Until 2020, the geopolitical West — encompassing, more or less, the United States, European Union, UK, Australia, along with Japan and a handful of other allies — actively and enthusiastically promoted the energy transition as a way to tackle climate change. Both the EU and the US fostered variations of what was often called a “Green Deal” — essentially, a corporate-led energy transition — supporting renewable technologies over fossil fuels along with different cooperation programmes across the Global South. With such measures, the West sought to position itself as a leading force in the fight against global warming in multilateral organizations and global forums. Yet this perspective has changed radically since then, triggered by both the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath as well as the wars raging in Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Gaza.
Bruno Fornillo is a member of the Group of Studies in Geopolitics and Commons at the University of Buenos Aires and a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET).
The war in Ukraine has, on the one hand, left EU member states with no access to cheap energy from Russia. This has triggered a re-opening of coal-powered plants in the EU, as well as the unexpected reclassification of natural gas and nuclear energy as “transition resources”, something unthinkable just a few years ago. On the other hand, the new, post-pandemic accumulation paradigm consolidating around solar energy with electromobility as its flagship is clearly dominated by Asian economies, particularly China.
Europe was soon forced to acknowledge that it did not dominate either the latest technology or global trade in the new energy paradigm. The US faces a similar predicament. Although then-President Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was touted as the “largest climate investment in American history”, the current Trump Administration has clearly prioritized the oil industry and fossil fuel vehicles. The West’s ambitious plans for a new energy paradigm paired with the rise of electromobility suddenly no longer appear so attractive, intended as they were to facilitate further expansion of Western capital.
One could even go so far as to claim that the dominance of Western capitalism is approaching its end. The conditions that led to Western supremacy over the last 300 years, based mainly on its military, technological, industrial, and commercial dominance, no longer exist. Europe, for example, has lost its position at the cutting-edge of technology. Its workforce is not competitive, while it faces competition from Asian products of equal — often better — quality and lower cost. Meanwhile, it relies on expensive imports for its energy, nor does it have the “critical minerals” required by the contemporary economy, between 70 percent and 100 percent of which it must import.
In short, Europe is not in a position to compete on the global market. To make matters worse, by supporting the genocide taking place in Palestine, it buried its image as a continent that stands for human rights, supports the UN, and exercises geopolitical restraint, instead reviving images of classical colonialism.
The Rise of the Asian Tech Empire
The West finds itself beset by slow growth, government debt that often exceeds 100 percent of GDP, and the loss of technological, industrial, and commercial supremacy. China’s nominal GDP, the most appropriate variable for comparing economies, is currently greater than that of the US. The “Asian giant” dominates industrial production, including the new energy paradigm — from solar panels to lithium batteries, electric mobility, and drones — and global trade, exporting more than Germany, the US, and Japan combined.
At the same time, China ranks first in 37 of the 44 technologies critical to the future. Its domestic market and the Asian market as a whole have grown enormously. China has a highly skilled and cheap labour force (it graduates 2 million engineers per year), and at some point it is very probable that it will achieve financial supremacy, dismantling the “dollar empire”. In this new context, transnational corporations now derive their most substantial profits from Asia, proving that capital moves where profits are possible. Absent any major disruptions, China will only consolidate its global dominance in the coming decades.
European capital, for its part, has sought to conceal the evidence of its structural post-pandemic recession by stirring up the spectre of war.
Certainly, the US no longer boasts technological supremacy, nor are many industrial and commercial supply chains under its control. Nevertheless, it still dominates the financial system. Even here, however, trade in national currencies between the BRICS countries, the abandonment of the dollar standard in the oil market, and the creation of the digital yuan and a payment system rivalling SWIFT are gradually weakening the dollar’s hegemony. Trump’s latest protectionist moves only expose his weakness. His indiscriminate use of tariffs as the sole tool of foreign policy is predicated on the idea that the US is an indispensable market, but so far, most indicators suggest that the tariffs will end up consolidating trade between the BRICS and the Global South in general, just as sanctions against Russia led to its own successful “pivot to the East” beginning in 2014.
