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Month: August 2025

Tariffs! At The Disco

Interpreting the latest tariff agreement between the European Union and United States


08/08/2025

Immediate reactions

In the latest round of tariff mud-wrestling, Donald Trump ate the EU’s lunch – no TACOs for von der Leyen. Reactions to the agreement announced on Sunday have been widely interpreted as a capitulation by the EU to the brazen bullying tactics of Donald Trump. The French PM Francois Bayrou called it a dark day for Europe. Economics commentator Christian Odendahl of The Economist took a more realist position on Bluesky, amplifying a range of voices that stress both the silver linings and the institutional weakness of the EU that led to the capitulation in the first place. Martin Sandbu of the Financial Times sounded utterly aghast at the way the EU feebly yielded even though he believes the EU had real leverage in negotiations with Trump. Perhaps the most pertinent statement, and one that frames this article on the deal, came from Nicolai von Ondarza, a think-tank wonk at SWP and Chatham House:

“I think European leaders – both national and in the EU – are underestimating what it will do to their publics to be humiliated by Trump.

Like the NATO summit and Rutte’s ‘Daddy’ strategy, maybe the outcome could have been worse. But losing pride and being humiliated is also a price that is paid.”

Asking the right questions about the trade deal is as important as formulating coherent answers to the ones we pose. We can choose to focus on the economic ramifications of the deal and spend our limited energy amplifying the negative impacts. However, in my view, this is a fool’s errand for two reasons.

First, this trade deal, like any other deal with a capricious organism like Trump, is not bound to last. It is a framework agreement, with details to be ironed out over an indefinite period. Estimating its long-term impacts is therefore impossible.

Second, retail politics is a dead end for the radical left — not because of a shortage of popular offers to the public, but rather due to a lack of any credibility to deliver them. An alternative approach, which I favour, is to forget the economics altogether and to focus on narrativising the EU’s capitulation itself. von Ondarza and Sandbu have their finger on the pulse when they choose to emphasise the political and moral ramifications of the deal more than any discussion of the numbers.

The bigger picture

Donald Trump has tried to impose tariffs in various forms on trade partners all over the world. What began with the pure festival of chaos that was the Liberation Day tariffs (a mere four months ago in April) has ended with a massive political victory for him, with a slew of favourable bilateral trade agreements with Japan, the UK, and now the EU. Favourable, not in an economic sense, but in a political one. Many people believed that the stock and the bond market chaos unleashed by Trump’s yo-yo trade policy would discipline him into returning to a status quo ante. No less than Adam Tooze warned of an epic crisis on the horizon. And yet, today, the stock markets are back to growing across the board. Capital is in an ebullient mood. Does this mean that there is no stopping the Trump juggernaut?

If Donald Trump is winning, it is not because of his own genius. He telegraphed his strategy plainly: bully people into submission, retreat momentarily when markets panicked, and ram the resolve of US trade partners again when markets calmed. Ironically, the TACO trade incensed him enough to keep trying, while simultaneously creating a unique opportunity for market movers to make an easy buck on the oscillations he was engendering with his tariff pronouncements. Like malleable dogs, Trump trained the capitalist class to stay calm when he barked, thereby removing a key obstacle to his objectives.

In turn, he moderated his ambitions on the final level of tariffs, settling on a bargaining position around 30 percent with the EU, which eventually accommodated itself to 15 percent as the headline figure (exceptions and carve-outs notwithstanding). Disunited, fearful of economic pain and political instability, lacking both resolve and intelligence, each major US ally bent the knee to his caprice. It needn’t have ended this way.

We radical leftists must take a moment to sit with the momentous change ushered in by this World Wrestling Entertainment hall-of-famer. Within seven months, free trade as a hegemonic concept undergirding world economics has collapsed. The sacred cow of frictionless movement of goods and services between major trading powers has had its entrails splattered over the floor of every stock exchange. But that is not the most significant blow Trump has struck. In fact, this one may end up doing more harm to the US than to Europe. Tariffs are a blunt tax on US consumers and will suppress economic demand, even if exporters try to soften the impact by reducing prices. Trump has effectively demoted allies and turned them into vassals in a true sense. He has forced them to stitch their fates to the whims of the US with their own skins.

