Is global war inevitable?
By Simon Korner
The defeat of the Soviet Union over 30 years ago removed the principal brake on imperialist freedom of manoeuvre – and the USA wasted no time in taking full advantage of its opportunity, acting with impunity to reinforce and extend its domination militarily, economically and politically. The unipolar world became a much more dangerous place for millions of people who suffered the lethal consequences. Now, after decades of destruction and destabilisation, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Ukraine and dozens of other countries, the US finds itself facing two obstacles it perceives as grave threats to its position: a rising China, and a Russia that has drawn a line at NATO’s eastward march. These challenges are exerting pressure on an increasingly reckless USA as it tries to hold onto its global dominance, and as it faces a crisis of legitimacy at home.
Biden called this period an “inflection point” in the battle between “democracy” and “autocracy”, as he asked for an extra $105 billion from Congress to add to America’s trillion dollar arms budget for last year. The money was to fund simultaneous wars against Russia and Palestine – as well as billions for Taiwan to prepare for war against China.
With a dominating military industrial complex lobbying for perpetual conflict – the Financial Times (FT) reports global arms orders up 10% over the past two years – and a hollowed out financialised economy, America knows only war as a means of maintaining its supremacy and has no long-term strategy for arresting its decline. As we can see in the Middle East, it prefers to risk catastrophic destruction, even to the extent of igniting a wider war, than to accept and adjust peacefully to reality. The question we face is – is continued escalation towards a global war now inevitable?
UKRAINE WAR - US PRESSURE IN EUROPE
The war in Ukraine marks the opening of the wider American war against its two main rivals. As it fights to weaken and contain Russia, hoping eventually to depose the leadership and dismember the country, it has already achieved several strategic gains from its point of view.
Having orchestrated an anti-Russian coup in Ukraine in 2014 and continuous bombardment of the Donbas ever since, killing over 13,000 people, the United States successfully provoked Russia into launching a pre-emptive operation to try to prevent nuclear weapons on its doorstep. Two years into the war leading hawks like the Washington Post’s David Ignatius boast of having achieved the “strategic windfall” of the expansion of NATO (1) – which only four years ago Macron described as “brain dead” – gaining effective control over the whole of Northern Europe, according to the Russian foreign ministry.
The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, and Germany’s US-enforced sanctions against Russia, have put paid to the growing economic and diplomatic alignment of Germany towards the east. Important German firms have been transferring production to the USA. German business as a whole, having lost its Russian markets, still hopes it can maintain profitable trade with China, but only insofar as this doesn’t conflict with American-imposed restrictions.
As a result of US pressure, Germany, the largest economy in the eurozone, has entered recession. The hobbling of the leading European economy also damages the rest of the EU. Fifteen years ago, the EU’s economy was slightly larger than the USA’s. Now the American economy is one-third larger than the EU’s and Britain’s combined. That’s partly the result of EU austerity policies following the 2008 crash, but has been greatly accelerated by the decoupling from Russia demanded by the US. The past year and half has been a process of “intra-Western economic cannibalisation”, according to commentator Thomas Fazi. (2)
The war has also achieved what previous US presidents failed to do: force Europe to make a bigger contribution to NATO – remember Trump calling the European powers “deadbeats” for relying on American “protection”. (3) Europe’s governments have all succumbed, using the “Russia threat” to justify to their populations diverting money from wages and welfare to armaments. As the US baulks at more funds for Ukraine, Europe is taking up the slack – most recently a promise of £14.7 billion from the EU.
The rise in European funding for NATO is setting off an arms race between rival EU powers. Chancellor Scholz has promised over €100 billion for re-armament to make Germany “the guarantor of European security”, in other words displacing France as the leading continental military power, under NATO. France, Germany’s main rival, has meanwhile announced its own increase in arms spending, the biggest in 50 years, rising to €413bn by 2030, which dwarfs Germany’s arms budget. (4) This makes quite clear that France will not accept German military superiority. Poland is also using the war to assert itself, doubling its defence spending to create the largest land army in Europe.
