Redline | April 10, 2025 | EUROPE

Once again, the great capitalist powers stumble through crisis with the grace of wounded giants. In April 2025, the European Union quietly suspended its retaliatory tariffs against the United States, just days after President Trump theatrically paused his own round of economic aggression. Both sides framed the maneuver as a “de-escalation,” a strategic timeout, a chance to breathe. But beneath the diplomatic posturing lies the real story: imperial panic.

This isn’t negotiation. It’s a truce in a war neither side can afford to win.

Let’s speak plainly. The global imperial system, dominated for decades by a transatlantic elite, is fracturing under the weight of multipolar contradiction. The U.S. empire, cornered by its own decline, lashes out with tariffs and sanctions as if economic coercion can buy it another century. Europe, chained to Washington through NATO and the dollar system, performs its dance of autonomy while praying not to be crushed in the process.

Trump’s tariffs are not policy—they are tactics of technofascist governance. They are part of a broader strategy of class war and imperialist recalibration, where supply chains are weaponized, labor costs externalized, and “free trade” replaced by protectionist blackmail. The EU’s decision to match the 90-day pause is not strength. It’s survival.

Europe is trapped in a contradiction of its own making. It cannot fully decouple from U.S. capital without triggering recession. It cannot cozy up to China without provoking sanctions. So it hesitates, suspends, and spins its paralysis as diplomacy. In reality, this is the choreography of crisis—the elite flailing in suits while their economies rot beneath them.

Meanwhile, the price of this “strategic delay” will be paid by workers on both sides of the Atlantic. Inflation will rise. Wages will stagnate. Industries will shed jobs in silence. And corporate monopolies will continue to offshore profits while national governments pretend the enemy is “abroad” rather than in the boardroom.

This is not a trade war. It is a counterinsurgency operation by other means. As the legitimacy of capitalist democracy collapses, the ruling class turns to economic nationalism to discipline the masses. The tariff threats, the suspensions, the saber-rattling—these are all signals, not to Beijing or Brussels, but to the working class: stay in line, or suffer.

Technofascism isn’t coming—it’s already here. It governs not only through militarized police and digital surveillance, but through economic management as repression. Tariffs are the new tanks. Supply chain disruption is the new embargo. Trade diplomacy is the new psyops.

The EU’s pause, then, is not a step toward peace—it is a breath between counteroffensives. And Trump? He is less a policymaker than a prophet of the imperial death drive, channeling the needs of capital in crisis through the language of populist vengeance.

When the 90 days expire, the crisis will not be resolved. It will be reconfigured. The contradictions of the world system will sharpen, the working class will bear the brunt, and the war of capital against humanity will press forward under new names.

Our task is not to wait for the next summit. It is to organize before the next blow lands.