The list of humiliations

Among the humiliations Trump has forced on the EU is a commitment to purchase $750 billion worth of energy imports from the US over the course of this presidential term, as well as a pledge to invest $600 billion. For context, the EU imported €76 billion worth of US energy last year out of a total bill around €375 billion. There aren’t enough pies in the sky to feed so many fantasies. This fantasy, should it even come partially to fruition, would make the EU an order of magnitude more dependent on fossil fuels from the US than it ever was on Russia. This comes hot on the heels of NATO countries being forced to commit to a 5% GDP defence spending target – a more than twofold increase of current levels. Combined with a completely supine foreign policy vis à vis Gaza and China, and a persistently unaligned strategy vis à vis Ukraine (something highly pertinent to European interests), the EU seems resigned to accepting whatever Trump wants.

The rationale for these humiliations seems to be couched in 4D chess-style arguments: that Europe has retained regulatory autonomy on areas such as big-tech and AI; that the German car industry has been shielded; that the pharmaceutical sector has been spared (though on pharma and semiconductors they have merely kicked the can down the road). These are the self-soothing lullabies of economistic wonks. Trump won because he played politics while the EU, Japan, and the UK played competitive Microsoft Excel. They caved to the extortioners’ demands, hoping that it would put an end to the extortion. Have they forgotten there are still 41 months left of the Trump presidency?

Ramifications and strategies for the left

The EU has comprehensively demonstrated how weak it is, not as an economic bloc, but rather as a political one. A unitary executive led by a mad pretend-king appears far more effective at achieving its objectives than a supposedly democratic bloc of European nations united by high-minded liberal enlightenment ideas. Professional commentary suggests that it was the internal discord among member states that led to a complete loss of appetite for a fight with daddy. But the deeper malaise is this: the Commission is designed as an A-tier retirement home for one-time political heavyweights ready to be put out to pasture, unsuited for the demands of world-historical political contestation. Perry Anderson’s withering criticisms — of its bloated, impenetrable rule book (over 90,000 pages long and accessible only to organised corporate lobbyists), and its structural inflexibility replete with perverse incentives against reform — are being grimly vindicated by this capitulation.

There are grim resonances between the EU’s political inefficacy and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which repeatedly succumbed to internal divisions in its battles with Russia and Sweden, eventually leading to three partitions of Poland. Germany is protective of its manufacturing industry and is effectively wedded to US patronage, as are several Eastern European countries. It is unsurprising such a diffuse set of interested parties could not forge alliances either within the EU or externally (for example with China or the Global South) to counter the Trump threat.

The biggest losers are most likely the affluent countries of Western Europe, now paying the price for decades of political inaction. Having treated the Eastern bloc of the EU as poor cousins who should be happy to be invited to their weddings, these countries helped foster a reactionary backlash that has hollowed out the EU from within. At the same time, this dynamic has deepened Europe’s dependence on the US, particularly in relation to the threat posed by Russia. The failure of Western Europe to engage in common development through Eurobonds; the austerity imposed on successive sovereign governments at the whims of Germany, Austria, and the Benelux nations; the visionless leadership of the European Commission; and the total unaccountability of the parliament in Brussels have all contributed to the EU becoming a rudderless behemoth, adrift in stormy seas.

For the radical left, this crisis of confidence within the EU presents a chance to promote solidarity of European nations against an onslaught from a vindictive bully. Common foes are the basis of fruitful alliances, and therefore, the left must argue for ecologically-driven economic development as a guard against permanent dependence on a decadent order led by the US. What is essential is to build an economically invested constituency for this vision across the bloc, a project that will require sacrifice by wealthier European nations to develop nations on the periphery.

This will entail helicoptering money into poorer countries to develop solar panel plants, wind turbines, electric buses and bikes, and trains and trams—all funded through commonly securitised debt at the European level, alongside increased taxation on European wealth. It will also mean arguing for uncomfortable ideas, such as the creation of a common European military apparatus that reduces costs and improves Europe’s defensive capabilities, thereby lessening its reliance on the US. But it also opens an opportunity to argue for expanded immigration as a way to address sectoral labour crises across the bloc. Who will build the houses, man the new factories, care for the young, the old, and the sick—if not migrants, whose arrival will help usher in a meaningful form of European sovereignty in an increasingly cut-throat geo-economic reality? 

None of these ideas is an easy sell. Many of them are deeply uncomfortable terrain for the radical left, and the timescales for them to become a new consensus stretch across decades. But that, ultimately, is what thinking big is all about.

