During the Democratic National Convention, when Kamala Harris attacked Trump on the basis of him not being enough of a warmonger, this showed how much of a threat Harris poses. It was a warning that the wing of our ruling class which backs Harris seeks to expand the present series of conflicts, creating a new war in Korea that would likely lead to the deaths of millions. This is the only honest way to interpret Harris’ saying it’s a bad thing for Trump to want diplomacy with the DPRK. The extreme nature of this menace we face from the liberal fascists must bring about a front of unity between all who oppose their apocalyptic agenda. That’s the organizational mission which communists like myself have taken up in response to monopoly capital’s World War III drive. And breaking such a united front is what the Harris wing seeks to do through its increasingly severe repression.
The ironic part about the Democratic Party’s unhinged campaign to bring a new Korean War is that Trump once shared their stance on the DPRK. In 2017, when he hadn’t yet become aware of how much leverage Washington has lost over the DPRK, Trump said that to socialist Korea he would bring “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” It must have been fun for him to make this statement, but then he needed to keep doing the job of president, and the only logical stance he could come to was that there needed to be negotiations with the DPRK. The time for preventing the country from getting nuclear weapons had gone, which meant that from the perspective of a leader like Trump, talks with Kim Jong Un had to happen. Within a year after making his genocidal threat, Trump had made history by becoming the first U.S. president to go into DPRK territory.
Liberals have decried this decision by repeating the lie about Kim Jong Un being an autocratic dictator, then using this to play into the “Trump is Hitler” narratives. Though most of the USA’s people have yet to be exposed to the information proving the DPRK’s deeply democratic political nature, most of them haven’t embraced the mindlessly aggressive stance the Democrats have on the DPRK. The majority of Americans liked how Trump established diplomatic ties with the country. They were not compelled by the arguments from the neocons and the liberals, because it’s intuitive to most people that peace is by default a good idea.
This shows that there’s hope for combating anti-DPRK propaganda, because only a minority of Americans have gotten seriously invested in the manipulative atrocity narratives that our government presents about the DPRK. These narratives are designed to exploit the human capacity for empathy, which gives them emotional power. But to fully embrace them, you must first substantially embrace the ideology of U.S. foreign policy. And most folks in the U.S. can’t be bothered with this, as their bigger concern is what’s best for their own society.
As Trump says he’ll reestablish diplomacy with the DPRK, and the dominant element of the elites scramble to prevent this, they’re trying to take advantage of that popular detachment from geopolitics. The average American’s lack of investment in foreign affairs can make them tire on supporting wars, as most of them have tired on Ukraine, but it also keeps them away from the anti-imperialist struggle. Our job is to connect them to this struggle, which we absolutely can do. Anti-imperialist impulses are already there among the bulk of the masses. The big obstacle to mobilizing them against the war machine is the imperial state, which has a plan for trying to thwart our efforts.
This plan, which involves stirring up 2024 election political violence that gets used to justify repression, is about reversing the direction in which the USA’s people are inexorably going. The people of this country are experiencing the crises which imperialism creates. They’re seeing the explosion in the cost of living, the ravages of fentanyl, and the ongoing decline of our infrastructure, while watching our government refuses to rectify any of these problems. Instead, it’s focused on getting us into more wars, policing what we see online, and eroding our civil liberties. Monopoly finance capital, and the deep state that works to protect it, are acting against the interests of every part of society. So great potential exists for expanding our united front against the empire.
This united front’s next task is to make sure that the East Asia war drive becomes too costly for the neocons. That the actors who brought about the war in Ukraine, and are perpetuating the genocide against Gaza, find themselves unable to extend their destructive campaign into yet another part of the globe. If the empire gets set back in East Asia, then its efforts in all other regions will become all the more self-defeating. Washington will have invested itself in a series of psyops that prove to be ineffective, and that provoke a successful mass mobilization against the war machine. This could happen within the next half-year, if we’re able to recognize where our allies in the struggle can be found at the moment.
Opposition towards war in Korea exists within many parts of Trump’s coalition; namely the Libertarian Party, and the MAGA supporters who hope for DPRK talks. It exists in organizations that communists may assume wouldn’t be willing to work with us, like the Unification Church, which seek to reunite Korea into one. The tasks of communists are to build networks between pro-peace forces like these, bring the broad masses into an antiwar mobilization effort, and translate the opposition towards war in Korea into an effort at combating all other imperialist war efforts. Because Trump has been pushed into opposing the neocon stance on Korea, the MAGA base has followed in this way of thinking, and has come to recognize the Democratic Party’s Korea stance as something which serves the deep state. Now we need to show them why war with China, Iran, and all other imperialist targets must be opposed as well.
Maybe the next Korean War will be prevented by Trump winning, and him being further steered in a direction that goes against the foreign policy establishment. We can’t rely on that outcome, though. Whatever the way in which the East Asia war plan gets defeated, it’s only going to happen if we build up massive strength for the anti-imperialist movement. This means avoiding the January 6-type traps that the feds seek to set for us during the election, and preparing our cadres to keep operating amid the next stages of repression. Our enemies are trying to use this turbulent moment to crush our efforts. We can use it to expose the drivers of the neocon agenda, and turn the people into our allies in this struggle.
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