The recent heatwaves revealed how ill-prepared Britain remains for a hotter future – and how unequal the ability to cope with it has become, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
CAPITALISM is in turmoil. Ongoing economic stagnation, alongside the startling failure of the major Western countries to contain the coronavirus pandemic, is producing a crisis of legitimacy and a corresponding sense of panic among the ruling class.
The leading capitalist power, the US, is the worst affected. Although it remains for the time being the world’s largest economy in GDP terms, its quality of life indicators are deteriorating. The poverty rate has reached 15 per cent, the highest it’s been for 50 years. Infrastructure is crumbling.
Large parts of the country are suffering chronic unemployment, a situation that Trump’s trade wars have singularly failed to fix. Covid-19 has taken the lives of a quarter of a million people, with the number increasing by a thousand every day.
Friedrich Merz’s call for a new Plaza Accord ignores how Washington’s 1985 currency ambush destroyed Japan without fixing US deficits — China, a sovereign socialist state with 1.4 billion consumers, cannot be bullied the same way, writes CARLOS MARTINEZ
JENNY CLEGG looks at the key points that defined the China-US relationship, for now
In a speech to the 12th Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, SEVIM DAGDELEN warns of a growing historical revisionism to whitewash Germany and Japan’s role in WWII as part of a return to a cold war strategy from the West — but multipolarity will win out


