The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, has given a downbeat assessment of the global economy in her curtain raiser speech for its meetings, held together with the World Bank, this week.
International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva at the Annual Meeting of World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024 [AP Photo/ Markus Schreiber]
She began by saying that “we should cherish the good news”—that inflation levels were coming down, at least on official figures—because “we haven’t had much of it lately.”
Even this was tempered by the observation that while inflation rates may be falling, the higher prices people feel in their wallets are here to stay and “families are angry, people are hurting.”
In what has become a central preoccupation of the IMF in the recent period, flowing from the rise in global interest rates since 2022, Georgieva directed attention to the rising levels of government debt and the need for action to bring them down.
As always, this was couched in terms of needing to maintain a gradual approach to promote fiscal consolidation and seeking to maintain social safety nets, but words cannot disguise their essential content which is to undertake major attacks on the working class and some of the poorest people in the world.
Georgieva said IMF forecasts pointed to “an unforgiving combination of low growth and high debt—a difficult future.”
The rising levels of borrowing meant that a growing share of government revenue was being used to cover interest payments under conditions of lower growth. The IMF’s Fiscal Monitor Report, a summary of which was released last week, said global government debt was expected to reach $100 trillion by the end of this year. Some $36 trillion of this debt is in the US where one in seven dollars of spending is used just to pay interest bills.
The problem extends across the world as “fiscal space keeps shrinking,” Georgieva said. “Just look at the frightening evolution of interest-to-revenue over time. We can immediately see how the tough spending choices have become tougher with higher debt payments.”
And, she continued, “we live in deeply troubled times” in which military spending may well keep rising “while aid budgets fall further behind the growing needs of developing countries.”
In its report for the meeting, the World Bank warned that global poverty reduction had “slowed to a near standstill” amid economies damaged by the pandemic and war. It noted that poverty levels in low-income countries were “higher than before the pandemic.”
On top of the slowing down of aid, Georgieva noted that major economies, driven by “national security concerns” were “increasingly resorting to industrial policy and protectionism, creating one trade restriction after another.” Trade was not going to be the engine of growth it was before, and the situation was worsening.
In 2019, the number of what the IMF called “harmful new interventions” on trade was below 1000. It has calculated this will rise to more than 3000 in 2024.
Georgieva insisted that budgets had to be consolidated involving “difficult choices” over how to raise revenues and make spending “more efficient”—always a euphemism for cuts—while making sure “policy actions are well explained to earn the trust of the people.”
Under conditions where their living standards have been hard hit by inflation and cuts in governments services and subsidies that have already taken place, that is not going to happen. This is why there is discussion in ruling circles around the world, including in the US and other major economies, about the need for the use of state forces to impose the financial dictates.
So far as “solutions” are concerned, within the framework of the global capitalist economy, the IMF chief pointed to the advances in technology, saying there was much countries could do as members of an integrated economic community. The forces of trade and technology had delivered a “hugely valuable degree of interconnectedness.”
Then, without recognising it, she ran straight into the central contradiction of the present epoch, intensified to an enormous degree over the past four decades by the globalisation of production, between the integrated world economy and the nation-state system of capitalism.
While integration had taken place, she said: “Yet still, we live in a mistrustful world where national security has risen to the top of the list of concerns for many countries. This has happened before—but never in a time of such high economic co-dependence.” [emphasis in original]
The key issue here is not that this “mistrustful world”—more accurately characterised as a world at war and advancing to World War 3—has arisen despite economic co-dependence. Rather, it is a consequence of that very integration under capitalism.
It is the result of the intensification of the contradiction between this historically progressive process with the outmoded nation-state system, which each of the imperialist powers, with the US in the lead, seeks to resolve by means of war.
It cannot be resolved under capitalism unless world war is considered be a “solution,” but only by the advance to a new and higher form of society, international socialism.
Of course, such a perspective, the only rational solution, cannot be advanced by the head of the IMF, one of the chief defenders of the capitalist order and so Georgieva advanced a totally unattainable perspective.
She said the reality of “fragmentation” should not become “an excuse to do nothing to prevent a further fracturing of the global economy” and that her appeal at the meeting would be “to work together, in an enlightened way to lift our collective prospects.”
A similar, equally bankrupt, perspective marked an editorial by the Financial Times(FT) on the IMF-World Bank meeting. Noting the 80th anniversary of the establishment of the two bodies at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 towards the end of World War 2, it said they had “filled a void where coordination was lacking.”
