Above: anti-NATO graffiti in west Ireland
As was the case in pre-revolutionary Russia, when the capitalist ruling class was determined to sustain the war it had started, the only way for today’s workers to end this latest imperialist war is via proletarian revolution. Even though from a practical perspective the imperialists at some point have to at least lessen their efforts to militarily aid Ukraine, they’re going to continue their war against Russia (and against the wider anti-imperialist bloc) for as long as this revolution is delayed. Should the Ukraine war only be allowed to “end” on the terms of the imperialists, what follows the present stage of weapons shipments will be even more destructive than the situation the hegemon has so far created. Because international monopoly capital can only survive if China (and Russia and Iran by extension) get defeated; and if monopoly capital can’t do this through sanctions combined with a proxy war, it will try to bring about greater levels of chaos.
Such chaos is the logical conclusion of the model for trying to maintain U.S. dominance that the hegemon has been utilizing since the start of the new cold war; a war that became clearly visible with Obama’s Pivot to Asia and proxy wars against Russia, but arguably began with Bush’s creation of AFRICOM in 2007. That was when, in response to the strengthening of the globe’s anti-imperialist forces which had occurred after Washington’s self-destructive “War on Terror,” the hegemon started expanding its occupations of the formerly colonized world. The goal behind this expansion was to make the peripheral countries too heavily under U.S. influence to be able to build serious ties with China; or, should these countries build such ties anyway, to create the means for destabilizing them.
This project to hold back history’s progression towards the multipolar new era is one that’s been constantly fluid in its tactics; a destructive campaign that’s more concealable than the original cold war, which was fought within the bipolar world of the USA vs the USSR. The nature of this 21st century war is more complex, its key events harder for the casual observer to identify as attempts at subduing Washington’s rivals. Gabriel E. Merino from Argentina’s National University of La Plata assesses this ambiguity at the center of these efforts to prevent a multipolar future:
While for the American authors the term “Hybrid Warfare” is generally used to describe the sophisticated means that both state and non-state actors would employ to mitigate a conventional disadvantage against the United States—closely linked to the concept of asymmetric warfare, for the Russian researcher (Korybko, 2015), Hybrid Warfare is a new method of indirect warfare conducted by the United States (the only power with the capacity to do so) with a view to producing regime change. In order to achieve this objective, this type of indirect warfare combines the tactics of “color revolutions” with non-conventional wars, in a multipolar scenario and where the costs of conventional warfare between powers are very high. For this author, Hybrid Warfare is the new horizon of the United States’ strategy to produce changes in regimes contrary to its interests. Although it is played out in secondary scenarios, it is aimed especially at three states that constitute the core targets of the United States: China, Russia and Iran…A central characteristic [of this] is that Hybrid War is completely blurred: the boundary between military and civilian, between the beginning and the end, between public and private is blurred.
That the new cold war is easier to conceal doesn’t make it less destructive; this makes it moreso. We’re increasingly going to see its catastrophic consequences as the hegemon transitions from the Ukraine proxy war, to a campaign of hybrid warfare again BRICS. Because in a time when the globe is experiencing unprecedented heatwaves from the climate crisis, made so severe by an emerging El Niño within an unbalanced atmosphere, the worst thing that can happen is for a major world power to start doing all it can to bring the world to anarchy. Countries like Somalia, which have been reduced to a state of mayhem and mass suffering by AFRICOM’s criminal acts, are only the first of the new cold war’s victims. The hegemon aims to perpetuate chaos within as many places as it can, as that’s the only way to stop the loss of the dollar’s reserve currency status and thereby a fatal contraction in U.S. capital.
That’s the nature of U.S. foreign policy when the hegemon can’t realistically restore the unipolar world order: endless efforts to either expand the zones of chaos, or ensure the existing zones of chaos aren’t allowed to recover. This is what Washington has been doing in Yemen; even as China has facilitated attempts at a peace deal, such a deal remains ineffective at ending the violence in large part because of Washington’s ongoing arming of the Saudis. It’s what Washington has been doing in Afghanistan, where even though its efforts to colonize the country have proven a failure, the hegemon has been imposing horrifically cruel sanctions upon the country for the last two years. And it’s what Washington will try to do in Ukraine, whose dedicated Nazi terrorist groups will be able to continue the attacks against Russia even as the country’s official armed forces fail.
