Stephen Sefton, June 8th 2025
Although not in a uniform and predictable way, many factors indicate that the decline of the collective West is accelerating relative to the strongest countries of the majority world. China and Russia have surpassed Western economies and societies in terms of economics and conventional military power respectively. Experts in the field also consider that Russia now surpasses the United States in the capability and modernity of its nuclear deterrent forces. Other powerful countries such as India and regional powers such as Brazil, Indonesia and Iran, among others, collaborate with Russia and China to develop commercial, financial and technological exchanges more independent of North American and European markets and economies.
Now the North American and European elites realize that Russia has enough market to grow its economy without the Western countries, despite thousands of coercive measures applied against it and the sequestration of more than US$300 billion of Russian assets in the Western financial system. Nor have they been able to extort concessions from China, either by the application of unilateral coercive measures of previous years or by the tariff war blackmail under the new administration of President Trump. In fact, the United States of America and the countries of the European Union are now suffering from inherent contradictions that imply a profound political and socio-economic crisis, although with different nuances for their respective ruling elites.
The weakness and incoherence as well as the fascist racism, intolerance and aggression of the US administration is complemented by the corruption, incompetence, fascist warmongering and brutal repression of the European Union leadership. The governments in Europe have proven to be unable to assimilate the decline of their power and to settle their differences with China and Russia in a mutually beneficial way. In their foreign policy, they try to maintain trade relations with China while opting for greater militarism against China's interests in Asia while also arguing about the division of functions in NATO's aggression against Russia. At the domestic level, they propose more economic austerity, less social spending and higher military spending while implementing ever more severe repression of political opposition and freedom of expression in general.
In Germany, for example, the authorities are considering declaring the largest opposition party, the Alternative for Germany (AFD), illegal. In France, the authorities have disqualified the main opposition leader, Marie Le Pen, as a candidate in future national elections. In almost all of Europe, the authorities apply anti-terrorist laws to repress people expressing solidarity with Palestine. The promotion of russophobia since 2014 has imposed a culture of self-censorship in the media and in public life in general that makes it impossible to communicate truthful and reliable information enabling a rational and sensible discussion of the NATO war in Ukraine or bilateral relations with the Russian Federation.
Since 2014, European governments have supported the regime of Nazi sympathizers in Ukraine in its genocidal terrorist attacks against the Russian-speaking population in the east of the country. Until February 2022, they deliberately acted via NATO to provoke a military response by Russia in defense of that civilian population in Donbass. For more than three years they have attacked Russian territory with their best weapons systems, with Western military personnel in command of Ukraine's military operations and with their most sophisticated information, surveillance and reconnaissance systems. However, they insist to their populations in Europe that Russia is the aggressor. Now, they have lost the war in Ukraine and Russia is determined to impose the political terms of the defeat.
In parallel with this clear political-military debacle, last year the leaders of the European Union countries accepted a report by the former head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, also former head of the European operations of the powerful US investment bank Goldman Sachs. Naturally, Mr Draghi recommended a change in European financial rules to allow for higher levels of government debt. Of course, this is a response to compensate for the loss of the hundreds of billions of Euros wasted on US orders in support of the corrupt regime of Nazi sympathizers in Ukraine.
In his report, Mr Draghi recommended an investment of €800 billion a year, mainly to the benefit of national and transnational private enterprise, to restore the competitiveness of the European economy. It is obvious that these extremely high levels of public spending imposed on European populations will have serious unpredictable political and electoral consequences at the same time as increasing repression is applied against political opposition. The most dangerous illusion of the European governments is that they think remain a major power in the world when, in truth, their ruling elites have subjected their societies to serve in effect as colonies to advance the foreign policy of the US elites.
Large US companies control important companies in key sectors of the European economy which, after giving up cheap Russian gas efficiently supplied by pipelines for decades, have become dependent, at a much higher cost, on liquefied natural gas from US companies. Now, last March, Ursula von der Leyen, corrupt president of the European Commission, has presented a plan called “Rearming Europe” to increase the military spending of the 27 European countries by a total amount of €800 billion over the next four years. Europe does not have enough industrial capacity to manufacture, in that period of time, the weapons and ammunition that the plan contemplates acquiring in order to be able to continue threatening the Russian Federation.