The overarching lesson that the left must draw from this moment is the importance of political consolidation, and the costs that come with it. As Perry Anderson argued in Lineages of the Absolutist State, the example of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth showed how the aristocracies of Russia and Prussia aligned themselves behind empowered monarchs in response to the threat of an ascendant Sweden. Today, the EU finds itself pulled between an autocratic, ascendant China and a once-hegemonic US on a self-indulgent bender, firing its guns in all directions and now wont to terrorising its allies as much as its foes. 

No single European country can act as a bulwark, for better or worse, against this reality. We can either treat European nationalism as just another species of nationalism’s evils, or we can attempt to imagine it as a form of limited internationalism – a bitter kind of intellectual self-contortion. The left, as constrained as it is, requires innovative strategies that can forge a new set of received wisdoms, rather than recycling the stale, if noble, tactic of arguing for straightforwardly good things in the absence of a common narrative. Donald Trump’s bullying may finally present a ready-made opportunity, one that favours social democrats more than radical leftists, but only if we let it.

13 August 1977: The Battle of Lewisham

This week in working class history


06/08/2025

In August 1977, the National Front (NF) in Britain was feeling confident. Two months earlier, the street fighting fascist party had stood 91 candidates in the Greater London Council election, gaining 119,000 votes and pushing the Liberals into third place. NF membership had climbed to 14,000, and was accompanied by a surge in racist attacks. In 1976, in a by-election in Deptford, two fascist parties shared 44.5% of the vote. 

On 30th May, 21 young Black people were arrested in nearby Lewisham for loitering and “conspiracy to steal”. This was part of a campaign known by the police as PNH (“Police Nigger Hunt”). Police claimed that these 21 individuals were responsible for “Ninety percent of the street crime in south London.” The NF responded by calling a “Muggers Out” march for the 13th of August. NF national organiser Martin Webster told the press: “We believe that the multi-racial society is wrong, is evil, and we want to destroy it”.

Two main demonstrations were organised against the NF march. One was led by the All Lewisham Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (ALCARAF)—a broad front including the Labour Party, Communist Party, and bishops. The ALCARAF demonstration took place in a different part of town at a different time. A second demonstration, organised by socialists and local youth, aimed to confront the fascists and prevent them from marching. It attracted between 5,000 and 10,000 people.

The police response to the counter-demonstration was brutal. Riot shields, already commonplace in the North of Ireland, were used for the first time on the British mainland. Between 4,000 and 5,000 police were deployed, subjecting demonstrators to repeated baton charges. Mounted police on 2,500 horses charged into the crowd. Yet demonstrators managed to break through police lines, physically confront the fascists, and cut their march in half.  The fascists did not pass.

In the wake of Lewisham, the Anti Nazi League (ANL) was formed, combining a mass popular campaign with a strategy of confronting fascists directly on the streets. At the 1979 general election, the NF received a miserable 0.6% of the votes. Peter Hain recalls Webster later complaining: “Prior to 1977, the NF were unstoppable and I was well on the way to becoming Prime Minister. Then suddenly the Anti-Nazi League was everywhere and knocking the sheer hell out of them”. This victory began at Lewisham.

Trump’s no-peace deal in the DRC

Why is there so much suffering in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and why doesn’t it seem to end?


Rwandan and Congolese delegates shake hands across a table as the U.S. representative looks on, with national flags and a portrait in the background.

The war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) gained a new, imperialist turn on June 26th as a peace agreement with neighbouring Rwanda was signed, mediated by Qatar and the US. Yet, this won’t bring peace and prosperity to the region, but will rather further serve capitalist interests at the expense of the people of the DRC.

The conflict in the DRC has its roots in colonialism and imperialism, but also strikingly in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when ethnic Hutu soldiers and extremists murdered about 800,000 members of the country’s ethnic Tutsi minority and moderate Hutu, as well as raped an estimated 250,000 women. In the aftermath, the new Rwandan Tutsi-led army then sought revenge on the DRC, where millions had fled to. Since then, according to different sources, the war on the mineral-rich eastern regions of the DRC has taken between 6 and 10 million lives, almost half of them children under age five. Rape has been used as a war tactic, villages and livelihoods have been destroyed, and millions have been displaced.

Since 2023, Rwanda-backed March 23 Movement (M23) paramilitary troops—once part of the DRC army—have been terrorising the country’s eastern Kivu region, with over 7,000 killed in fighting. The war escalated at the beginning of this year when M23 took over the region’s largest city of Goma. The Rwandan government has repeatedly denied its linkage to M23, but evidence from the UN tells another story. 

