Published 11 July 2025, the dialogue Insoumission between Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Tariq Ali is one of the most lucid indictments of global power written this year. You should read it. Here’s why.
While Western liberals wring their hands over Gaza and feign confusion over how it got this bad, Mélenchon and Ali dispense with the illusions. Gaza isn’t a policy failure. It’s an imperial strategy. Mélenchon lays it out: the mass death, the long war, the destruction of a people. This is all part of a plan coordinated by Washington and Tel Aviv.
“So no one can say that the Americans don’t know what they’re doing… it’s all deliberate, planned, organized jointly by the US and Netanyahu.”
The fiction that the US is a restraining force is long dead. Under Trump 2.0, with JD Vance and Stephen Miller pulling the ideological strings, the mask has dropped. Trump ordered a ceasefire with Iran. Israel broke it. Trump exploded. But the war continued. Because the plan wasn’t peace. It was control.
The Real Target Is China
Mélenchon’s sharpest intervention is in naming the wider logic. The war in Gaza, the destruction of Iran, the militarisation of Europe. None of these are isolated events. They are about oil. And whoever controls oil, controls China.
Ali adds the most damning point: liberals in the West are now saying “let’s focus on China” as if that’s the moral pivot. But that has always been the point. US empire wants to bring China to heel not through trade, but through siege. Cut off the oil, break the supply lines, trigger collapse without firing a shot.
“Some in the West would prefer a cold war to a hot war… but these are nuances. It is easy to move from one to the other.”
Three Things That Make This Essential
- It names Gaza for what it is: genocide planned and managed for geopolitical gain.
- It understands the US strategy: not confusion or incompetence, but deliberate escalation towards imperial war.
- It reclaims revolutionary strategy: rooted in history, but attuned to the present.
Mélenchon even wagers that the United States will not exist by century’s end. Not through war, but through internal collapse: demographic contradiction, cultural fracture, and the impossibility of sustaining a nation built on conquest and competition.
“The US is not a nation… it is a country that has been at war with all its neighbours since birth.”
France, Fascism, and the Fight Ahead
Mélenchon’s final message is about France, but it speaks to all of us. The far right isn’t rising in isolation. It’s being incubated by liberal technocrats who hollowed out the state, privatised the public secotor, and now have nothing left but police and fear.
But the French, he says, can still erupt. Insoumission (the spirit of refusal, of rupture) runs deep in the country’s veins. It isn’t just about strikes or slogans. It’s about rejecting the dead world the dominant class is trying to sell us.
“We may be workers, but we are also lovers, poets, musicians – and these identities also have their place in politics.”
Final Word
This isn’t a dialogue. It’s a provocation. A challenge.
It’s a rare thing in 2025: a piece of writing that doesn’t just describe the world as it is, but insists on the world that could be.
Read it.
Share it.
Then act.