As the IMF and the World Bank gathered for the annual meeting, they confronted a new set of challenges that risked undoing what has been accomplished.
The conditions of intensifying trade war, a worsening situation in developing countries, problems of climate change, shocks from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and mounting debt problems, the FT said, underscored why global cooperation is such a “precious commodity” and that international problems “require international solutions.”
The world facing the IMF and the World Bank looked very different from today, it concluded, but the “spirit in which they were forged at Bretton Woods remains as important as ever.”
The deepening crisis of global capitalism is not “spiritual.” It is material, rooted in objective structural contradictions deriving from the private ownership of the means of production and the outmoded and reactionary nation-state system. They can only be resolved by the advance to a new and higher form of global society, that is, international socialism.
[This article was originally published here in WSWS on October 20, 2024]
~Given the enduring supremacy of oil and gas, countries holding large, cheap reserves of the commodity remain essential to geopolitical calculations~
The United States and Israel are on the brink of war with Iran. While the Biden administration has publicly stated that it does not want “escalation,” it has made clear that it will support Israel regardless of what Netanyahu does. Nearly every bomb dropped on Gaza and Lebanon was made in the US and given for free to Israel by the Biden-Harris administration.
A natural gas refinery in the South Pars gas field in Asalouyeh, Iran, on the northern coast of Persian Gulf. November 19, 2015 [AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi]
For Netanyahu, who faces multiple criminal indictments once he leaves office, this moment presents an opportunity to realize the long-held, grotesque ambitions of the Israeli ruling class: to destroy the Iranian regime through war. As the Financial Timeswarned this past weekend, “the chances of an Israeli attempt to topple the Iranian regime cannot be fully discounted.” The paper noted that last week Netanyahu declared, “When Iran is finally free—and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think—everything will be different.”
The Trump faction of the American ruling class has expressed its full backing for such a war. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and former Middle East adviser, wrote a long post on X arguing for Israel and the US to topple the Iranian regime. He stated, “Iran is now fully exposed. … Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.”
Though other sections of the ruling class have voiced concerns about the spiraling situation, the logic of their position—unconditional support for Israel’s actions—puts them on the same road toward war with Iran. The Democrats may have tactical differences with Trump about how to overthrow the Iranian regime but both salivate at the prospect of doing so.
The removal of the Iranian regime, while a geopolitical end in itself for American imperialism, is also a critical steppingstone in its economic and military confrontation with its chief adversary: China. All factions of the American ruling class unconditionally support Israel because they know that controlling the resource-rich Middle East—and ending the Ayatollah’s power—will significantly increase their power and flexibility in a war with China.
The importance of Iranian hydrocarbons
Iran is a large country, roughly the size of Spain, Ukraine and France combined. Eighty-nine million people live there. Compared to Iraq, its neighbor, which was invaded by the US in 2003, Iran has almost four times as many people and a far more sophisticated military and economy.
Iran has a long history of colonial subjugation, including British control over its oil industry in the first half of the 20th century, the CIA-MI6 coup in 1953 to prevent the nationalization of its oil industry and several decades of bloody rule by the US-backed Shah.
Everyone knows that Iran’s wealth primarily comes from its oil. Iran produces a little more than 3 million barrels of oil per day, about 3 percent of the world’s total. What is not as well understood, however, is the potential for Iran’s oil production to expand. Only three other countries in the world have larger reserves of commercially realistic oil (Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iraq). Additionally, Iran has the second-largest reserve of natural gas in the world after Russia.
Oil and natural gas remain the energetic bedrock of the global economy. Despite efforts to promote new alternative energies, the “energy transition” under capitalism remains a half-hearted and contradictory affair. The principal concern of the US and Europe with their investment in EVs and critical minerals is not stopping global warming but ensuring their economic and geopolitical supremacy vis-à-vis China, which has excelled in this area. Fifty-seven percent of the world’s energy comes from oil and gas, another 27 percent from coal, and just 1 percent comes from solar, a record high.
Given the enduring supremacy of oil and gas, countries holding large, cheap reserves of the commodity remain essential to geopolitical calculations. It is striking that Russia, Iraq and Iran—after Saudi Arabia—are the world’s largest holders of cheap oil reserves. Each country has been a principal target of US imperialism over the last quarter-century. The US invaded Iraq and is now on the brink of war with both Russia and Iran, the second and third largest holders of oil and gas reserves.