Imperialism in central Africa

Rwandan President Paul Kagame is celebrated by many for the country’s economic growth, although poverty remains widespread outside the capital. At the same time, he is widely criticized as a ruthless dictator, having served as a de facto head of state for 30 years with the mission to establish “a home for the Tutsi population”. Kagame, a former Tutsi refugee in Uganda, initially led the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a militia founded by exiled Tutsis in Uganda in the 1980s, which fought the Rwandan Civil War and eventually ended the genocide. Yet, the international community, led by the US, failed to make the true genocide perpetrators accountable, many of whom were able to escape to the DRC and hide among the approximately 2 million—mostly unarmed—civilian Hutu refugees. Hence, with the already dodgy record of the RPF due to human rights violations, Kagame started to wage massacres against these refugees over the border. In 1996, with the support of the US, and UN leaders looking the other way, Rwandan and Ugandan armies acted with impunity and organized a full-scale invasion of the DRC’s eastern regions. This is known as the First Congo War. 

According to the documentary Crisis in the Congo: Uncovering the Truth by Friends of the Congo, the US government, as well as the international community, knew very well about the atrocities being committed, but only stayed silent. Thanks to its location in the central African Great Lakes region, along with its proximity to the Horn of Africa, Rwanda is surrounded by the DRC minerals and West-Sudanese oil, making it an important geopolitical ally for the US. As stated in the documentary, the whole US economy and its military funding are, indeed, based on the raw minerals from central Africa. Similar to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s observation that Israel is doing the “dirty work for us” in Iran, Howard French from The New York Times explains in Crisis in the Congo the US strategy:

“Why are Uganda and Rwanda important to the US military? Precisely because we can have them do in Africa that which we don’t wish to do ourselves. We can have their soldiers die if need be, we can have them to deploy to places if need be. And so having proxies, having allies, and having clients who are willing to do your bidding becomes very important.”

Moreover, the EU is among Rwanda’s largest supporters, most recently as a part of the “Global Gateway” project for minerals for the “green transformation” and to counter China’s growing influence in Africa. Yet, a diplomatic crisis has arisen since an investigation by Global Witness has revealed Rwanda’s decades-long involvement in “conflict minerals” from the DRC. Evidently, Rwanda has been trading for instance white coltan with the EU—a raw material used in various electronics, but which does not occur in large amounts on Rwanda’s own soil. Further, in 2024, the DRC filed criminal charges against Apple in France and Belgium for the use of conflict minerals in their supply chains. This now poses a reputational risk for the European Commission, and Belgium has been pushing for sanctions against Rwanda. In response, Rwanda cut diplomatic ties with Belgium. The issues have been predictable: while the EU as well as Rwanda have praised “sustainable and responsible production”, the DRC’s sole control organ for the mineral supply chain, the International Tin Supply Chain Initiative (ITSC), has shown evident gaps, with some members involved in laundering conflict minerals, child labour, trafficking, and smuggling in the DRC.

However, the most important political and economic partners of Rwanda remain the US and the UK, and estimates state that diplomacy with Belgium will soon be restored out of pragmatism. With its powerful allies in the Global North and the rhetoric of defending “national security” and protection of the Tutsi minority in the DRC, Rwanda has developed into an important power in Africa —“a poster child of neoliberalism”—sending out the EU and the US paid troops to Central African Republic or even until the coast of Mozambique, where large gas reserves are located. As Mwambari stated: “This classic story is palatable to the Western world, in which the concept of genocide and resilience have a special place in the media narrative, especially in the United States, with its unique relationship with Israel (2021, p. 611–628).”

Congo’s bitter past and the present

The DRC, on the other hand, has been a colonial, imperial playground, and the people have been displaced, abused, kidnapped, raped, enslaved, mutilated and murdered since the Berlin Congo Conference of 1884–-1885, during which Congo was handed out to King Leopold II of Belgium. Indeed, the fast industrialization in Europe had created a new demand for raw materials found on African soil, and so the “scramble for Africa” began. Under the humanitarian narrative of bringing “civilization” and security to the region, King Leopold II and his administrators established the king’s own plantation for ivory and rubber for the newly invented vehicles. Between 1885 and 1908, 10–15 million Congolese were killed in this world’s only private colony. The Belgian government eventually took over, yet the structures of forced labour, apartheid and kidnapping of “mixed-race” children by the settler colonial regime continued.