Playing off “new” eastern Europe against the “old”, Germany and France, and stirring up Franco-Germany rivalry, reinforces US dominance. Any idea of a European military force acting as an autonomous counterweight to the USA – which has been France’s long-held ambition since De Gaulle – has been killed off by “the subordination of the EU project to the objectives of the [NATO] military alliance”, as El Pais put it. (5)
CHANGE OF STRATEGY
And yet, in spite of these gains, the US is being forced to change strategy, as the much-vaunted Ukrainian counter-offensive, conducted with western weapons and guidance, continues to fail. Crimea remains Russian, leaving the Russian Black Sea navy able to protect Russia’s southern flanks despite provocative attacks against its fleet. Ukraine is devastated. Hundreds of thousands of its soldiers have been killed. 14 million Ukrainians have emigrated since 2014 – for both economic and safety reasons. A further 5 million have chosen Russian citizenship. And western sanctions have failed to crush the Russian economy, which has surpassed its 2022 growth rate and is increasingly self-sufficient in arms and food. Russian oil exports are now going to China (50%) and India (40%). Russia’s massive battle-hardened army, efficient arms production and united population, make it impossible to defeat.
The US is thus preparing to call for a ceasefire along the current frontline to buy NATO time to produce more arms and reinforce Ukrainian air defence systems, fortifications, and anti-tank barriers – just as they used the Minsk Agreements in 2014 to arm Ukraine. Ukraine would join the alliance by the back door via the EU. However, Russia will not accept such a proposal, especially given western admissions that Minsk in 2014 was a deception rather than a serious peace plan. Putin has suggested instead that Russia will secure all the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine (up to the Dnieper river), including Odessa and Ukraine’s coastline on the Black Sea. The landlocked rump of western Ukraine would thus be deprived of a navy as a key element of its demilitarisation. (6) Russia would also insist on Ukrainian neutrality in line with its original war aims.
While such an outcome would represent a strategic setback for the US, it wouldn’t be enough to stop its relentless warmongering. Unable to advance on the ground, the US will escalate the conflict in other ways, by delivering yet more powerful weapons such as ATACMS ballistic missiles, Taurus cruise missiles and F-16 planes. It will foment conflicts in neighbouring countries such as Moldova and Georgia, and intensify Ukrainian terrorist attacks against Russia itself. Russia will remain tied down near its borders.
In this way, the US will feel partially satisfied with what it’s achieved – ensuring Russia’s attention is focused on self-defence and using its rivals in Europe to pay for the ongoing conflict, to the benefit of the US economy. Russia must be neutralised as a strategic power to create the necessary conditions for the US’s bigger conflict to come, against China, as General Fabio Mini, former head of NATO Southern Europe Command, says. (7)
PREPARING FOR WAR WITH CHINA
At some point, the US will have to wage war on China, if it is to remain on top. Elbridge Colby, who was Trump’s deputy assistant secretary of defense, puts it like this: “The US has to…remain the most powerful state in all respects, everywhere. Physical force, especially the ability to kill, is the ultimate form of coercive leverage … China is a threat because it’s on a trajectory where the US might not be a threat to it. The US should retain the ability to kill China …” (8) The lesson of the Greek general Thucydides from the Peloponnesian War is that a big power facing a rising rival should strike first if it can win with some degree of certainty. China is still a developing country, hence the growing calls in the US to strike sooner rather than later, while there’s a chance. One US Airforce general recently predicted war starting within two years. (9)
Yet apparently, the Pentagon’s war-gaming suggests no clear US victory against China given current military dispensations. So, instead of an imminent attack, the US is ratcheting up pressure on China in order to weaken it first, according to war correspondent Elijah Magnier. Economically, it’s forcing China into an arms race in order to squeeze domestic investment – the strategy that helped defeat the USSR – while economic sanctions similarly aim at hindering China’s modernisation and lowering living standards. Meanwhile, it is stirring up secessionist claims by the Uyghurs and Hong Kong and Taiwan, to destabilise China internally. Externally, it’s forging a combat-ready Asian alliance to encircle China, and has moved the bulk of its own navy to the Asia-Pacific.
This external build-up is advancing rapidly. America’s main ally Japan is doubling its military spending to become the world’s third largest arms spender after the US and China. At the moment it’s the ninth. The historian Rana Mitter says Japan is changing from a “semi-disarmed economic giant, an Asian Germany of sorts” into a major armed player, ready to confront China. (10) Japan has also, like Germany, been pressured to switch from cordial relations with Russia – Putin visited Japan in 2016 – to condemning Russia and sending arms to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, South Korea, which already hosts 30,000 US troops, will have American nuclear submarines deployed there periodically, and Australia is buying three nuclear-powered subs as part of the AUKUS alliance with the US and the UK, becoming a de facto nuclear player and submitting to American military control to an unprecedented degree.