What is more, each of them—partially due to being squeezed and sidelined by economic sanctions—has a relatively underdeveloped oil industry, deprived of vital streams of capital and advanced technology required for production. This is evident in the case of Iraq, where after the US’s brutal invasion, American and European oil companies significantly raised production, increasing output from 2 million to almost 5 million barrels per day today.
The US oil boom’s role in imperialist strategy
Were the current US-Israeli onslaught taking place 10 or 15 years ago, the impact on global markets would be significantly worse. In the last few days, oil prices have risen by about 10 percent, the largest increase in two years since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, a dramatic shift in global oil and gas markets has tempered the effect.
In the last 15 years, the US has experienced the largest oil and gas boom in world history through hydraulic fracturing. This method allowed the US to grow from about 5 million barrels of production per day (mb/d) to over 13 mb/d. This represents about 15 percent of the world’s oil supply and is the only major source of supply growth internationally during this time.
The US ruling class is in an entirely different situation today regarding controlling global oil and gas production than when it was planning the Iraq invasion in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By being able to put a lid on oil and gas prices through fracking, US imperialism has been able to afford the loss of oil from Libya, Russia and Iran on the world market, allowing the US and its NATO allies to squeeze these countries and make plans for their regimes’ overthrow. (In Libya’s case, a “successful” plan that has led to a permanent state of civil war.)
The US oil boom, however, will not last forever. Generous estimates give it another 10 years, after which it will precipitously fall.
In his critical work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism written in 1916, Lenin explained the importance of imperialism remaining one step ahead of its current needs. He wrote,
The more capitalism develops, the more the need for raw materials arises, the more bitter competition becomes, and the more feverishly the hunt for raw materials proceeds all over the world, the more desperate becomes the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.
To this, one could add that resources also deplete, and as they deplete, this “feverish hunt” further intensifies.
Where are the future supplies of oil and natural gas—so vital to the global economy—that will persist as other sources dry up, such as US fracking? They remain in the Middle East and Russia, with Iran, Russia, Iraq and Saudi Arabia being some of the most important future sources.
China and the US
It is important to stress that a key driver of US imperialism is the growing military and economic collision with China’s development. The US and its allies are fundamentally opposed to giving Chinese capitalism a “seat at the table” of the most advanced capitalist countries.
For several decades, China served as the cheap goods platform for the world’s major companies. But due to its own internal development—particularly in education and more advanced manufacturing processes—China has now created domestically controlled industries that seriously challenge US and European companies.
This is most obvious in the realm of automobiles, where Chinese EVs, advanced and cheaper than those of the US, have experienced rapid growth. In just a few years, China’s auto exports have gone from being a small fraction of those of Japan, the US and Germany to now overtaking all of them.
Having completely jettisoned past rhetoric of “free trade,” the US and its allies seek to prohibit Chinese corporations from playing a major role in the global economy at all costs. Confronting its own deepening economic and social contradictions, the US seeks to use its still dominant military and financial power to undermine the economic rise of China.
A central reason to control geostrategic resources like oil and minerals is not simply to profit from them but to pressure countries by denying access to this vital supply of energy and resources.
China, for its part, has much of the world’s critical mineral processing located inside the country, posing a problem for US imperialism’s war plans. However, while China has a relative advantage in critical minerals and batteries, the US has the advantage in oil and gas, at least for the next five to 10 years.
A RAND Corporation study on how the US could win a war against China noted, “If China is vulnerable to critical shortages in a war with the United States, it could be … in oil supplies, of which it imports about 60 percent and has a declared strategic reserve of just ten days.” Indeed, it is likely that one of the key reasons China was so quick to pioneer EV technology was its ruling class’s awareness of this serious weakness.
Almost all the oil China imports comes from the Middle East. Now that that oil no longer flows to the US, due to the fracking boom, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Iraq and the UAE send their oil east to China. China imports a staggering 11.4 mb/d of oil, making it the largest importer of oil in the world. China is the top recipient of Iranian oil.
Oil and World War III
Taking the geopolitical situation as a whole:
The US currently has control over global oil and gas markets more than any other country.
This level of dominance, however, has a limited window of about five to 10 years before that control significantly erodes due to the eventual decline of fracking.
