Hundreds of news reports have flooded the bourgeois media following US President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing, along with the public statements made by Chinese President Xi Jinping and D. Trump.
“A war-weary world pins its hopes on the Beijing meeting” is a telling headline, accompanied by reports on the “toasts” exchanged by the two leaders during the official dinner.
Xi called on the MAGA “movement” to follow the “rebirth of the Chinese nation”, adding that the US and China “can help each other succeed and promote the prosperity of the entire world”.
Earlier, he had publicly stated that the Taiwan Strait is also a flashpoint and that, if the issue is not “handled carefully”, the two countries could even be driven into direct conflict. In the same context, he identified the “Thucydides Trap” as the greatest “dilemma” of our time —namely, whether the US, whose dominance within the international imperialist system is being challenged by China, will manage to “coexist harmoniously” with Beijing or instead be driven into armed conflict.
The fact that the possibility of a “final showdown”, one that would bring devastation to the peoples of the world, is now openly discussed is itself characteristic of capitalism’s “war era”.
Beyond this, however, the way events are being presented amounts to a complete distortion of reality.
The battle between the US and China has already begun in the “Straits” of the entire world.
From the Panama and Suez Canals to the Straits of Hormuz, Malacca, and Taiwan, the conflict is already under way. The rivalry between the US and China is already leaving shaping the two fronts of the imperialist war in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Whether or not they “fall” into the “Thucydides Trap” is not a matter of choice for the imperialists. It is the only way they can exist, because their existence depends on fighting to the bitter end for the interests of their own business groups and for the pursuit of maximum capitalist profit.
Various analyses attempt to interpret reality in a fragmented way, ignoring the fact that the intensification of contradictions is a law of capitalism, that the sharpening of competition is irreversible, and that nothing can guarantee “balance”. History has never shown otherwise.
The imperialists are preparing, and are determined, to turn the peoples into cannon fodder in their wars. Every “choice” they make to defend their “vital spaces”, every blow struck against their rivals, only deepens their contradictions and deadlocks. There is no turning back.
The crucial issue, therefore, is that the people must not fall into the trap of waiting for those who deprive them of their lives and labour to secure a future of “shared prosperity”.
They must decisively organize their independent struggle and, without further delay, take the path towards the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist barbarity.