Then there’s Taiwan, whose military the US is arming and training to create a strong base from which to attack the mainland. Increasingly brazen US and British navy provocations in the Taiwan Straits are designed to show how easily they could choke off China’s imports and exports, including its vital fuel supplies, most of which pass through the narrow Straits.
The US aims at preventing Chinese reunification, not only to keep hold of Taiwan but also to keep control over its regional allies, particularly South Korea, Japan and the Philippines. If it loses Taiwan, these powers will lose faith in US “protection” and assert their autonomy. (11) The loss of these Asian vassal states would signal the eclipse of US power in the Far East, and with it a more general eclipse. So, it will wage war to prevent this.
OBSTACLES TO WAR
China and Russia – whose longstanding friendship has rapidly developed into a “no-limits partnership” in response to US sanctions and aggression – represent the main bulwark against America’s ability to successfully wage global war, notwithstanding Russia’s ongoing preoccupation with Ukraine. Both stand for a stable world order, under UN auspices, and have recently increased mutual military co-operation. Both are nuclear armed.
In Asia, a further constraint on the US drive to war is the unwillingness of most countries to sacrifice their own national interests to fit US strategy. A wavering state like India, which the US keeps pressurising, has abstained on various UN resolutions condemning Russia, increased its imports of Russian crude oil tenfold in the past 18 months, and continued to buy Russian arms. Similarly, most of the ASEAN countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, are refusing to impose sanctions on Russia or to choose between China and the US.
Even South Korea is not as compliant as the United States would like. President Yoon last year reversed his decision to station more American THAAD anti-missile systems aimed at China, for fear of alienating Korea’s largest trading partner. And though Korea is moving closer to the Quad – the military grouping of the USA, Japan, India and Australia – it’s not joining it. And, American attempts to pull South Korea closer to Japan in an anti-Chinese military alliance have foundered on the Korean people’s vocal refusal to forgive the atrocities of Japanese colonial rule. In Japan, too, where “Pacifism is an idée fixe,” according to a recent BBC News report (12), around half the population remains firmly against change to its “pacifist” constitution. And in Taiwan, the current pro-western, anti-mainland government is facing strong opposition from the Kuomintang party and its allies, who have a more co-operative attitude to Beijing.
Elsewhere in the world, in Africa, resistance to constant war has produced a crisis for French neo-colonial rule in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and elsewhere. In the Middle East, conservative pro-western regimes have hurriedly distanced themselves from the US and Israel as the Gaza massacres continue. Not just in the Middle East but everywhere, the ruling classes of the Global Majority countries, wary of American warmongering and sanctions that damage them at home and strategically, are moving away from the western embrace towards a multilateral foreign policy.
In Europe, anti-Ukraine war expressions are growing, often in circuitous ways: German war scepticism has seen the rise of the far-right AfD, and at least 55% of all Germans now favour peace talks; Slovakia’s new anti-war president, Fico, has stopped arming Ukraine; Hungary refuses to join the anti-Russian chorus; Polish support for Ukraine was weakened after farmers’ protests against cheap Ukrainian grain.
In the USA, opinion polls show 55% of Americans are against further funding to Ukraine, and this is becoming an election issue as Bidenomics fails to halt the catastrophic decline in living standards. And fissures are opening up in the American ruling class too. Major establishment figures are worrying that the Ukraine war and sanctions are backfiring. Robert Gates, former CIA director and Defense Secretary under both Bush and Obama, warns that Russia and China are outpacing the USA in developing close relations with Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. (13) Fiona Hill, adviser to Bush, Obama and Trump, believes the war has become “a proxy for a rebellion by Russia and the ‘Rest’ against the United States.” She says it marks the passing of Pax Americana and that punitive sanctions and past illegal wars have caused resentment and fear. (14) Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans argue that rather than fight Russia, the US should focus solely on China.
This is not a united ruling class – as we saw recently with the mutinous letter by State Department diplomats, who fear damage to US interests from its complicity in Israeli war crimes.