Further, as the DRC serves as the warehouse of vast reserves of crucial minerals—gold, copper, coltan (70% of the world’s reserves), and uranium—imperial interests continue to hold their grip. However, after the official colonial rule, in 1960 the people of the DRC saw a brief light of true liberation—but for only three months. The film Lumumba by Raoul Peck documents the life of the revolutionary pan-Africanist, socialist Patrice Lumumba, depicting his path to becoming a celebrated, freely elected prime minister in June 1960. As shown in the film, Lumumba was feared and hated by the white settlers and threatened imperialist interests. The US, together with Belgium and the UK, reacted with a coup and assassination of Lumumba by the CIA in 1961, subsequently placing Joseph Mobutu in power for the next 30 years—“to save Congo from communism”. With the help of his “Western” allies, Mobutu would become one of Africa’s most notorious and cruel dictators. He plundered the country’s resources instead of investing in health care, education or infrastructure for the people, and accumulated an estimated 4 billion US dollars in his Swiss bank accounts.

As the Cold War ended and the record of immense human rights violations committed by Mobutu became somewhat embarrassing to the US, the West required a new, strong accessory in the region. It seemed they’d hit the jackpot with a former ally of Lumumba’s and opposition leader of Mobutu, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who seized power with Rwanda’s help in the First Congo War in 1997. However, Kabila soon started to pose nationalist demands, and so the imperialist eyes turned to the country’s eastern neighbour, which was struggling with the aftermath of the genocide and wanted to continue retaliatory actions towards the ethnic Hutu in the DRC.

Throughout the decades, many attempts have been made for peace and security. However, although UN “peacekeeping” missions under various names have been on the ground since 1999, they have been struggling with credibility. UN peacekeepers have been accused of standing by as M23 took over Goma in 2012, not addressing the army’s human rights violations, chaotic and greedy leadership, or simply being useless. What is more, the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), one of the former missions, concentrated on fighting only rebel groups opposing Rwandan or Ugandan interests. After several protests, the latest United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the DR Congo (MONUSCO) was banned by the DRC in 2024 for not being able to bring peace.

Old wine in a new bottle

Yet now, the DRC’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner and her Rwandan counterpart, Olivier Nduhungirehe, have signed a peace agreement at Marco Rubio’s office in Washington, with the US calling this a “historic turning point”. The peace deal aims at the “neutralization” of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) militias and other groups. The FDLR was established by the ethnic Hutus after the Rwandan genocide and has been accused of immense atrocities like the murder of civilians and the use of child soldiers. However, the deal does not mention the role of Rwanda’s forces, which have also been suspected of participating in the conflict and are present in the DRC, violating the country’s territorial sovereignty. Further, M23 calls its mission the protection of the Tutsi community in the DRC against discrimination by the government and, hence, is supported by Rwanda. The deal with M23 is being negotiated separately with Qatar during the first week of August. Interestingly, Qatar is now investing heavily in the Kigali airport as well as the national RwandAir, as Qatar plans to establish its first cargo hub abroad. 

Kambale Musavuli from the Center for Research on the Congo says many are questioning the deal with the US, which has not been transparent and includes giving up rights to minerals., and  only then could the US “be engaged constructively” in the peace stability. Indeed, there has been an increasing interest by US companies in investing in crucial minerals in the DRC for new technology, such as electric cars, nuclear plants or weaponry, especially now since Chinese companies are gaining more and more influence in Africa. Yet, the miners in Katanga Province have already put out a statement against the agreement, and some MPs have questioned why this was not first discussed in the country’s parliament or the senate. Moreover, it has been strongly emphasized that DRC cannot lose control of their own minerals—by Lumumba and still today. Even the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, previously offered a similar deal: minerals in exchange for peace attempts.

Moreover, the new “peace deal” does not address justice and accountability for the millions of deaths, displaced people or the severe atrocities such as rape as a war tactic, killings or torture—still taking place in M23-controlled areas. What the deal does include is US military training to “secure peace”. Yet, as history has shown us, armies are seldom there to protect people, but rather to secure the capital and easy access to resources. Musavuli draws a parallel to history by stating Trump is now creating false narratives of Congolese people being killed by machetes and, hence, needing to be saved—by the US: “At least for him, being the new King Leopold, he’s telling us what he got from DR Congo. […] The US has literally shown to the world that for them to have supremacy, they will do everything in their power to have control over Congo.”

