Pepe Escobar
The "BRICS lab" has a non-stop, ever-adapting creative spirit. Beats Tariff dementia everytime.
The fourth plenary session of the Communist Party of China has been scheduled by the Politburo for October (no precise data announced; probably four days during the second half of October). That's when Beijing will be deliberating the lineaments of its next five-year plan. The plenum should be attended by over 370 Central Committee members of the party elite.
Why this is so crucial? Because China is the undisputed top target, alongside top BRICS members, of the new universal "law" devised by the Empire of Chaos: I Tariff, Therefore I Exist. So the next five-year plan will have to take into consideration all vectors deriving from the new "law".
The plenum will take place a few weeks after Beijing stages a grand parade to celebrate the end of WWII; Vladimir Putin is one of Xi's guests of honor.
Moreover, the plenum will be right before the annual APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit, starting October 31 in Seoul. This summit carries a window of opportunity for a direct, face to face Trump-Xi meeting - which the Circus Ringmaster, for all his posture and tergiversations, is actively pursuing.
The plenum will have to carefully weigh how a de facto trade, tech and geopolitical war between the US and China will only get more incandescent. As much as Made in China 2025 revealed itself to be a staggering success - maximum pressure from Trump 1.0 notwithstanding - new Chinese wave tech decisions taken in 2025 will define the road map ahead on everything from AI to quantum computing, biotechnology and controlled nuclear fusion.
I am so thrilled to be your lackey
Everything that matters on trade and tech will be decided between the two economic superpowers. By now it's clear that a potential third actor, the EU, has simply committed serial suicide.
Let's start with the China-EU summit on July 24 - which featured, among other niceties, Beijing protocol deigning to send at best a lowly tourist bus to greet the European delegation, and Xi Jinping for all practical purposes ending the summit before schedule in a message widely interpreted across the Global South as "we have no time to waste with you clowns".
That's exactly what the Circus Ringmaster wanted.
Then came the EU-US get together - which sealed, in spectacular fashion, the already accelerated phase of Europe's Century of Humiliation.
It starts with Trump de facto erasing Russia from the EU's energy future. Brussels has been forced - Mafioso "offer you can't refuse"- style, to buy $250 billion of overpriced US energy a year, every year, for the next 3 years. And in the process be slapped with 15% tariffs - and like it.
So smashing Nord Stream 2 - an operation carried out by the previous D.C. autopen administration - had a clear imperial purpose from the start.
On top of it, the EU must pay for its - already lost - war in Ukraine by buying unlimited amounts of overpriced US weapons to the tune of 5% of GDP. That's what Trump imposed NATO to impose on the EU. Follow the money.
Yet whatever the "deal" advertised with a profusion of superlatives by the Circus Ringmaster, the numbers don't add up.
The EU spent a hefty 375 billion euros on energy in 2024; only 76 billion euros of these were paid to the US.
That means that the EU would have to buy three times more US energy over the next three years. And only LNG Made in USA: no Norway, for that matter, which sells cheaper pipeline gas.
Defying reality - and obviously not put in check by meek European mainstream media - the toxic Medusa in Brussels vociferated that US LNG is cheaper than Russian pipeline gas.
Moscow is not breaking a sweat - because its major clients are all across Eurasia. As for the Americans, they will not divert all their exports to the EU - as European refineries can only handle a limited supply of American shale oil. Moreover, there's no way EUrocrats can force European energy companies to buy American.
So to round up their figures they will have to buy from somewhere else. That would be Norway - and even Russia, assuming the Russians will be interested.
Trump 2.0 was clever enough to "exempt" some sectors from the tariff dementia, such as aircraft and aircraft parts, semiconductors, critical chemicals and some agriculture. Of course: these are all part of strategic supply chains.
The only thing that really mattered overall was to lock up Europe as a massive buyer of American energy and force them to invest in US infrastructure and the industrial-military complex.
And that points to the only way to "escape" the tariff dementia: when faced with an "offer you can't refuse", you don't refuse; you take it, like it, and offer all sorts of investment in the US. Ancient empires used to force their "partners" to pay tribute. Welcome to the 21st century version.
After all, what does Europe have to offer as leverage? Nothing. No European company on the global Tech Top Ten. Not even an European search engine; or globally successful smartphone; or operating system; or streaming platform; or cloud infrastructure. Not to mention no top semiconductor producer. And only one car maker among the global best-selling Top Ten.
All aboard "directed improvisation"
If the US sharks gave the EU rodents literally nothing, foxy China was benign enough to give just a little bit of something: a blah blah blah on climate change.
The end result - for the whole world to see: the EU as a sorry player carrying less than zero strategic autonomy on the global chessboard. It is royally ignored on the Empire's Forever Wars - from Ukraine to West Asia. And it lectures Beijing - in Beijing - (italics mine) when it is totally dependent on Chinese raw materials, industrial equipment and complex supply chains for green and digital tech.
Yuen Yuen Ang, from Singapore, is a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She may need to tow the - strict - lines of US academia, which is exceptionalist by definition. But at least she's capable of some valuable insights.
For instance: "We're all suffering from an attention deficit. We used to read books, then articles, then essays, then blogs, and now it's further reduced to tweets of 280 characters. So you can imagine what sorts of messages fit in that tiny space. It has to be simplistic."
That cuts to the heart of how the Circus Ringmaster is conducting his foreign policy; ruling via an accumulation of nonsensical posts.
Yuen Yuen reaches more serious territory when she comments on how China "wants to retire an old economic model that was highly dependent on low-cost exports, construction and real estate. It wants hi-tech, innovation-driven development."
That's exactly what will be discussed at the heart of the plenum in Beijing in October.
Yuen Yuen also notes how "back in the 1980s and 1990s", China could "imitate the late industrialisation model in East Asia. Today, there aren't many role models. China itself has become a trailblazer, and other countries are seeing it as a role model."
Hence her concept of "directed improvisation" - being conducted by the Beijing leadership. They know the preferred final destination, but still need to test all possible paths. The same, by the way, also applies to BRICS - via what I defined as the "BRICS lab", where all sorts of models are being tested. What matters, above all, is a non-stop, ever-adapting creative spirit.
Beats Tariff dementia everytime.