Argentina “is recovering.” It’s true that the population has been starving there for over two years now and will continue to do so to an extent never before seen in this — as the wantonly uncomprehending analysts report — “basically rich” country. Even today there isn’t a whole lot of production and trade taking place, not nearly as much as before the “major payments crisis” around the turn of year 2002. And the nation as a whole still hasn’t regained much international credit. However, the speculators are active once again. They are speculating within Argentina, on its stock exchange for example, which has apparently survived every economic catastrophe. They are speculating on Argentina, on its assets and government bonds that supposedly possess a bit of value again and could once again bring in some good money, even though the newly elected Kirchner administration has left much to be desired. Of course, the country must first of all fulfill a few conditions: the IMF and Argentina must agree to new loan guarantees and conditions; the country must newly resettle and service its national and international debts; some progress needs to be seen in the balancing of the national budget; in other words, the country must once again become ‘calculable’ and make a return to ‘normalcy’ in the eyes of the business world and according to its standards. The financial markets, in this sense totally unperturbed, are now handling the entire country as an object of their speculation that has become interesting again, a country in which the entire monetary system recently collapsed under their very direction.

Many an observer of global politics took the U.S. government’s declaration of war on Iraq as a profound turn in international relations. When the Bush administration, even without awaiting general authorization by the UN and its Security Council, resorted to a “preemptive strike” in order to eliminate this Mesopotamian threat to the law-abiding human species, they sensed a breach, if not an abandonment, of international law as an institution of international politics on the part of the superpower. Advocates of the legal form of relations between nations considered the approach of the “hawks” to be “legally suspect” and therefore regrettable and alarming. And yet what is noteworthy here is that the United States for its part obstinately insisted on its right to wage war in general and to launch a “preemptive strike” in particular.

Reasons for war come about in times of peace — when else? Conversely, peace is the “state of affairs” brought about by wars and is unthinkable without the capacity and willingness to wage them. This is something the Romans were already aware of long ago when they declared, si vis pacem, para bellum (if you seek peace, prepare for war).” And in the twenty-first century, NATO follows the same principle when it commits to being willing and able to carry out no less than six simultaneous military missions at any time — two larger wars with 60,000 troops and up to four smaller wars with 20,000 to 30,000 troops — for the purpose of securing world peace.

1. Oil — a strategic good
2. Oil — an exquisite item of trade
3. Oil — a political object of "consumer countries"
4. Oil — The supply states' means of existence

It’s no surprise that the participants in the global financial business perceive its precarious state. It is more astonishing that nobody can be found willing to distance himself from the daily disseminated concerns about the latest “developments” on the financial markets, and to criticize the circus that plays itself out in elaborate contrast to unemployment and starving Africans. Especially as this circus arises from the antagonism between the various nations in which the free market economy is raging, and gives this antagonism a new impetus.

For Trump, it is a sure fact that the proud USA and American people are being bled by transnational business that has caused jobs in the country to be lost, whole industrial regions that once flourished to go to rot, American infrastructure to decay, the local population to sink into poverty, trade balances to be negative, and government debt to be gigantic. For him, this goes hand in hand with an alarming decline in American military power, which he sees not only in the curbed expansion of US weapons budgets over the last decades, but also in the USA’s lack of success in its military engagements over the last quarter century.

It’s clear to him that all this is the result of a sell out of American interests that is as huge as it is criminal. An utterly corrupt “establishment,” in his view, has allowed economic dealings by which American jobs have been stolen, thereby depriving his “hard-working” and “beautiful” Americans of their right to the happiness of achieving, by their superior proficiency, the prosperity for themselves and their families, and thus for America as a whole, that befits them and their nation. This picture of America’s deep crisis and its causes shows what Trump’s picture of the world altogether is like.

America’s call for an intensified “integration into the world market” is aimed at states that have done nothing other than participate in the world market and earn money with all their means. The dark continent with its 700 million potential market participants is involved in global business. In Africa, too, everything revolves around money: on the markets where the population does its business, as well as with the governments that arrange their activities in accordance with a proper budget. And the results of all that are summed up to a gross national product in accordance with all the rules of national accounting, converted into dollars, and divided by the size of the population, so that one knows where one stands with these countries, as far as economics is concerned.