The US, economically threatened, plans for a military confrontation with China centered around Taiwan.
China is strategically vulnerable when it comes to oil, relying on massive daily flows of oil from the Middle East. Iran’s largest oil export partner is China.
The Middle East and Russia, in the long term, will be the principal sources of the world’s remaining oil and gas. Iran is one of the single largest sources of undeveloped oil and gas reserves.
Taking these components together, it is evident that Iran’s oil and gas are of great interest to the United States and its partners. While many other factors go into the consideration of war, it is no accident that the principal targets of US imperialism are the most resource-rich countries in the world.
Netanyahu’s threats that Iran will “soon be free” reflect the fact that Israel, acting as a US attack dog, has been given a blank check to restructure the Middle East. The Israeli ruling class has its own distinct set of interests, but the Israeli war machine is ultimately funded, armed and driven by US geostrategic interest in the region.
This is the cold geostrategic logic that underlies the US-Israeli war against Iran and its proxies in the Middle East. The US seeks to strengthen and deepen its hold over this vital region as it prepares for a potential war against China.
For those who are disgusted by the rampage of Israel in the region and the blood-soaked, hypocritical role of the US, it is essential to understand that this war is not a “policy choice.” Capitalism, in its nationalist pursuit of profits at all costs, drives American imperialism toward a conflict that threatens the lives of billions of people. However irrational and dangerous, the American ruling class sees no other way out to its deepening spiral of economic, social and political crisis.
[This article was originally published in the WSWS here on 07 October 2024]
Statement of the WSWS International Editorial Board
We post below the Statement of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board, published in WSWS.org on January 13, 2024. We, theSocialist.LK endorse this statement in its entirety and invite our readers to carefully peruse it and grasp it for actions ahead.
The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns Thursday’s attack by the United States and United Kingdom against Yemen. With no popular mandate, with no congressional or parliamentary authorization, without even an attempt at a serious explanation, the Biden administration in the US and the Sunak government in the UK have carried out an illegal act of war against an impoverished nation.
The aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the fast combat support ship USNS Supply transit the Strait of Hormuz, Dec. 14, 2023. [Photo: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Keith Nowak ]
The attack on Yemen is a major escalation of the developing war in the Middle East. Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the US and its imperialist allies in NATO have overseen a massive militarization of the region, directly targeting Iran. This is itself part of an expanding global war, including the US-NATO war against Russia and the developing economic and military conflict against China.
US President Joe Biden did not even see fit to go on national television to explain the launching of a new war, under conditions in which there is overwhelming popular opposition to the expansion of war in the Middle East. As the Pentagon was planning to attack Yemen, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was admitted to the intensive care unit of Walter Reed Hospital, with the knowledge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but unbeknownst to the president. This bizarre episode underscored the reality that US war-making is operating on autopilot, increasingly outside the pretense of civilian oversight.
As always, the rationale provided to justify the war is a pack of lies. Biden declared that the missile strikes were “defensive” and “a direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks.” The American media, with the same breathless reporting that has accompanied every US military operation, proclaims that a country with a gross domestic product 700 times smaller than the United States is carrying out “intolerable” actions, against which the American military is “forced” to defend itself. Overnight, Yemen’s Houthis have been turned into a new bogeyman, requiring urgent military action without any discussion or explanation.
In coordination with the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the United States has dispatched to the Middle East a massive military armada, consisting of two aircraft carrier battle groups, multiple guided missile destroyers, an unknown number of submarines and dozens of warplanes. These forces have provided logistics, reconnaissance, and target selection to Israel in a deliberate effort to provoke retaliation from Iran and its allied forces such as the Houthis.
Yet, supposedly it is Yemen that is the “aggressor,” carrying out “unprecedented attacks” on US military forces deployed in the Red Sea, thousands of miles from the US border. American imperialism, which has a military larger than that of the next 10 countries combined, claims to be waging a “defensive” war on the other side of the world against a small, oppressed and impoverished country.
“We’re not interested in a war with Yemen,” asserted the Pentagon on Friday, “We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind.”
In fact, the imperialist powers have been waging a war against the population of Yemen for nearly a decade. The Houthis in Yemen have been subject to ruthless slaughter, waged by Saudi Arabia but armed and financed by the United States. According to the United Nations, 377,000 people have been killed in a genocidal campaign that has involved blockades resulting in mass starvation and disease. First under Obama and then under Trump, the US financed this assault with more than $54 billion in military equipment, aided and abetted by its imperialist allies, including the UK.
