
politically criminal. Macron did not recall it, but Trump stated in a tweet
that America alone spent “8 trillion dollars” on wars in which “millions have
died,” wars that were “based on a false and disproven premise.” As for Macron,
he himself is deeply implicated as a former minister in the French government
that pushed to bomb Syria in 2013.
Macron’s statements are an
indication of the urgent necessity of building an anti-war movement in the
international working class based on a revolutionary socialist perspective. The
capitalist system is not only bankrupt and criminal. Its escalating conflicts
over markets and strategic advantage are, by the admission of leading
capitalist officials themselves, placing the world on the brink of an all-out
conflagration.
The reactionary perspective
Macron outlined to address this situation—namely, stepped-up international
collaboration between the spy agencies against Islamist terrorism—will not
resolve the underlying inter-imperialist conflicts over markets and strategic
advantage. Indeed, it is quite obvious that the solution that Macron proposes
on a capitalist basis will only intensify the conflicts.
“We must clearly re-think the
strategic relation… how to reconstruct what I have called an architecture of
confidence and security,” Macron said, adding, “We will make our intelligence
agencies work together, share a vision of the threat, intervene maybe in a more
coordinated manner against Islamist terrorism in our entire neighborhood.”
Contrasting Islamism with “our
model built in the 18th century with the European Enlightenment,” Macron called
Islamism the “worst enemy of European humanist values that rest on free and
reasoning individuals, equality between women and men, and emancipation.”
This is absurd. Macron is not
a defender of the Enlightenment, but a right-wing banker and politician who, as
part of his police crackdown on mounting opposition to his policies of
austerity and social inequality, has bemoaned the French Revolution and
declared that France needs a king. As for his canned invocation of “humanist
values,” they are belied by his constant appeals to neo-fascistic hatred of
Islam, which is rife and growing in the French security forces.
What Macron is proposing is a
policy not to halt the drive to war, but to further build up the agencies of
state repression that would be mobilized against an anti-war movement.
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