Here, where the British population was browbeaten into siding with their establishment over Ukraine, they are refusing to accept the media and political onslaught when it comes to Israel. The major demonstrations for a free Palestine are thus objectively becoming mobilisations for peace and against the drive to war. The more Palestinians that Israel massacres, the more the growing gap between rulers and ruled is exposed all over the world. The US is becoming increasingly isolated, its Middle East normalisation strategy in tatters. Even Jordan has been forced by its population to distance itself rhetorically from Israel, even though it continues to act as a logistics hub for Israel.
ENSURING PEACE
All these obstacles to US warmongering are, however, insufficient to ensure world peace. The drive to world war has gained huge momentum as the USA tries to maintain its declining hegemonic power. American establishment internal disagreements are not about peace but about the best methods of perpetuating US supremacy. Virulent propaganda has for several years whipped up US and western public opinion against China, just as Hillary Clinton’s Russia-gate lies prepared the ground ideologically for the Ukraine war. Biden has called for a transition to war production in the USA, whose military industrial complex he calls the “arsenal of democracy”. A bi-partisan Congress commission concluded recently that the US must prepare for simultaneous wars against Russia and China.
The mobilisation of the US navy into the Middle East, and the US bombing of Syrian targets, as well as hawkish calls for taking the war to Hezbollah and Iran, shows that the United States will never allow its dominant world position to be endangered. Its war on terror killed four and a half million people, and created 38 million refugees. It will unleash far worse if it has to, and it cannot be trusted to act rationally, even in its own interests. Only mass public pressure, above all from the organised working class, can stop it.
So far our labour and peace movements have been extremely weak over Ukraine and NATO, as we saw at the last TUC congress where a dreadful motion for increased arms spending was passed. We need to keep making the argument that the Ukraine war was, from the start, a deliberate provocation by NATO, that Russia acted in self-defence with the aim of keeping Ukraine neutral, and that it is the belligerent western powers, especially the USA and Britain, that pose the real danger to world peace. The current escalation in the Middle East couldn’t make that clearer. While the response of several unions in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza has been encouraging, along with the union contingents on the Palestine demonstrations and workers picketing Elbit plants, there have as yet been few signs of more organised action against British warmongering.
At a time when Britain is waging undeclared war in Ukraine and banging the drum for striking Yemen and Iran, there is much work to be done.
(1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/18/ukraine-war-west-gloom/
(2) https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1689220284375851008 9/8/23
(3) https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/05/07/europe-is-struggling-to-rebuild-its-military-clout
(4) https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/budget-policy-operations/french-defense-budget-rise-2024.
(6) https://www.newsclick.in/putin-lifts-fog-war-ukraine 30/12/23
(7) https://www.legrandsoir.info/general-fabio-mini-l-ukraine-a-genoux-et-l-europe-confrontee-au-prix-du-gaz.html 24/11/23
(8) https://en.rattibha.com/thread/1515197978482409476
(9) https://nilepost.co.ug/2023/09/18/gen-advises-us-to-avoid-open-armed-conflict-with-china/
(10) https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/japans-plans-for-an-antichina-alliance/
(11) https://csbaonline.org/about/news/why-taiwan-matters/
(12) BBC News, 19/5/23
(13) https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/robert-gates-america-china-russia-dysfunctional-superpower 29/11/23
(14) https://news.err.ee/1608977948/fiona-hill-ukraine-in-the-new-world-disorder 15/5/23
Finland’s accession to NATO marked by raising its flag at NATO HQ pic by Rory Arnold
Fifteen years ago, the EU’s economy was slightly larger than the USA’s. Now the American economy is one-third larger than the EU’s and Britain’s combined.
Members of the RMT union demonstrate against arming Israel pic by Alisdare Hickson
China and Russia – whose longstanding friendship has rapidly developed into a “no-limits partnership” in response to US sanctions and aggression – represent the main bulwark against America’s ability to successfully wage global war, notwithstanding Russia’s ongoing preoccupation with Ukraine.
Robert Fico Prime Minister of Slovakia. Critic of West’s strategy in Ukraine. Pic by EU2016 SK
The drive to war has gained huge momentum as the USA tries to maintain its declining hegemonic power.
