U.S. rulers and their European allies are locked in a fierce struggle with their imperialist adversaries in Russia for control over Eastern Europe. Among recent developments:
 • Russia’s seizure of strategic Crimea — after the coup backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Ukraine (see CHALLENGE, 3/12) — foreshadowing a wider world conflict;
 • The crisis in Crimea intensifying inter-imperialist rivalries already in place;
 • U.S. rulers scrambling to oppose Russian bosses even as they must continue to “pivot” toward a military confrontation with China and try to police the Middle East;
 • The hostilities between the capitalist regimes of Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin escalating to shifts of military assets and longer-term coalition building. U.S. Air Force fighter jets have left Italy and England for Poland and Lithuania, while Russian tanks threaten Ukraine’s eastern borders;
 • NATO vowing absolute defense of the now-threatened Baltic states, a promise the Western powers may be unable to keep;
 • A standoff that “has made Russia, Iran, and China more united in attempting to create a new power pole, counterbalancing and resisting the West — particularly the United States,” according to Majid Rafizadeh of Harvard’s International Review (FrontPageMag, 3/20/14).
Workers’ Only Answer: Communism
The international working class has no interest in either side of this imperialist dogfight. Our only answer is to organize for communist revolution to destroy the profit system and its mass racist unemployment, poverty and war. (For conditions of workers in Ukraine, see page 4). Building the communist Progressive Labor Party is crucial to the goal of creating a society free of profits and bosses, one run by workers for workers’ needs.
When Putin says he seized Crimea to help the ethnic Russians who reside there, it is a bald-faced lie. Putin is in power to serve his fellow-Russian capitalists, the corporate oligarchs who share a strategic interest in Crimea’s energy pipelines and Russian naval base. The Russian president is offering similar “service” in a play to win over the Russian-speaking 25 percent of Estonia and Latvia. Under the headline “Disquiet in Baltics over Sympathies of Russian Speakers,” Reuters reported (3/23), “There was disquiet when as pro-Russian forces took up positions in Crimea, the Russian ambassador to Latvia offered Russian passports and pensions for Ethnic Russians.”
But unlike Ukraine, the Baltic nations — Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia — belong to the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which views invasion of a member state as an act of war. NATO boss Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently reaffirmed this war pledge at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the leading think tank for the finance capital wing of U.S. imperialism.
A CFR interviewer asked, “How confident should the government of, say, Estonia feel that, if Putin decided to send Russian forces into Estonia on the pretext of protecting the large ethnic Russian population there, NATO would respond with force?” Rasmussen replied, “I am 100 percent sure ... that the alliance as a whole would take action to ensure effective protection and defense of an ally that is attacked” (CFR website, 3/21/14). A NATO-Russia conflict would put the two sides with their millions of troops and thousands of nuclear bombs in direct confrontation.
U.S. Bosses Not Ready?
But others in the U.S. ruling class insist that NATO is not yet prepared for a broader conflict. On the day of the CFR-NATO interview, the Brookings Institution (another finance capital think tank) published “The Geopolitical Realities of the Ukraine Crises, the Limits of U.S. Energy Assistance, and the Need to Tone Down the Rhetoric.” It noted that the U.S. goal of using its natural gas exports to break Russia’s stranglehold on Western Europe’s energy supply remains years from reality.
Brookings warned Obama to “de-escalate the tensions currently surrounding the crisis unfolding in Ukraine before we either reach an impasse with only suboptimal outcomes or expand the crisis into a truly global one.” In other words, the U.S. rulers and their allies must fully militarize before taking on a power like Russia. Otherwise, their present course will lead to regional defeats — or a third world war for which they stand unprepared.
Naturally, Brookings failed to note the bosses’ most dangerous weakness. The U.S. will be hard-pressed to march to war as long as the U.S. working class has yet to be won to the capitalists’ cause, as reflected by popular opposition to a military draft and intervention in the Syrian War.
No wonder that U.S. bosses are protesting that Germany and France contribute far less to NATO than they could in both cash and cannon fodder. Even weaker is their alliance with NATO member Turkey. At present, Turkey allows Russian warships passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea through the chokepoint of the Bosporus Strait. At the same time, citing safety reasons, Turkey bans all liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers from the strait. This prohibition blocks the U.S. bosses’ plan to use LNG from Qatar (and eventually from Texas) to undercut Russia’s energy export leverage against the European Union. In any case, the infrastructure to handle these exports is at least a year away in Qatar and five years off in the U.S.
A Scenario for World War
ExxonMobil currently provides crude oil from Kurdistan (an autonomous region in Iraq) for the long-term purpose of winning Turkey fully to the U.S. side. But this deal antagonizes the Iraqi government, which is vying for control over Kurdistan oil. Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is threatening to cut off the vast operations of Exxon and allied oil companies in southern Iraq, established during the last U.S. invasion.
But the U.S. may run out of time to consolidate its bloc before the next great-power clash. On March 18, three days before Russia’s parliament ratified the annexation of Crimea, U.S. ruling-class mouthpiece Roger Cohen fed war fever in his column in the New York Times. He imagined a scenario that begins with the assassination of the Russian defense minister by a young Ukrainian nationalist, an obvious parallel to the events that helped trigger the imperialist murder of tens of millions in World War I. And then:
Russia annexes Crimea. It declares war on Ukraine, takes Donetsk in short order, and annexes the eastern half of the country. The United States warns Russia not to advance on Kiev. It reminds the Kremlin of America’s binding alliance with Baltic states that are NATO members. European nations mobilize. Desperate diplomacy unravels. A Ukrainian counterattack flounders but inflicts heavy casualties, prompting a Russian advance on the capital. Two NATO F-16s are shot down during a reconnaissance flight close to the Lithuanian-Russian border. Russia declares war on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Invoking Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty — an attack against one member shall be considered an attack against all — the United States and its European allies come to their defense. China, in what it calls a pre-emptive strike, invades Taiwan, “a potential Crimea.” Japan and India declare war on China. World War III has begun.
Cohen’s scenario may not materialize in Crimea in 2014. But given enough sparks, one of them must burst into flame somewhere. U.S. imperialism is locked onto a violent collision course with its equally ruthless competitors. Unchecked, the result would murder hundreds of millions of workers. It can only be answered by the might of a communist-led international working class, which has the power to wipe out the capitalist system. That’s the goal of Progressive Labor Party. Join us!