Europe, Middle East Conflicts Threaten U.S. Imperialism

U.S. imperialists recently suffered three major setbacks which intensify global rivalry and thus threaten wider war. In Ukraine, significant territorial gains by pro-Russian forces have U.S. rulers scrambling to arm their Kiev puppet regime. In Yemen a Shiite group friendly with Iran has seized power. Yemen borders Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich cornerstone of the U.S. worldwide empire. In addition, ISIS has swept through parts of Syria and has captured one-third of Iraq where it routed the Iraqi army. Lastly, the U.S. and European Union imperialist rivals are squaring off against Russia. Amid these ramped-up war threats, the international working class has no stake in taking any bosses’ side. The workers in Russia, U.S. and the EU pay the price through lower
living standards, displacement, and death.
Ukraine
“A bipartisan group of lawmakers from the Senate Armed Services Committee has called upon the White House to provide lethal weapons to Ukrainian forces to fight off Russian separatist advances into their territory,” (Military.com, 2/5/15). The Capitol Hill gang pushing for stepped-up fighting included Senator John McCain, leader of the Republican’s imperialist wing, and liberal Senator Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a state which produces helicopters, submarines, guns and other lethal weapons for the U.S. war machine.
The motivation of these pro-wider war lawmakers comes directly from U.S. capitalists, not from workers whom the politicians falsely claim they represent. It was the U.S. bosses who used NATO to weaken Russian imperialist influence in Eastern Europe, which emboldened Russia to reclaim the vital Crimea and eastern Ukranian provinces in the first place. Days before McCain & Co. appealed to Obama, the Brookings Institution, Atlantic Council and Chicago Council on Global Affairs think tanks had issued a joint report titled “Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression: What the United States and NATO Must Do.” These policy factories get the bulk of their funding from the heaviest hitters in U.S. finance capital and imperialist industry, such as JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Rockefeller family foundations. The senators’ plea essentially parroted this report, which said in summary:

Russian success would fatally undermine Ukraine’s stability and embolden the Kremlin to further challenge the security order in Europe. It might tempt President Putin to use his doctrine of protecting ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in seeking territorial changes elsewhere in the neighborhood, including in the Baltic States, provoking a direct challenge to NATO. Maintaining Western sanctions are critical but not by themselves sufficient. The West needs to bolster deterrence in Ukraine by raising the risks and costs to Russia of any renewed major offensive. That requires providing direct military assistance — in far larger amounts than provided to date and including lethal defensive arms — so that Ukraine is better able to defend itself. The U.S. government should provide Ukraine $1 billion in military assistance as soon as possible in 2015, followed by additional…[amounts] of $1 billion in FY [Fiscal Year] 2016 and FY 2017.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper, however, said (2/7/15) Europe’s bosses think an arms deal would amount to declaring war:

Carl Bildt, the former Swedish foreign minister, said a war between Russia and the West was now quite conceivable. A senior diplomat in Brussels, echoing the broad EU [European Union] view, said arming the Ukrainians would mean war with Russia, a war that Putin would win.