The devastation of Yemen is part of more than 30 years of unending and expanding war, spearheaded and led by American imperialism, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. This included the first Gulf War in 1990; the dismantling of Yugoslavia, culminating in the war against Serbia in 1999; the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001; the second war against Iraq in 2003; the war against Libya in 2011; and the CIA-backed civil war in Syria that began the same year.
Every single administration since that of Bill Clinton has authorized military operations, airstrikes, and destabilization operations in Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen, seeking to control the critical waterway leading to the Suez Canal.
The launching of military strikes against Yemen marks a new stage in the deepening imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East and beyond. The US and its imperialist allies are waging a de facto war against Iran, working to eliminate Iran’s military allies throughout the Middle East. The strikes against Yemen are directed at encircling Iran and provoking it into retaliation against US forces, which could be used to justify a full-scale war against Tehran.
The immediate antecedent for the escalating war in the Middle East, of which the genocide in Gaza is a part, is the collapse of Ukraine’s “spring offensive.” But the imperialist powers are doubling down. “Backing Ukraine is key to the West’s security,” declares The Economist, while Foreign Affairs asserts that “Victory Is Ukraine’s Only True Path to Peace.”
Overriding all of this, the United States is involved in a struggle to fend off the challenge posed by China to its global hegemony, which threatens to trigger a shooting war in the Pacific. In the US media and political circles, there is growing talk of a new “axis of evil” involving Iran, China and Russia.
Each one of these conflicts cannot be understood in isolation. The bombing of Yemen is part of a global counter-revolution, in which the imperialist powers are seeking to reestablish direct control over their former colonies.
The countries carrying out this agenda are the old imperialist powers: the US, UK, France, and Germany. The British ruling class, unable to carry through its policies independently, seeks to exploit the so-called special relationship, that is, Britain’s role as the principal ally of American imperialism, to advance its own interests on a global stage.
Every war launched by the US and its imperialist allies has ended in one bloody debacle after the other, with millions of people killed. But each disaster only reinforces the determination of US imperialism to use war as a means to secure its global hegemony.
American Imperialism, to paraphrase the words of Leon Trotsky, is “tobogganing towards disaster with eyes closed.”
Over the past three months, millions of people all over the world have marched in protest of the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. The US strikes on Yemen occurred on the same day as the International Court of Justice heard devastating evidence that Israel, and by extension the United States, were responsible for genocide in Gaza.
The response of US imperialism to these mass popular protests and exposures of its war crimes has been to accelerate its war plans. This is because the eruption of war, genocide and political repression is not an aberration. Imperialism, as Lenin explained, is not merely a policy, but rather a specific historical stage of capitalist development. Opposition to imperialism is, therefore, a revolutionary question.
It is not a matter of appealing to the capitalist governments responsible for these crimes to alter course, but rather mobilizing the working class, fusing the struggle against war with the developing struggles of workers all over the world against inequality and exploitation. The logic of these struggles requires the conquest of political power by workers all over the world, the expropriation of the capitalist oligarchs and war criminals, and the socialist reorganization of economic life on a world scale.
Statement of the WSWS International Editorial Board
We post below the First Part of the Statement of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board, published in WSWS.org on January 03, 2024. The statement contains four parts. Please access here Part Two, Part Three and Part Four. We, theSocialist.LK endorse this statement in its entirety and invite our readers to carefully peruse it and grasp it for actions ahead.
A bulldozer unloads the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israel in a mass grave in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2023. [AP Photo/Fatima Shbair]
1. New Year 2024 begins under conditions of escalating international crisis. At the dawn of the millennium, there were rosy predictions that world capitalism, under the benevolent and “unipolar” rule of the United States, was entering a new epoch of universal peace and prosperity. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the demons of the “short twentieth century”—above all, the specters of Marxism and socialist revolution—had been buried for once and for all. Wall Street cried out to the world: “My name is Capitalism, King of Kings. Look on my works ye Mighty and despair!” But it has taken less than a quarter-century to dissolve that arrogant boast into a colossal wreck. The new century of triumphant capitalism has proven to be the shortest of all. The fundamental contradictions of the world capitalist system that produced the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century have not been resolved and remain the driving forces of the intensifying economic, social and political upheavals that are sweeping across the globe.