By increasing their military spending in this anti-democratic way, European governments will have to buy from the big US arms companies significant quantities of equipment and armaments that are overvalued and in fact inferior to their Russian equivalents. In all this context, NATO has announced its expansion into Asia to harass China. European governments concretely support the aggressive US threats and military provocations against the government of the People's Republic of China, while European exports depend on having access to that country's huge market. In this sense, the European ruling elites betray both the sovereignty and independence of their countries and also the essential interests of their peoples
For their part, the US elites do not accept their military defeat by the Russian Federation but neither can they commercially surpass the economy of the People's Republic of China. Little by little they are realizing that they cannot even maintain their former technological superiority with respect to either of the two. In the case of their threats of military aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the US authorities are now thinking twice after they could not defeat the Ansarullah movement in Yemen. No doubt, during President Trump's recent visit to the Persian Gulf countries, the Arab monarchies explained to him that a war with Iran would be a disaster both for their countries and for US economic interests.
In his foreign policy and in his domestic policy, President Trump's measures collide with the implacable reality. His tariff war sabotages his goal of consolidating the supply chains of the US economy and, to the extent possible, bringing them closer geographically. The Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress reported in 2024 “Recent global economic disruptions have underscored the need for resilient supply chains in the United States... (Canada and Mexico) have an important role to play in improving supply chain reliability, increasing trade and economic output.”
In fact, the aggressive increase in tariffs against Canada and Mexico and other trading partners affects the entire North American industrial manufacturing sector in a very negative way, after it has recovered slightly over the past ten years despite the marked decline in the number of employees in the sector. The manufacturing sector contributes 12% of the country's GDP compared to about 15% for the European Union and about 25% for China. A Goldman Sachs study on the impact of the tariff increase estimates a net loss of 400,000 jobs and an increase of up to 15% in the costs of manufacturing companies thanks to the corresponding adjustments in supply chains
Another measure of President Trump's administration which contradicts the policy of strengthening the economy and generating employment is the cut in government funding for scientific research that is fundamental to maintaining technological competitiveness. The National Science Foundation's budget has been cut by more than 55% this year, from $9.2 billion to $4.1 billion. By comparison, in 2024, the budget of the government of the People's Republic of China for basic scientific research rose 10% to about US$14 billion. The neoliberal belief that private enterprise will fill this critical void is pure fantasy. To all these economic factors can be added the cuts to public health care and the fascist policy of racist repression against migrant families which also destroys a fundamental part of the labor available for the US economy.
The ruling elites of the collective West are not going to recover the ground they have lost in international relations to China and Russia and their partner countries. The election last week by 115 countries of Russia to the UN Economic and Social Council demonstrates the failure of the Western attempt to isolate the Russian Federation. For many reasons, but especially because of their complicity in the Zionist genocide against the Palestinian people, the prestige and authority of Western countries at the international level is in ruins. This is evidenced by events such as the China-CELAC Forum, the trilateral summit between China, ASEAN and the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and also the excellent relations of China and Russia with African countries.
At the moment, measured by purchasing power parity, the US remains the second most important economy in the world after the People's Republic of China, and followed by the European Union, India, Russia and Japan. However, everything indicates that the fascist ruling elites of the collective West are going to waste their still very significant economic capacity in more useless militarism at the international level and progressively worse counterproductive economic and political repression of their populations0domestically. For Latin America, US policies respresent the direct opposite of President Xi Jinping's vision for the Fourth China-CELAC Ministerial Forum:
"China is ready to work with Latin American and the Carribean to implement the Global Civilization Initiative together, establish the civilization concept of equality, mutual learning, dialogue and inclusion, and enhance humanity's common values of peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom... No matter how the international situation changes, China will always be a good friend and a good partner of LAC countries. May we join our efforts and move forward hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder in our respective march towards modernization, writing together a new chapter of the construction of the shared future community of China and Latin American and the Carribean.”