The People’s Republic of China has formed a strong partnership with Russia. The two countries complement each other seamlessly: Russia’s energy and military power is a blessing for China, while the latter’s industrial, financial, and market capacity is a blessing for the former. This general Eurasian cohesion is strongly interconnected in material terms by its own “march towards the West”, based on the Belt and Road Initiative (connecting Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and even Europe and the entire world), and by regional and global intervention through its own multilateral governance institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or BRICS+. China has emerged as the axis of Asia and a major centre of global capital accumulation. It is true, however, that China does not yet have the strength to impose its hegemony across the world system.
The Spectre of Russian Invasion
European capital, for its part, has sought to conceal the evidence of its structural post-pandemic recession by stirring up the spectre of war (aided, in no small part, by Russia’s decision to invade neighbouring Ukraine in early 2022). After all, how else can cuts in social spending, concessions on workers’ rights, and a general increase in taxes be justified? In recent years, the revival of militaristic discourses and policies in Europe suggests a response to the fear of war itself. Fuelled by the media, this new political pact around war represents a defence of what Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen have called the Western “imperial mode of living”, allegedly threatened by the spectre of a Russian invasion, drawing on tropes from the Cold War that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yet, in purely geopolitical terms, would it make sense for Russia to launch a massive attack on Central Europe? Russia does not exactly need more territory to expand into, nor is the EU particularly abundant in resources. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that Russia could control Europe’s diverse civil society or trade union movement. Moreover, a quarter of continental Europe’s population already lives in Russia, and a potential attack on the EU could unleash a confrontation between nuclear powers — a scenario in which the Russian Federation would have much to lose and very little to gain.
Trump has made it clear that geographical expansionism is the new modus operandi in American foreign policy.
Russia has successfully turned to the East and is now part of the new economic centre of the world. Like China, a sustained war is not in its interest. The war in Ukraine, which Russia initially imagined would be much shorter, was, at least according to Russia’s leaders, intended as a response to NATO’s expansion and an intervention to protect the pro-Russian inhabitants of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, which in turn had an impact on domestic politics. Should current geopolitical and geoeconomic trends persist, Russia will continue to grow alongside Asia, while Europe will continue to slip into stagnation and decline.
A realpolitik perspective, by contrast, suggests that it is Russia who should fear a European siege. The European Union stands to gain quite a bit were that continent-sized country to “switch sides”. Specifically, Russia has everything Europe needs today and in the future: abundant and cheap fossil fuels, vast stores of the most varied minerals, abundant nature and agricultural production, and a rich but sparsely populated territory relative to its size. Even more so, in the unlikely situation that the geopolitical West succeeds in controlling Russia, it would isolate China and facilitate Western dominance of the Middle Eastern oil industry. These two scenarios are quite likely the only avenues for the West to maintain its global hegemony, and both entail military intervention.
Military Keynesianism in the Geopolitical West?
Military Keynesianism — boosting financial investment and material production in security-related industries — allows Europe to do three things. First, it enables states to discard a politics of “austerity” and, instead, inject huge sums of money to sustain declining local industry (Volkswagen, for example, which is no longer competitive in electric cars, is considering shifting part of its production to “defence”). Second, it allows Europe to justify and intensify the exploitation of the European workforce (e.g., by reallocating funds from social welfare and eroding workers’ rights) and control immigration. Third, it potentially opens the door to future interventions to secure access to key critical resources, such as the aforementioned “critical minerals”.
Today, Europe is inclined to promote what could be called a “War Deal” in the face of a sharpening socio-ecological crisis and the exhaustion of cheap natural resources and services. It is doing so in a context of declining international influence, as can be seen in the expulsion of France from the Sahel. For now, in terms of tariffs and the purchase of military equipment, Europe is accepting the terms and conditions imposed by the US, and has agreed to devote 5 percent of GDP to military spending as the war in Ukraine rages on.