2. The horrors produced by the cataclysms of the past century are being reenacted. Genocide is being openly adopted as an instrument of state policy. The attempt by the Israeli regime to exterminate the Palestinian people in Gaza proceeds with the open endorsement of the United States and its imperialist allies, which have repeatedly proclaimed their opposition to a cease-fire. A densely populated urban area is being subjected to a merciless bombardment that has killed more than 25,000 people, mostly women and children, within the first 10 weeks of the war.
3. The fascist prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared in his New Year’s message that the onslaught will continue throughout 2024. Israel could not continue the war another week, let alone a year, without the unlimited financial and military support of the United States and its NATO co-criminals. The US president, secretary of state, countless other high government officials and top Pentagon personnel shuttle back and forth between Washington and Tel Aviv, overseeing the Israeli operations and participating in the selection of bombing targets. It is an open secret that US and NATO personnel are directly involved in murderous actions on the ground within Gaza.
4. The sanctioning of and participation in genocide represent more than the imperialist powers’ usual violations of their invocations of human rights. The Gaza genocide confirms, on a higher level, a tendency first noted by Lenin in the midst of World War I, more than a century ago. He wrote in 1916 that “the difference between the democratic-republican and the reactionary-monarchist imperialist bourgeoisie is obliterated because they are both rotting alive…” Substitute the term “fascist” for “reactionary-monarchist” and Lenin’s analysis is entirely valid as a description of present-day imperialist regimes.
5. The Gaza genocide is not a unique episode, best understood as a product of exceptional circumstances related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the inherently reactionary character of the Zionist project and its racialist and xenophobic-nationalist ideology. The latter elements play, of course, a significant role in the actions of the Israeli regime. But the unrestrained ferocity of the present war, carried out with the full support of its imperialist paymasters and weapons suppliers, can be understood and explained only in the context of the breakdown of the world imperialist and nation-state system.
6. The fundamental “error” of the strategists of American imperialism in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was that the event was explained in purely ideological terms, that is, as the triumph of capitalist “free enterprise” over socialist “dictatorship.” But this explanation, based on the false identification of Stalinism with socialism, concealed the real cause of the breakdown of the Soviet Union and its implications for the future development of American and world imperialism.
7. Notwithstanding its tragic consequences, the dissolution of the USSR confirmed the essential Marxist-Trotskyist critique of the Stalinist policy of “socialism in one country.” The reactionary nationalist utopia of an isolated socialist state fell victim, as Trotsky had predicted, to the reality of world economy.
8. The end of the USSR provided the United States a short-term advantage over its rivals, which its propagandists dubbed the “unipolar moment.” But the fundamental contradiction that led to the two world wars of the twentieth century—the conflict between the objective reality of a highly integrated world economy and the persistence of the obsolete nation-state system—had not been resolved by the demise of the USSR and its satellite regimes in Eastern Europe.
9. The United States sought to exploit its geopolitical advantage to achieve a level of global domination that had been denied to it in the aftermath of World War II as a consequence of the decisive role played by the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazi Germany and the post-World War II wave of anti-colonial mass movements. Washington convinced itself that it could finally reorganize the world economy under its control through its military power. US imperialism’s favorite pundit, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, proclaimed in 1999 that “the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps…”[1]
10. The endless series of wars launched by the United States—in the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia—was a desperate attempt to maintain its dominant position, despite its overall economic decline. The International Committee explained the motivation for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and foresaw the failure of its underlying hegemonic project:
The launching of an aggressive war against Iraq represents a final, climactic attempt to resolve, on the basis of imperialism, the world historic problem of the contradiction between the global character of the productive forces and the archaic nation-state system. America proposes to overcome the problem by establishing itself as the super nation-state, functioning as the ultimate arbiter of the world’s fate—deciding how the resources of the world will be allocated, after it has grabbed for itself the lion’s share. But this sort of imperialist solution to the underlying contradictions of world capitalism, which was utterly reactionary in 1914, has not improved with age. Indeed, the sheer scale of world economic development in the course of the twentieth century endows such an imperialist project with an element of madness. Any attempt to establish the supremacy of a single national state is incompatible with the extraordinary level of international economic integration. The profoundly reactionary character of such a project is expressed in the barbaric methods that are required for its realization.[2]
11. The Gaza genocide epitomizes the “barbaric methods” arising from the increasingly desperate and beleaguered effort of the United States and its NATO allies to sustain their dominant position in the face of the challenge posed to their hegemony by China and recalcitrant national states whose interests conflict with Washington’s “rules-based” imperialist order. The slaughter of the Palestinians is unfolding in the midst of the bloody US-NATO proxy war against Russia, which has cost since its outbreak in February 2022 approximately a half-million Ukrainian and, at least, 100,000 Russian lives.
