New tariff threats show how pointless it is to grovel: You just get kicked in the face
~ punkacademic ~
Britain’s modest contribution to a European attempt to bolster Greenland’s defences in the face of annexation by the United States has met with immediate economic warfare. Trump’s announcement that Denmark and Greenland’s would-be backers would be hit with 10% tariffs from 1 February has left the commentariat struggling to explain how the approach they have lionised for months — Starmer doing whatever Trump wants — has failed.
When Trump held court last summer at Turnberry for his vassals to pay homage and subordinate themselves, it was obvious to all but the most delusional European elites that the Emperor was exacting tribute. They, too, would now do all they could to simper and fawn to avoid the worst of it. Even Starmer’s nominal support for Denmark and Greenland was a mere sentence in an obsequious eulogy for the ‘special relationship’ in his address on Monday.
The Starmer approach has been praised by state media as cautious, sensible, unlike the “juvenile” idea of standing on principle. And this, it was argued (often by useful idiot Chris Mason), would lead to results. The definition, then, of centrist politics as seen by its true believers: astute manipulation. Starmer and the leaders of other European countries even failed to leave X for fear of offending Elon Musk.
Except it was all total bullshit. Starmer’s tech deal is dead. Von der Leyen’s EU deal is dead too. Trump’s announcement of new tariffs proves the point that grovelling, as NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte memorably did, is pointless. You just get kicked in the face.
According to the Guardian, ‘some Greenland residents are now preparing for the worst, either stocking up on supplies or readying themselves to flee quickly’. So much for 3D chess. Leaders will not, in the end, ‘protect’ you.
Britons should worry too. Politically, the UK is uniquely exposed amongst European nations to the change of weather in the US. After Brexit divided Britain from the EU and did severe harm to the UK economy, successive British governments bet the farm on a deal with a country over three thousand miles away, instead of the trading bloc twenty miles away.
Britain’s military, too, is reliant on its US overlord. From nukes to F-35s, Britain is in hock to America. US nukes are parked up at Lakenheath, 80 miles northeast of London.
But whilst the military is to the forefront of the mind when states ‘beef’ (as Bakunin knew they always would), the dependence of Britain and other European states on the US is more prosaic.
British and European tech infrastructure is overwhelmingly dependent on hardware and software provided by US firms. Apart from the headline-grabbing contracts being awarded to Peter Thiel’s Palantir by the government on everything from health data to defence targeting, most businesses rely on US-based cloud hosting and software-as-a-service, provided by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. The Dutch government recently was forced to nationalise, then privatise, a Dutch tech company in response to US whims as Trump sought a deal with China.
British ‘leaders’ long cultivated a delusion that Britain could be ‘Greece to America’s Rome’ — providing quality and wisdom to a younger, more powerful, partner. Again bullshit, but it allowed generations of British politicians to languish in shibboleths such as ‘our armed forces are the best in the world’ because they’d seen Roger Moore ski off a cliff with a Union Jack parachute after they’d eaten their Sunday roast.
Other European nations were less delusional, notably France with its longstanding scepticism of American influence and the NATO project. But most Western European nations’ political elites subscribed to a view of the US as an essentially-benign imperial power — at least as far as they were concerned.
Whilst the US was happily killing millions in ‘anti-communist’ wars around the world, European nations — as Vincent Bevins notes in The Jakarta Method — were allowed to have social democratic welfare states. The common thread of course was white supremacy. The US would tolerate things in Western Europe that it wouldn’t elsewhere.
Now that tolerance is gone. The US National Security Strategy, recently published, is an imperialist’s dream and arrogates to the US the power to intervene in Western European countries, ostensibly to defend the West in a doctrine that is essentially a repackaged far-right conspiracy theory.
As anarchists we are no apologists for states or for warmongering institutions such as NATO. But the unvarnished reality of empire red in tooth and claw abroad is not distinct from the terror visited upon US citizens by ICE, including the murder of Renee Nicole Good.
But that means the response isn’t either. States cannot solve the problems states create. The American state’s wars against its own people or those abroad will not be ended by rival militaries.
They will be stopped by people acting collectively, in the US and around the world. As ICE has been driven out of restaurants, chased back to their compounds, publicly named and shamed by citizen journalists, so too can the mass power of people drive out US bases from countries around the globe and mass non-compliance, mass boycotts of US goods, deliver effects.
The likes of Keir Starmer can never save us. We can only save ourselves. Greenlanders, Minnesotans, all of us know this in our core. With thousands of people marching on the US consulate in Greenland, this power is visible. And when such power is made visible, imperialist chains can be broken.
Images: Wikimedia Commons, White House on Flickr
