“[T]he war of 1914-18 was imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital….”
Vladimir Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” 1917.
Whether or not Russia invades Ukraine in the coming days or weeks, the growing weakness of U.S. imperialism—and of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the U.S. military arm in Europe—is more and more apparent. French President Emmanuel Macron is pushing for “strategic autonomy” for the European Union (news.usni.org, 2/8). Russian President Vladimir Putin is demanding a NATO rollback from Eastern Europe. Ukrainian officials are sending mixed signals about their long-term ambition to join NATO—a move that Putin has warned would lead to nuclear conflict. Weakened by internal ruling-class divisions and knowing they’re not politically prepared for a global military conflict, the U.S. finance capital bosses—represented by President Joe Biden—have openly ruled out sending troops to Ukraine. Eight years after invading and grabbing back the Crimean Peninsula, the Russian imperialists are determined to restore more of the old Soviet sphere of influence.
As CHALLENGE goes to press, both Biden and Putin are suggesting that a diplomatic “solution” is still possible. But make no mistake. Even if Russia decides to pull back for now, global instability and an international crisis of capitalism is pushing the world closer to fascism and World War III. For the international working class, this period contains both great danger and huge opportunity. Only a communist revolution can turn imperialist war into class war against the capitalist parasites. Only communism can end the bosses’ mass slaughters of our working-class sisters and brothers for all time. Join Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and help build a worldwide communist movement!
Rise and fall of NATO: sunset for U.S. bosses?
In 1949, four years after the end of World War II, NATO was founded by the United States, Canada, and 10 countries in Western Europe as a military alliance to block further expansion of the Soviet Union. Electoral victories by communist parties in Italy and Czechoslovakia, along with Soviet control of East Germany, intensified the U.S. rulers’ fears that they could lose the Cold War. They knew they couldn’t afford to give up their place as the dominant imperialist superpower; no empire in history has ever peacefully passed the torch. NATO was liberal democracy’s iron fist. It was formed to guarantee that the U.S. bosses—and junior partners like Britain and France—could continue to amass super-profits by exploiting workers and robbing natural resources around the world.
In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union imploded, the U.S.-dominated NATO expanded to absorb three former Soviet republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), and several other countries formerly dominated by the Soviets under the now-defunct Warsaw Pact, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. As NATO bases and missiles moved closer to Russia’s borders, the U.S.-led alliance has murdered millions of workers in Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Afghanistan, and the Balkans in southeastern Europe.
But even as NATO expanded, it got weaker. Without the Soviet Union as a unifying threat, cutthroat gangs of capitalists went their own ways. Nationalism swamped In 2015, a Pew Research Center poll found that a majority of people in every NATO country in Europe were opposed to using military force to help an invaded NATO member. And as the rotten profit system continued to decay, liberal democracy was exposed as a sham—as the dictatorship of one or another set of bosses—in Bosnia, Hungary, Turkey, and (more recently) the U.S. (Foreign Affairs, July/August 2018). If NATO was designed to protect the so-called “freedoms” of democracy, what was its purpose now?
Today, the U.S. is too preoccupied with arch-rival China—and the strong possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan—to aggressively contain Russia if it moves on Ukraine. It’s no accident that U.S. Secretary Anthony Blinken just took a weeklong trip to meet with leaders of Australia, India, Japan, and other countries in the “Indo-Pacific region,” an open campaign to counter China’s economic, political, and military rise. More than “any other part of the world,” Blinken said, “what happens in this region is going to shape the lives of Americans” (Asean Post, 2/14).
The U.S. bosses know they’re not ready to fight a big war. And even if they felt they had no choice, Ukraine wouldn’t be the hill they'd choose to die on. A recent lead article in Foreign Affairs, finance capital’s most authoritative magazine, was headlined, “Time for NATO to Close Its Door.” It basically proposed to give in to Putin:
With the alliance already overextended in one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods, incorporating Ukraine would be strategic madness….The United States needs a new strategy for dealing with Russia in eastern Europe, one that does not rely primarily on NATO (Foreign Affairs, 1/17).
The weakening of NATO—the collapse of the old liberal world order—presents a danger for the world’s working class. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Vladimir Lenin shows how the world’s bosses need to invade other nations to contend for top-dog status and survive as capitalist powers. Finance capital, the main-wing liberals who still lead the U.S. ruling class, will need to discipline both the capitalists and the workers to get ready for that war. They will be forced to turn to fascism, even if it has a liberal face and comes to power through the bosses’ election apparatus.
The working class always suffers in the rulers’ quest for world domination. Their wars are waged with our blood. But as Lenin noted, “[O]ut of the universal ruin caused by the war a world-wide revolutionary crisis is arising which, however prolonged and arduous its stages may be, cannot end otherwise than in a proletarian revolution and in its victory.”
In Russia, in the midst of fighting World War I, workers organized for communism and took state power! In China, in the midst of the fight against fascism and the horrors of World War II, workers organized for communism and took state power! Although the leadership of the old communist movement made serious errors that eventually reversed these revolutions, we can learn from their mistakes—and be inspired by their courage. World War III is a scary prospect for the working class, but many workers around the world are already in a life-and-death struggle against imperialism and capitalist state terror. History shows us we have only one way out of this misery: a mass, violent revolution for communism. Join Progressive Labor Party and organize for a worldwide communist revolution!