12. As the war in Gaza has normalized genocide as an acceptable instrument of imperialist policy, the relentless escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia has been accompanied by the de facto acceptance of a high level of possibility, even probability, that the conflict may lead to the use of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. The Biden administration regularly sanctions and directs military attacks on Russian assets and territory that would have been ruled out during the Cold War as inciting nuclear retaliation. Repeatedly crossing “red lines,” the Biden administration and its allied NATO governments have asserted that their conduct of military operations will not be constrained by the threat of nuclear war.
13. Despite bleeding Ukraine white, US-NATO imperialism has failed thus far to achieve victory on the battlefield. Its much vaunted “spring offensive” in mid-2023 ended in a debacle. In the final days of 2023, the Ukrainian regime carried out a significant escalation of the war by launching a missile attack on Russian soil, killing at least 22 people in the city of Belgorod. Russia has responded with a new wave of missile attacks on Ukraine, which the Biden administration is exploiting to press its demands for continued unlimited funding of the proxy war.
14. In the final analysis, the US-NATO instigation of the proxy war in Ukraine marks nothing less than preparation for a US war against China, transforming every part of the world into a specific sphere of operations. Nearly 20 years ago, in 2006, the International Committee posed a series of questions related to the global policies of the United States, among which were the following:
Will the United States be prepared to retreat from its hegemonic aspirations and accept a more egalitarian distribution of global power among states? Will it be prepared to yield ground, on the basis of compromise and concessions, to economic and potential military competitors, whether in Europe or in Asia? Will the United States graciously and peacefully accommodate the rising influence of China?[3]
Responding to these questions, the ICFI replied that those who would answer in the affirmative “are placing heavy bets against the lessons of history.”
15. Today, the answers to these questions are not of a speculative character. War between the United States and China is viewed not as a possibility, but as an inevitability. This consensus within Washington’s foreign policy establishment is summed up in an essay published in the new January-February 2024 issue of Foreign Affairs. It is ominously titled, “The Big One: Preparing for a Long War With China.” Its author is Andrew J. Krepinevich, Jr., a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a leading imperialist think tank.
16. The essay assumes that the United States and China will go to war. It is a fact taken for granted, about which one should not waste time debating. The real questions relate to how and where the war will start—in the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula, along the Sino-Indian border, or in South Asia—and whether the war will go nuclear. Krepinevich states:
Once a war has broken out, both China and the United States would have to confront the dangers posed by their nuclear arsenals. As in peacetime, the two sides would retain a strong interest in avoiding catastrophic escalation. Even so, in the heat of war, such a possibility cannot be eliminated. Both would confront the challenge of finding the sweet spot in which they could employ the force to gain an advantage without causing total war. Consequently, leaders of both great powers would need to exercise a high degree of self-control.
To keep the war limited, both Washington and Beijing would need to recognize each other’s redlines—specific actions viewed as escalatory and that could trigger counterescalations.[4]
17. It is nothing less than delusional to stake one’s hope for an avoidance of nuclear Armageddon on the ability to limit escalation in the midst of an existential conflict upon which the fates of the combatants depend. In any case, the US-NATO proxy war against Russia has already established that US imperialism will not be deterred by the threat of nuclear retaliation and will cross all and every “red line” in order to achieve its objectives.
