Sharpening competition for resources, markets, and labor are driving U.S. capitalists toward war with their Chinese, Russian and Iranian rivals. As each nation’s imperialists maneuver for the upper hand, they must impose more deadly fascist conditions on their working class while clamping down on any opposition. Workers throughout the world are being squeezed by austerity policies to pay for the inevitable wars to come.
U.S. bosses are at a huge disadvantage here. They rule a population of 315 million, while their foes have a combined 1.5 billion from which to raise armed forces. Seeking a racist remedy for their shortage of cannon fodder, defenders of the U.S. empire are seeking support from countries historically exploited by the imperialist powers.
In November, the pro-Obama Center for a New American Security (CNAS) published a report called “Global Swing States: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey and the Future of International Order.” CNAS lists Chevron, GE, JP Morgan Chase, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. Defense Department among its supporters. The think tank’s report proposes a U.S.-led world war alliance that could draw on more than two billion inhabitants.
The global Swing States report covers the immediate steps needed to begin building the mega-coalition. While skirting direct mention of a third world war, it unmistakably alludes to one. In “the worst case scenario,” according to the report, “a renewed international order will withstand Chinese pressure.” “If the global order fragments,” it ominously warns, members of this proposed grand alliance “will suffer the consequences.”
“International order” and “global order” are code for U.S. imperialism. Global Swing States begins by wistfully — and falsely — recalling that the predominance of U.S. imperialism after World War II (outside the Soviet bloc) derived from globally admired virtues. The U.S., CNAS says, selflessly created and fostered international institutions like the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The paper identifies five areas where U.S. imperialism supposedly served as a beacon — and where it could now bolster ties with its new mega-allies, assigning specific roles to each. They are finance, trade, maritime “freedom,” nuclear non-proliferation and human rights.
But reality contradicts the bosses’ rosy interpretation of U.S. “leadership” on every front. The IMF and World Bank ensure loan repayments to U.S. bankers by enforcing austerity programs that deepen the impoverishment of workers in some of the poorest lands in the world. The WTO gives U.S. bosses access to ultra-low-wage labor, from Haiti to Vietnam. “Freedom of the seas” means continued U.S. Navy control, which has included sanctions, of worldwide energy and the shipping of goods. Nuclear treaties guarantee that the lion’s share of these weapons remains in the hands of U.S. rulers, the only ones ever to use them.
As for human rights, U.S. bosses have long since surpassed Germany’s Nazis as world record holders in murder and abuse. The Pentagon’s civilian death count soars from the atomic bombing of Japan (250,000), through Korea (one million), Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia (five million) Serbia (tens of thousands), Iraq (one million from sanctions and direct invasions), Afghanistan (hundreds of thousands and counting, with Obama’s drone strikes).
Then there are the uncounted mass deaths from U.S. interventions in Guatemala, Chile, and the Dominican Republic; the installation of the fascist Shah in Iran; CIA directives that led Indonesia’s rulers to massacre one million; the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, leading to decades of fascist rule; support of apartheid in South Africa; supplying Saddam Hussein with weapons and intelligence in his war with Iran (another million dead), and on and on.
In the U.S. itself, the capitalists arrest and imprison or deport millions of workers, mainly black and Latino, every year. State-sanctioned racist executions by lethal injection or cop’s bullet are a routine occurrence. The looming fiscal cliff cuts (see page 8) point toward even more austerity and exploitation.
As the embattled U.S. ship of state takes on water, CNAS urges the rulers of Brazil, India, Indonesia and Turkey to board and to drag workers with them. Global Swing States envisions Brazil as a potential pro-U.S. force in a world war, operating on both sides of the South Atlantic: “Geographically, Brazil dominates South America; it shares a border with every country on the continent except Chile and Ecuador. In addition, with a coastline that extends far into the South Atlantic, Brazil economically and culturally bridges South America and West Africa.”
In India, CNAS recommends that the U.S. “back New Delhi’s aspirations for maritime leadership in the Indian Ocean.” In another “worst case scenario,” this strategy to gain India’s naval assistance for U.S. control of China’s oil supplies could entail the deployment of millions of Indian ground troops.
Indonesia straddles the Malacca Strait, the passage for all Chinese oil imports from the Middle East. It also faces the South China Sea, where China makes highly contested territorial claims. In one phony anti-war passage, CNAS suggests that Indonesia benefit ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and Shell by joining the U.S. in setting redlines that China must not cross. The penalty would be war. Says CNAS, “Corporations that rely on this waterway for transit…have a vested interest in the peaceful management of current frictions. As non-claimant states, the United States and Indonesia are uniquely positioned to facilitate a South China Sea Corporate Caucus.”
Egypt lies torn between Islamic and military rule. Netanyahu’s Israel, though armed to the teeth, is small and unreliable. As a result, U.S. rulers are counting more and more on Turkey (pop. 75 million) as a long-term ally in holding onto Middle East energy assets in opposition to the similar-sized Iran. CNAS praises Turkey’s “increasingly hard-line position” against Iran stooge Syria in “imposing sanctions, severing diplomatic ties, giving material aid to the Syrian rebels and taking direct military action against the regime’s forces.”
Imperialist alliances shift and change, however, which complicates the U.S. rulers’ plans. Moreover, they are assuming that the international working class will roll over and play dead in the face of intensifying exploitation and increasingly likely carnage. But workers are already striking against austerity and taking to the streets in Bangladesh, Pakistan, France, China, Spain, Portugal, Haiti, Egypt and South Africa. We can see the same thing happening in the U.S. in Wisconsin, California and Chicago.
Communist class consciousness can thwart the U.S. rulers’ global militarization by sparking international rebellion. Progressive Labor Party is organizing working-class internationalism in more than twenty capitalist countries. PLP is confronting the bosses’ racist attacks on black and Latino workers and youth in cities across the U.S. Building the Party in all of these areas and in mass organizations is the key to the ultimate overthrow of capitalism and the smashing of the bosses’ state. Only communist revolution will emancipate the working class from the rulers’ exploitation, mass unemployment, racism, sexism and war. Only then will society be run for and by our class. Join us!