Supposedly staunch NATO allies Germany and France stand militarily unready (and in Germany’s case, dependent for energy on Russia). So, while Washington weighs sending missiles and tanks, German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president François Hollande went on an emergency trip to Kiev, Ukraine, and Moscow to buy time. Hollande said the “Ukraine crisis now risked becoming total war” (Guardian).
Meanwhile, war has killed over 5,000 in the Ukraine, and 43 percent of Ukraine’s workers are food-deprived (ten million people). It has also seen youth unemployment hit the 53 percent mark. However, Western and Russian rulers need more than arms; they need youth to join the military to use those weapons and they will incite racism on both sides to try to win their allegiances.
In reality, the youth have three choices in Ukraine and among all war-bent capitalist countries during such crises: join the military, join one imperialist faction over another, or join a communist movement.
Yemen
Early this month, Houthi fighters, an insurgent group, took power in Yemen. Business Insider (2/7/15) says:
The biggest loser from the Yemeni government’s fall is …Saudi Arabia. The monarchy feared that a collapsed Yemen would exacerbate the threats posed by both Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula…as well as the Houthis, Shi’ite militants allied with Iran, which is still Riyadh’s top geopolitical rival.
Saudi Arabia, the largest and most profitable source of oil on the planet, lies further encircled by Iranian influence. Tehran-leaning Shiites (including strengthening Badr militias, increasingly successful against ISIS), dominate bordering Iraq, despite the presence of U.S. troops there. President Franklin Roosevelt’s pledge to defend the kingdom in return for U.S. access to its oil has secured the lifeblood of U.S. imperialism since World War II. Under U.S. military protection, ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest seller of refined petroleum, counts Saudi Arabia as its biggest source, and the Saudis count Exxon as their biggest customer.
Today, keeping Roosevelt’s Saudi promise remains indispensable for U.S. rulers, even as it proves more difficult. In late January, Obama — who hadn’t bothered to attend or send a representative of any importance to the massive rally following the Paris massacre —  personally led a gold-ribbon delegation to Saudi Arabia to reassure the new king. It featured former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and other top ruling-class figures linked tightly to Big Oil. They were major architects of both Iraq wars as well as Clinton’s bombing of Kosovo. (Chevron named an oil tanker after Rice when she sat on its board.) The delegation included the commander of U.S. Mideast operations, along with the CIA chief and warmonger McCain.
Obama understands his capitalist masters’ needs in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. That’s why the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) praises his latest National Security Strategy (NSS) document, which “reaffirms the importance of NATO as the hub of a global security network and pledges to deepen its cooperation with the EU in countering Russian aggression in Ukraine” (CFR website, 2/7/15). The CFR also lauds his Saudi-inspired NSS identification of “major energy market disruptions” among “top security risks” requiring drastic U.S. action. U.S. rulers’ coming requirements also explain Obama’s new budget request. It seeks an additional $60 billion for the military, mainly to buy “the sorts of weapons systems needed for a big war against a major power: aircraft carriers, stealth fighter jets, and submarines” (Slate, 2/2/15).
While these billions are slated for war, the “recovery” the Obama administration is touting is fraudulent. The unemployment they claim is declining, when combined with the “hidden unemployment” — long-term jobless who are not counted, the underemployed (part-timers who can’t find full-time jobs and workers on welfare and first-time job seekers, also uncounted — all adds up to over 30 million.
That’s why PLP says we need communism, where everyone has a job, producing for the good of the entire working class, and unemployment is history. Our class needs a mass Party. Join and build PLP!

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Bosses Prepare for War

While these war regions may be far from U.S. shores, U.S. oil bosses’ interests to stay top dog leads them to drag workers and youth into a killing quagmire. The U.S. is preparing workers for war with budget cuts and military recruitment.
Obama and the capitalists he serves need troops on the ground to battle their opponents. This means luring millions of youth into the military to fight in the bosses’ wars for profit, while killing their sisters and brothers worldwide. They hope that some version of the Dream Act will induce immigrant youth to enlist in the armed forces. They also hope that capitalism’s massive racist unemployment will force masses of Black, Latin and Asian youth to join the bosses’ military — the “economic draft.”
Who pays for the multi-billion dollar war budget? All workers do! Our class already suffer from stagnant and declining wages, a 23 percent jobless rate (see Shadowstats.com), reductions in social services and healthcare and mammoth cuts in education budgets, all of which hit Black, Latin, and immigrant workers the hardest. The rulers then use their racist cops to terrorize Black and Latin youth — from Ferguson, Missouri, to New York City and L.A. — to prevent them from rebelling. Capitalism’s sexist exploitation forces women workers to accept one-third less in earnings than men workers, putting even more profits in the bosses’ bank accounts.
All this sets the stage for cutting white workers’ wages — Obama’s deal with General Motors and Chrysler chopped newly-hired auto workers’ wages in half. Thus, racism and sexism affects ALL workers, Black, Latin, Asian and white.
The capitalist class needs all these cuts to pay for their war preparations. So the wars in far-off regions directly land on U.S. workers’ backs.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party is organizing the working class in the U.S. and  worldwide not only to fight back against these war-driven attacks, but to overthrow the capitalist system altogether. A communist revolution to eliminate bosses, profits, and war will create a society run by and for the working class.