FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to London is, behind all the formalities and Establishment flummeries, a revival of the Entente Imperiale, which has been the bedrock of relations between the two countries for more than a century.

The purpose of the trip is to cement the war alliance between two of the three major imperialist powers in Europe on a basis of militarism and joint hegemony.

It follows a period of estrangement following Britain’s democratic vote for Brexit, which France, as a major EU power, sought to resist, with relations further poisoned by the infantile anti-French chauvinism of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

The impetus for reconciliation is to be found in Donald Trump’s presidency in the US, which has eroded all the assumptions on which British diplomacy, in particular, has long rested.

The fact that Trump has sought energetically, if thus far ineffectually, to bring the Ukraine-Russia war to an end, has cast doubt on the US commitment to Nato, which has been the main vehicle for pan-imperialist aggression for 75 years, and has broken all the trading rules, has thrown London and Paris into a tail-spin.

“America First,” they fear, means European interests left behind.

In that sense, the present period resembles that between the world wars, when the US was entirely disengaged from Europe, and Britain and France allied to try to impose a hegemonic settlement privileging their own interests.

That was based on anti-Sovietism and the Versailles treaty designed to keep Germany in a subordinate role, a strategy which collapsed in the face of Hitlerism.

Today, the co-ordinates are obviously different. Germany’s economic supremacy within the EU is established, even if it remains militarily much inferior to Britain and France.

But the underlying impulse to the Anglo-French alliance remains the same.  It is a union of two imperialist powers seeking to reinforce their own global positions.

Starmer and Macron pledged to unite their nuclear forces in the event of a major conflict, a significant escalation in the likelihood of nuclear war, since the combined “force de frappe” will make the two powers more significant players in that macabre theatre.

They also recommitted to the continuation of the war in Ukraine, which Trump had been hoping to bring to an early end. Bleeding Russia white if possible is the strategy of the Starmer-Macron “coalition of the willing,” pouring arms and other support into the battlefield to do so.

Britain and France also remain the two imperial powers other than the US with the scope for military intervention in the Middle East, a role they deploy in support of Israel and of Western hegemony more generally.

And while France’s influence has been declining among its former colonies in western Africa, Britain is working overtime to maintain its “global role” through the Aukus pact and demonstrative naval expeditions to the Pacific as part of US-led anti-China manoeuvres.

All this constitutes an attempt to build up a second, semi-autonomous force within the broad camp of western imperialism, which, while remaining allied with the US, can also pursue its own agenda where possible. It is a form of multipolarity within the major imperialist bloc.

This British-French love-in is no force for peace in the world. It forms part of the overall drive towards new conflicts and new wars, and is directed above all against the rise of China and the breaking of much of the world from US/Nato direction.

The working people of the two countries should reject the Starmer-Macron agenda, which they will be expected to pay for, first in the domestic impoverishment already underway, and later in lives.