Robberies, shootings, extortion, and rapes have been carried out by over 120 different groups pursuing different business or political interests—in collaboration with organized crime by multinational corporations, and even with the army itself, which sells weapons to whoever can pay. Musavuli goes further, stating the army is, in fact, the source of these groups and the perpetrators are “coming in and out of the military”, acting with impunity, contributing to a never-ending cycle of peace negotiations. Hence, none of the peace agreements have worked so far. What is more, the whole political structure of the country has been marked by predation, impunity, patronage, and a longstanding lack of legitimacy for decades—or even centuries.

In summary, the new imperialist deal is everything but justice and peace for the people of the DRC. But, the Congolese are calling for justice, and it is evident that this can only come from below, from the liberated people in control of their own resources instead of by creating new neocolonial exploitation structures with foreign military forces. According to Musavuli, Lumumba remains an aspiration; resistance is there, and people do keep fighting for their rights and the liberation of the DRC, like the fierce youth of Goma who protected the city against the M23 troops for 2–3 days. Musavuli quotes Lumumba: “Congolese are not alone but […] every liberated people everywhere around the world have always been found on the side of the Congolese people and because of that we are sure that people around the world will join us as we are fighting to transform the African continent”.

Climate change is killing us – and could claim millions more lives by 2030

Climate change insidiously and unequally affects human health, and it’s time we pay attention.


Healthcare workers die-in at the front of the Victorian Parliament, part of Day 1 of Extinction Rebellion's Autumn Rebellion in Melbourne. Photo by Matt Hrkac, CC BY-NC 2.0

The sooty fingertips of climate change can be found on almost everything dominating the news these days: soaring food prices, weather disasters, severe disruptions of ecosystems. And with another summer afoot, its halfway point has already hit Europe with a sweltering, inescapable heatwave, causing thousands of deaths. Another effect that may not have been at the forefront of climate change experts’ and activists’ manifestos, is its negative impact on human health. 

When we think of summertime, usually it’s turquoise water, poolside lounging, clear and bright skies. After all, things usually look better under a filter of golden glow. But there’s an aesthetic, and then there’s reality: rapidly rising temperatures, weather disasters, and lack of equitable and sustainable energy access spreading  disease and deterioration—exacerbated by an unsteady health infrastructure and many countries’ sheer lack of climate resilient tools. 

This year in June, the World Health Organization declared climate change to be a public health emergency. They’ve been emphasizing the danger it wields against humanity for years, pointing to rapid air pollution, an uptick in infectious diseases, and a surge of heat-related deaths. And yet, while climate change’s effect on health and mortality is well-documented and increasingly covered in the media, it still seems under-acknowledged in the general public sphere.

A rapid study led by researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London found that the pollution-driven warming tripled the death toll of Europe’s heatwave. A concerning 58% of infectious diseases faced by humanity worldwide have been in some form exacerbated by climate change. In December 2024, almost one fifth of Dengue cases in Latin America and the Caribbean were attributed to global warming, according to a study carried out by researchers at Harvard and Stanford. In 2023, a record number of six million cases of dengue fever were reported worldwide, indicating that as the world’s burning ramps up, so does disease. Malaria also has been linked to rising temperatures, due to parasites thriving in humid climates. WHO has also explored the intersection of tuberculosis (TB)—one of the world’s most contagious and dangerous diseases—and climate change, highlighting water insecurity and displacement as key factors. 

Researchers urged for extreme heat to be appreciated as a very material threat, and one that will appear with increasing regularity, due to the relentless speed of global warming. Indeed, June 2025 is the hottest ever recorded, and all signs point to the remainder of the year following its example. While Europe, Africa, and Asia are scrambling to rein in carbon emissions and speed-run the green energy transition, President Donald Trump has slashed funding for a host of sustainability initiatives and just hired three climate contrarians for the United States Energy Department, indicating that the leading global power is standing firm on plans to burn more and more fossil fuels, all evidence of severe danger be damned. 

Extreme heat isn’t the only threat climate change poses. This year alone, climate change has been linked to  higher prevalence of eco-anxiety, sleep apnea,  difficulties during pregnancy, a high prevalence of eco-anxiety, and the faster spreading of infectious diseases. From sleep conditions to mental illness, pollution touches every aspect of human health—and fundamentally, every part of our lives. And with every person affected, comes a further strain on an already-struggling healthcare system, the infrastructure of which is globally lacking due to aid cuts and general patient inequity. 

