Inter-imperialist rivalry is heating up between the U.S. ruling class and its two main rivals. The capitalist bosses of China and Russia are rapidly consolidating a bloc to extract Eurasia’s huge oil and gas reserves. The fight over these strategic resources — and for military and economic domination of the world — will inevitably lead to the wider wars imperialists must use to settle their differences.
As the liberal Asia Times (5/1/14) pointed out, “All around Asia, China is pushing and probing at America’s alliances, trying to loosen the bonds that have kept the countries close to Washington and allowed the United States to be the pre-eminent power in the region since World War II.” In addition, China has fast become the dominant economic power in Africa, surpassing the U.S. without investing a single soldier. Meanwhile, the U.S. spent a trillion dollars and deployed hundreds of thousands of troops in Afghanistan for 13 years, yet has suffered a big defeat.
As profit-driven bosses escalate their conflicts, the international working class suffers. Millions of workers and youth die in these wars. Hundreds of millions of others ultimately pay for these conflicts with mass poverty, constant wage and budget cuts, massive unemployment, destruction of homes, inadequate health care, and the most ruthless racist and sexist attacks.
For the working class, the only way out of capitalist hell is to overthrow this system, seize state power from the bosses, and destroy them with communist revolution. This is the road followed by the Progressive Labor Party. We are organizing our revolutionary party in more than twenty five countries toward the goal of eliminating the profit system at the root of all our problems.
To the Victors Go the Spoils
U.S. corporations once drooled over Afghanistan’s profit potential. Now they’re losing the spoils of war to China and Russia. In 2010, when the U.S. had more than 100,000 troops in the country, the U.S. Geological Survey scanned Afghanistan’s mineral assets and found a trillion dollars’ worth of mainly copper, lithium, and iron. But today the largest mining contract in the country is held by China, a $3.5 billion deal to exploit vast copper deposits at Mes Aynak.
Referring to this contract and to President Hamid Karzai’s May visit to Beijing, Afghanistan’s state news agency said, “Chinese companies...enjoy a more positive relationship with Afghans [than the U.S.], making their investments less likely to be targeted for attack by insurgents” (Khaama Press, 5/19/14).
Pepe Escobar, who critiques global imperialism for the Asia Times, went so far as to declare (5/29/14):
In more ways than one, last week heralded the birth of a Eurasian century…. The $400 billion Russia-China gas deal was clinched… in Shanghai, on Wednesday (a complement to the June 2013, 25-year, $270 billion oil deal between Rosneft [Russian oil giant] and China’s CNPC.) Then, on Thursday, most of the main players were at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — the Russian answer to Davos [annual U.S.-led gathering with its capitalist allies]. And on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, fresh from his Shanghai triumph, addressed the participants.... St. Petersburg…made it clear how China wants to finance an array of projects in Crimea, whose waters, …boasting untold, still unexplored, energy wealth, are now Russian property. Projects include a crucial bridge across the Kerch Strait to connect Crimea to mainland Russia; expansion of Crimean ports; solar power plants; and even manufacturing special economic zones (SEZs). Moscow could not but interpret it as Beijing’s endorsement of the annexation of Crimea. 
The St. Petersburg meeting had a decidedly militaristic thrust, according to attendee Escobar:
One day before the clinching of the Russia-China gas deal, President Xi Jinping called for no less than a new Asian security cooperation architecture, including of course Russia and Iran and excluding the U.S.... Xi described NATO as a Cold War relic.
U.S. Rulers Losing Gas Pipeline Control
Even worse for U.S. bosses, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project — the main reason for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan under President George W. Bush — seems to be slipping into Moscow’s hands. President Bill Clinton launched the TAPI scheme in the 1990s. A consortium led by the Union Oil Company of California, or Unocal (now a Chevron subsidiary), was designated as the pipeline’s prospective operator. U.S. oil interests needed cooperation from the Taliban, which then controlled 90 percent of the country — and which was avidly seeking recognition by the U.S. government. But the pipeline negotiations skidded to a halt in 1998, after Taliban ally Osama bin Laden directed the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Clinton declared the Taliban enemies of the U.S. Attacks on the U.S. mainland followed with 9/11, something CHALLENGE warned about a year before.
The Clinton administration chartered the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, known as the Hart-Rudman Commission, in 1998. On January 31, 2001, seven months before 9/11, the Commission released its report and pointed the way forward for U.S. imperialism. Noting that U.S. workers had opposed foreign interventions since the U.S. defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s, the report argued there was only one way to gain support for a war for oil: through an attack on the homeland. Lo and behold, it happened. The bosses were able to mobilize for the invasion of resource-rich Afghanistan and, six months later, for intervention in Iraq.
While ExxonMobil and Chevron have current bids on the table for TAPI rights, they have stiff competition:
[Russia’s] Gazprom has expressed an interest in
building the … pipeline, in addition to its interest in ultimately connecting its gas fields in Russia’s Altai
region to TAPI. Beyond this, proposals for building a Rosneft oil pipeline parallel to TAPI, or even a Gazprom gas pipeline next to it, are being considered.
Essentially Indian companies want to bring in Russia as stakeholder in the energy corridor they seek to create between Central Asia and India
(World Politics Review, 5/10/14).
The U.S. is drawing down their original 100,000 troops in Afghanistan to an announced 10,000, including 6,000 Special Forces and possibly mercenary contractors. Should Russia and India move in with their joint TAPI-type pipeline, they will have to provide their own security along that corridor. That could put them in direct conflict with U.S. forces, which “have abandoned more than 90 percent of the 600 bases they once held” (Wall Street Journal, 6/2). The U.S. will use its remaining bases to launch drone attacks in Pakistan — and kill even more innocent civilians.
Afghan Fiasco v. Obama’s Spin
Through all of this, Obama is feebly trying to spin U.S. imperialism’s Afghan fiasco as a successful pacification. On May 28, he told newly commissioned West Pointers, “We are winding down our war....You are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.”
Three days later, Obama announced a prisoner swap with the Taliban that freed a U.S. soldier who had gone missing — or deserted — five years ago. He continued the spin: “Families across America share in the joy.” He triumphantly envisioned a “hard-earned peace within a sovereign and unified Afghanistan.” As the New York Times (6/1/14) reported, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl had departed for Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany eight hours earlier, but that did not stop Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel from taking a figurative victory lap” around Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan “to celebrate the release of the lone remaining American prisoner of war in the Afghan conflict.”
For the world’s workers, the Bush-Obama Afghan invasion has proved a disaster. Post-9/11 combat there needlessly killed at least 8,000 working-class U.S. and NATO soldiers from Britain, France, and other EU countries, and more than 20,000 Afghan civilians. Innocent Afghans are still being slaughtered by drones. And thousands of GIs are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and battle wounds while they wait for months and even years for treatment in a dysfunctional Veterans Administration system.
Workers’ Trump Card:International Unity
Desperate to fend off the emerging China-Russia alliance, U.S. rulers will pull out all stops to win U.S. workers to support a potential war against these imperialist rivals. Look for more racism directed against Chinese people in the U.S., along with assaults on Muslims worldwide. The bosses’ attack black, Latino, Muslim and immigrant workers in an effort to divide and weaken the working class and drag down conditions for all workers.
PLP’s answer is to organize the international working class against the murderous capitalists. Our Party says, Workers of the world, unite! Smash all borders! Join us!