18. Krepinevich acknowledges that the inevitable US-China war, even without the use of nuclear weapons, will have catastrophic consequences for all of humanity. He writes:
Even if the two sides avoided nuclear catastrophe, and even if the homelands of the United States and its major coalition partners were left partially untouched, the scale and scope of destruction would likely far exceed anything the American people and those of its allies have experienced.[5]
19. The conclusion drawn by Krepinevich is not that the military cataclysm must be prevented at all costs, but that the United States-led coalition’s “ability to sustain popular support for the war effort, along with a willingness to sacrifice, would be crucial to its success.”[6]
20. This nightmarish imperialist scenario of inevitable war must be opposed by the American and international working class. Workers in the imperialist centers of North America, Europe, Asia and Australia and New Zealand have absolutely no interest in defending the global geopolitical and economic interests of their power-mad financial-corporate imperialist ruling class. Nor should the workers of Russia, China and other major capitalist regional powers—Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, the Gulf States, Turkey, Nigeria, South Africa, India, Indonesia, to name only the most significant—attribute any progressive character to the reactionary efforts to reorganize world geopolitics on the basis of the utopian perspective of multi-polarity.
21. The fact that US imperialism instigated the Russia-Ukraine war does not justify, from the standpoint of the interests of the Russian and international working class, the decision of the Putin government to invade Ukraine. The Putin government’s response to the provocations of American and European imperialism was determined not by abstractly defined considerations of “national defense,” but by the class interests of the parasitical oligarchic-capitalist ruling class that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union and the privatization and outright theft of its nationalized assets.
22. In the years preceding the dissolution of the USSR, the political conflict within the ruling bureaucratic apparatus developed along national and ethnic lines. This reactionary tendency had been prepared and facilitated by Stalin’s repudiation of proletarian internationalism and the promotion of Russian nationalism under the cover of a chauvinistic Soviet patriotism. In the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the already existing conflicts between nationalistic bureaucratic cliques—of which the Russian and Ukrainian were the most powerful—evolved rapidly into an open struggle for raw materials, markets, and territorial advantages between the new national capitalist ruling elites. In October 1991, less than three months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the International Committee warned:
In the republics, the nationalists proclaim that the solution to all problems lies in the creation of new “independent” states. Allow us to ask, independent of whom? Declaring “independence” from Moscow, the nationalists can do nothing more than place all the vital decisions relating to the future of their new states in the hands of Germany, Britain, France, Japan and the United States.[7]
23. The ongoing war is a vindication of the warning made 30 years ago by the International Committee. The struggle against the US-NATO war must be conducted not by adapting to the Putin regime, but in implacable opposition to its reactionary nationalist-capitalist agenda. The anti-war policy of Russian and Ukrainian workers must be based on the unity of all sections of the working class of the former Soviet Union against the new capitalist elites. The internationalist policy upheld by Lenin and the Bolsheviks during World War I, of intransigent opposition to the defense of their national capitalist state, must be adopted by the workers of present-day Russia (against the Putin regime) and Ukraine (against the Zelinsky regime).
24. The same fundamental principles of socialist internationalism determine the attitude of the International Committee toward the conflict between US imperialism and China. The United States strives to limit China’s economic development, restrict its access to critical resources and technologies, and block the expansion of its global influence. China attempts to counter the relentless pressure exerted by American imperialism through the restructuring of the prevailing geopolitical and economic institutions in which the US dollar functions as the pillar of world trade and financial transactions. But this policy, notwithstanding China’s attempts to endow it with a progressive and even altruistic veneer (e.g., through the promotion of the “Belt and Road Initiative”), unfolds on a capitalist basis and aims at nothing more than the reorganization of the existing global balance of power.
25. The outbreak of war cannot be averted by counterposing to the hegemony of American imperialism a new multi-polar coalition of capitalist states. The struggle against imperialist war cannot be achieved through a restructuring of the nation-state system, but only on the basis of its destruction. As Rosa Luxemburg insisted on the eve of World War I, the working class “must draw the conclusion that imperialism, war, plundering countries, haggling over peoples, breaking the law, and the policy of violence can only be fought against by fighting capitalism, by setting social revolution against global genocide.”[8]
[1] Thomas L. Friedman, “A Manifesto for the Fast World,” New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999
[2] A Quarter Century of War: The U.S. Drive for Global Hegemony 1990-2016, by David North (Mehring Books: Oak Park, MI), p. 277
[3] Ibid, pp. 368-69
[4] Foreign Affairs, January-February 2024, pp. 111-12
[5] Ibid, p. 117
[6] Ibid, p. 118
[7] “After the August Putsch: Soviet Union at the Crossroads,” by David North, in The Fourth International, Volume 19, No. 1, Fall-Winter 1992, p. 110.
[8] “Petty-Bourgeois or Proletarian World Policy?” in Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War I, translated and edited by Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), p. 470