The “Food is Medicine” initiative has seen a recent increase in popularity in the United States. Positing that nourishing, individualized diets and access to healthy foods regularly can combat a number of health issues and save the government a substantial chunk of change, philanthropic organizations and research associations worldwide are working to implement such projects. But climate change threatens this radically simple ambition by disrupting the levels of carbon dioxide and the temperature conditions required for optimal crop growth, and by causing an imbalanced water supply. The world food production rate and the nutrition values of foods have been gravely impacted as a result. Agricultural losses are being recorded with more frequency, in line with the changes to temperature and precipitation. Without affordable and healthy food, the power of nutrition and nourishment is reduced—and chronic illnesses flourish. 

Perhaps coming on the heels of COVID, the general population is too fatigued to address another health emergency. After all, it was an odd, alienating and, scary time, impacting our mental health in myriad ways. In fact, reports confirmed that COVID drove wedges between people, threatening solidarity and community during a distressing time. It was almost four years of lock downs and regulations, some of which chopped and changed so quickly they had us all suffering from whiplash. Only five years have passed since it was declared, and yet, often in conversation, it is referred to in bafflement and abject incredulity. With the toll it took globally, it’s no wonder that there is a resistance to addressing another health emergency, one that isn’t new but has been bubbling barely beneath the surface for decades, over flames stoked by human-caused global warming. How could we not be jaded? Atop the succession of crises the past five years have offered us, those who aren’t denying climate change are also aware of the fact that it’s the top 1% of the world that emit the most carbon dioxide—roughly 1000 times more than the rest of us. 

And yet talking about it is better than not, because any small drop into a rising wave can contribute to a revolution. 

While the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku ended with a feeling of disappointment at the inadequacy of climate commitments, a milestone occurred in the signing of a Letter of Intent uniting Azerbaijan, Brazil, Egypt, the UAE and the UK under a framework co-led with the WHO with the aim of integrating health into climate change policies. WHO officials underlined health as a cross-cutting priority and emphasized that future leaders ought to keep the same momentum for the issue. COP30, slated for November in Brazil, is expected to continue on this line of discussion, with hopes that advances have been made and resilience is being pursued. 

Of course, the Trump administration’s slashing of foreign aid has thrust many undeserving countries into a tailspin. Despite insistence that the cuts have not caused fatalities, CNN has reported from the Nangarhar Regional Hospital in Afghanistan, where US-funded medicines, medical equipment, nurses, doctors, and midwives have been withdrawn, that the mortality rate of babies has risen by three or four percent since the suspension. Further research has projected that the cuts of international humanitarian aid could cause fourteen million premature deaths by 2030—with a third expected to be children. But medical calamities aren’t just being outsourced to the world’s most vulnerable countries; that Big Beautiful Bill we keep hearing about (I believe the ink is still fresh) will have a profound impact on the country’s healthcare. “This big, beautiful bill—in terms of its impact on health care, on how physicians and hospitals are going to navigate the next few years—I think is the biggest immoral piece of health care legislation I’ve ever seen. Just unethical, indefensible and tragic,” Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, a professor and founding head of the division of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine told Healio. 

Himal Magazine has declared that the global health order as we know it has collapsed. This May, the 2025 Geneva Health Forum (GHF) took place alongside the World Health Assembly (WHA), under the theme of “One World for Health”—convening leaders in global health, medical personnel, philanthropists, and academics who were ensured of the utmost significance of the event—this year more than ever. In a session titled “Climate Change and Health: Adaptation and Resilience in a Changing World”, experts considered how to develop a new system, one in which climate change is recognized as a defining human health emergency. 

A burning planet scorches everyone in its path, but particularly the vulnerable. The elite set the bonfires and we inhale the smoke. The dam has already broken for those at the bottom of the pile—those who don’t have access to healthcare or food or shelter, those who are unable to afford nutritious meals or preventative care—and the water will rise until it reaches all of us. COP30 is coming in a matter of months, and the global health order is being recreated almost from scratch. While the only action most of us are able to provide to the cause is spreading awareness, it’s an action we must continue to do—continue talking, continue sharing, and continue protesting. Healthcare is at the point where it is now inextricable from climate change, and it’s imperative that research continues and measures are still taken towards crafting resilient and adaptable infrastructures worldwide to prevent millions of needless deaths. 