In the US, Trump has made it clear that geographical expansionism is the new modus operandi in American foreign policy. Moreover, some politicians now explicitly advocate for what at least one Reuters columnist called a “metallic NATO”, what former British Prime Minister Liz Truss called an “economic NATO”, and a “global NATO”. For the old American hegemon, stimulating the economy through military spending and using force as a geoeoconomic battering ram is nothing new. US economic superiority is inseparable from its military dominance. War and capital, as Rosa Luxemburg explained at the beginning of the last century and Mauricio Lazzarato has demonstrated more recently, are inextricably linked. In short, the geopolitical West is no longer the centre of systemic accumulation, and thus deploys and intensifies a territorial-military logic almost as a last resort.
“Peak Everything” and the Future beyond Capital
In the midst of this inter-imperial conflict between the geopolitical West and Asia, an even graver crisis has emerged, rooted in the depletion of natural resources and crossing of planetary limits. Fossil fuels have an almost absolute limit: according to British Petroleum’s 2021 report, the world’s recoverable oil reserves will be gone in half a century. Some claim that its useful lifespan can be extended through the use of “extreme energies” (extra-heavy oil, fracking, etc.), but there is no doubt that prices will increase given the trend towards scarcity and rising extraction costs, which will destabilize the global economy in a kind of “energy access peak”. In turn, the burning of hydrocarbons is responsible for 56 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, seas of plastic waste, and all kinds of environmental hazards.
Our societies thus find themselves in what we could call an unsolvable equation: if we continue to burn fossil fuels, our world could very well cross irreversible ecological tipping points; but if fossil fuels were to run out, we would reach another limit, given that this “black gold” guarantees the functioning of our complex world. Even a simple increase in its price would make current productivity unviable. That is why the era of the “great acceleration” has begun in a world undergoing a “great transformation”, as we move through a time of “ecological limits” that marks the decline of contemporary society. In short, these are the basic premises of a change on a massive scale where humanity is witnessing the unfolding of the development of “destructive forces”, in the words of André Gorz, and the arrival of “peak everything”, going through an “era of scarcity” and constant dangers to survival. If it survives, capitalism will fully enter into its solar phase.
The economy has always been essentially linked to extra-economic force, but contemporary geopolitics is thrusting us into a renewed capitalism of war.
As was the case in previous rounds of accumulation, the Global South is increasingly perceived as a reserve of natural resources. The new energy paradigm is, in fact, an energy mining paradigm. Latin America is projected to be one of the main suppliers of critical minerals: it accounts for 47 percent of the world’s lithium reserves, 37 percent of copper, 35 percent of silver, 23 percent of graphite, 17 percent of rare earths, 16 percent of nickel, and 14 percent of zinc. We are witnessing an inter-imperialist struggle, where the US, China, the Global North, and their corporations seek to control resources. This establishes an extractive-financial dynamic that increasingly consolidates an intensely oppressive colonialism over our territories and communities.
If the drums of war are beating today, when the era of effective scarcity in which we live is not yet directly visible, if the relationship between war, violence, and capital is part of its historical trajectory, if neoliberalism is waging a “civil war” against its own Western population, how is it possible that military confrontation between the geopolitical West and a rising Asia is not intensifying? The economy has always been essentially linked to extra-economic force, but contemporary geopolitics is thrusting us into a renewed capitalism of war.
War is a business, an intra-capitalist dispute in the interests of unlimited profits. Rather than a green deal between summit actors, it is necessary to promote a red, green, and popular confrontation against capital, which will guide our societies toward a socio-ecological transition and the collective construction of social welfare. We must also continue to fight for a just and popular energy transition rather than a corporate energy transition. The “war consensus”, “military Keynesianism”, and the advance toward the ultimate colonization of life, nature, and the commons are nothing more than the discourse and action of the “reactionary international” unleashed in the face of the collapse of the geopolitical West. In the face of this, it is necessary to revive and articulate an internationalism that focuses on the care and power of life over the poles of power and capital, as our twenty-first century demands.