This won’t be able to destabilize Russia, and the Ukraine conflict overall has represented more of a gain for multipolarity than a loss; it also doesn’t mean monopoly capital is going to stop existing after this stage of the proxy war ends though. Whenever global attention has shifted away from Ukraine enough for NATO to be able to end its wasteful aid efforts, the sanctions will go on, and the arms contractors will find new avenues to gain profits. These avenues in part will be Washington’s growing occupations of southeast Asia; a place which, in the months between the Afghanistan withdrawal and the Ukraine escalation, the hegemon was already starting to shift towards as its main location of military involvement.
The problem with this project to complete the pivot to Asia; one where the hegemon would continue sending arms to places like Taiwan indefinitely and (it hopes) provoke China into entering into a new proxy war; is that even Washington’s biggest allies in the present proxy war are finding less and less reasons to participate in such a war on China. Washington may have been able to momentarily ruin the hopes for a German-Russian pipeline, but the widespread awareness that Biden was behind the Nord Stream explosion has come with longer-term consequences. Consequences that involve a loss of perceived credibility for Washington among the peoples of Germany and wider Europe. And even if this growing wariness towards Washington isn’t enough to make the capitalist dictatorships of these countries abandon the war on Russia, it could be enough to deter them from joining the war on China; that, along with the increasing economic incentives Europe has to keep building a relationship with the PRC.
As was written about this month by Jacobin’s Patrick Maynard, an internal mass pressure is building within Germany to end the war effort. Pressure that can only grow more acute as the government keeps refusing to obey the popular will:
The country recently released its first public national security strategy, which lists Russia as the country’s primary threat and urges continued military buildup. Such pushes worry German antiwar activists like Karl-Heinz Peil, who told Jacobin that Germany’s leadership, pushed along by uncritical media coverage, is willing to allow “economic decline with dramatic social disruptions” in order to militarize. Ultimately, though, their opinions are unlikely to produce significant change, as despite being the EU’s largest economy, Germany is largely forced to follow the US lead. Analyst Schwarz says that this is US “leadership” instead of a real “partnership.” [Leftist German politician Sevim] Dağdelen is less diplomatic. For her, Germany’s role has “no democratic sovereignty in sight,” she comments by email to Jacobin. “And the United States seems not to acknowledge any allies, just vassals.”
What could come from this situation where, even as rallies within Germany to end the war have been able to reach numbers like thirteen thousand, the ruling class fully intends to reinforce NATO’s dominance? Given that even such pro-American of a leadership as Germany’s Green Party likely wouldn’t want to commit to a war on China, we could see a return of inter-imperialist rivalry. Washington has already brought tension between Germany’s government and people, and for it to ask the government to do something even more destabilizing and self-sabotaging would force some meaningful choices to be made.
Choices which, should they bring about either a newly U.S.-defiant Germany or a Germany that’s helping wage war on China, will create the conditions for workers revolution. That is, if the communists sufficiently work to take advantage of these circumstances. What we know at this point is that there does exist a social base for a German movement that’s come to a synthesis between anti-imperialism and class struggle. That was indicated by the positive receptions to last month’s speech in Germany by the members of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform:
In this city, Cologne, which was devastated by imperialism in the World War II, the anti-imperialist and anti-NATO struggle for the liberation of the world people has a special significance in the present. In the historical anti-imperialist war, the world anti-imperialist forces including the international communist forces have to strongly conduct the anti-imperialist and anti-NATO struggle against the NATO including the main enemy, US imperialist. The World Anti-imperialist Platform unites the working class and working people under the banner of anti-imperialism and, holding the anti-imperialist and anti-NATO joint actions, plays a vanguard role in advancing a new day of true communism. Keeping the scientific idea of the working class proven by the history and practice as the scientific conviction for revolution, we are convinced of the great victory of the people, that the shining era after the victory of the Second World War will come again. Workers of the World, Unite! The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
Movements like the one WAP represents are an instrumental part of the story of how imperialism becomes no longer able to menace the globe. Just as much as the class struggle within the imperialist countries depends on the success of the global anti-U.S. struggles, these worldwide liberation efforts depend on us in the core countries sufficiently combating the crimes of our governments. We can only expect the empire to lose so much of its power simply due to its self-inflicted process of collapse; much of the globe will continue to be subjected to the empire’s evils until we in the core have ended these evils ourselves.
If our governments don’t listen to our calls for peace, then we’ll instead have to bring peace by overthrowing these governments. Our rulers have already helped provide us with a mandate for that revolution through their criminal actions, and through their willingness to condemn the workers to economic pain. The destruction can only end, though, when we’ve done what’s necessary to defeat the state. Which entails projects, exemplified in things like WAP, to connect and unite the world’s anti-imperialist forces.
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