Ellen McBride is an Irish writer, media analyst and social media marketer based in Berlin. She has written for Friends of Friends, Companion Magazine and Whisk Journal.

“The masks have finally come off”

Interview with French decolonial activist Houria Bouteldja


Hello Houria. Thank you for talking to us. Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I am a decolonial activist. I co-founded the Parti des Indigènes de la République in 2005. It is a decolonial political party which broke with the French Left, which we criticised for having abandoned people with a colonial history and, more broadly, for collaborating with what I call the “integral racial state”. I develop this concept in my book Beaufs et Barbares, le pari du nous [Published in English as Rednecks and Barbarians: Uniting the White and Racialized Working Class]

What is your experience as a Franco-Algerian author and decolonial activist?

As a Franco-Algerian, that is to say a post-colonial subject, my experience is one of structural racism in French society. Fanon said, “A society is either racist or it is not”. French society, like German society, is structurally racist. That is why, no matter how hard I try to integrate, my efforts will always be in vain, because there is a glass ceiling that means I can never truly be French. As a decolonial activist, I am quite satisfied right now because I can see that our definition of racism is progressing. The political anti-racism that I espouse has made great strides on the left. 

You were recently disinvited from a conference organised by Historical Materialism (HM). Can you explain what happened and why? 

In France, our enemies have created a very negative image of us. When we denounce structural racism, we are accused of being anti-white racists; when we denounce colonial feminism, we are accused of being masculinists; when we denounce Israeli colonialism, we are called antisemites. The French reactionaries who run the universities today take advantage of this image to justify censoring us. This is what happened with Dauphine University, which hosted HM. 

We understand that Les Soulèvements de la Terre and Action antifasciste Paris-Banlieue were also affected? How do you interpret this? 

It’s very simple. What has been censored is the transformative left: anti-fascists, radical environmentalists and political anti-racists. In short, those who want to break with the capitalist order. 

HM issued a statement after the conference. Are you satisfied with their response? 

Their initial communiqué was timid, but people on social media were unhappy with this weakness. After that, the second statement from HM France was much better, as was the one from HM London. Overall, I am quite satisfied, because many allies protested, some by boycotting and others by denouncing the censorship from within.

Is this the first time one of your speeches has been cancelled? 

No. It happens to me frequently, in this country of human rights and freedom of expression.

Where does the current debate on Israel stand in France?

I would say that reactionary forces are running out of steam. The denying of genocide cannot withstand the reality of the facts. The moral bankruptcy of French leaders is complete, as is that of other Western leaders. This bankruptcy is all the more significant because its consequences are terrible. Antisemitism among the elites has never disappeared, to the point that the French and German police forces have begun to persecute anti-Zionist Jews. The masks have finally come off. 

How does this debate fit into the context of the implementation of various Islamophobic laws and the continued rise of the National Rally?

The far right no longer has anything to do, since the positions of the Islamophobic and imperialist government are completely taken up with serving or anticipating  the far-right agenda. 

Do you think that antisemitism is being exploited? 

It has been being exploited for a long time. It is simply more visible now than it was before. When the yellow vest uprising took place, the authorities immediately used accusations of antisemitism to destroy the movement. We decolonialists have always warned the left: if you let the government exploit antisemitism (which, incidentally, has never disappeared), you will end up being the victim. That is what is happening now. 

Would you say that you are part of the French Left? Why, or why not?

I would say that it is up to the French Left to decide whether the decolonial movement is on the left or not.

What kind of solidarity is possible between Jews, Arabs and the French Left? 

Rather than talking about solidarity, I prefer to ask how we can build a hegemonic bloc, as [Antonio] Gramsci advised us to do. It seems to me that in order to unite the working classes in a radical left-wing project, we need an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, ecological, and anti-imperialist programme. That is how we can unify the working classes and build a people’s movement. 

How can we support you in Germany? 

By supporting anti-Zionist Muslims and Jews in Germany who are mobilising for Palestine, by supporting anti-imperialist movements, by creating a decolonial international with us. This is what we are trying to do with the series of events we have entitled the ‘Bandung du nord’ (Bandung of the North), [in reference to the 1955 meeting of newly liberated colonies from Asia and Africa] which have already taken place in Paris, Brussels, Barcelona and Montreal. 

Translation from the French: John Mullen