Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 1st December 2024. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here.
US imperialism’s internal contradictions and desperation to hang onto its world hegemony has led to an immediate threat of nuclear war, as close as if not closer than anything that happened in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The NATO expansion drive through the proxy war in Ukraine now means Russia is being bombed by the United States and Britain with US and British-controlled medium range Cruise Missiles (Storm Shadow and ATACMS), and the French SCALP missile is also in play. Storm Shadow/ATACMS/Scalp are all similar ‘long range’ missiles. These are not really long range, they cannot even reach Moscow from Ukraine, but they are a political provocation.
Not so much a military danger, but the fact that Ukraine cannot possibly do this independently of the imperialists, but imperialist military forces must program them and fire them, otherwise they will not be accurate. It means that the fig leaf that some on the left have hidden behind, the idea that this is primarily a national conflict between Russia and Ukraine, has been torn away. This is an attack on Russia by the US, Britain and France, and the claim that Ukraine is doing it does not stand up. In itself, it is not much of a military threat if the payloads of these missiles are conventional; they won’t change the course of the war. But there is always the possibility of nuclear weapons being sneaked in, or a misunderstanding about that, triggering off a major exchange.
The Russian response is the new Oreshnik (Hazel Tree) missile. It can travel at Mach 10 – around 3 km per second. It is a multiple re-entry mid-range ballistic missile. It Can be conventional or nuclear. Nothing can touch it both for speed and unpredictability. It can have up to 26 different warheads. It can hit anywhere in Europe, as far away as London, which is probably the limit of its range. Maybe if it were fired from Eastern Siberia, it could possibly (just about) hit the US. But it’s really a European, mid-range missile. It’s a trump card – no pun intended – and underlines that Russia’s missile and nuclear capability is superior to the West. Will it stop the Biden administration and its cohorts, and their military provocations against Russia?
They have class-related reasons for attacking Russia – and a particular tactical take on that, so it’s less than likely. They demand obedience by those outside the imperialist club to the ‘rules-based order’, which is the Western, imperialist-dominated order. Now there is musing about ‘pre-emptive strikes’ in a conflict between Russia and a NATO state, in leading NATO circles, from one General Bauer – a Dutch military figure – the head of NATO military committee. That’s their response to Putin – obviously authorized by the US though said in Europe.
And even worse, there is now talk in Washington about giving nuclear weapons to Kiev after all. The immediate result of that will be a Russian nuclear elimination of the regime.
Marjorie Taylor-Green, the Trumpian House of Representatives member, called it an act of treason. But which nukes? Russia has all the old nukes from Ukraine. It’s hard to believe that the US would just give Ukraine nukes. US nukes in Britain are under US control, not British control. So, if they did, it would be another, even more brazen act similar to the ATACMS etc. Scott Ritter says this is a lie from the New York Times. And setting that up would take months, and likely have to get through Congress, where the GOP controls both houses. So possibly a step too far for a lame duck administration.
Any country, or group of countries, that defies them, is a target. At this point, they cannot accept defeat. This is the Cuban missile crisis plus plus, and it will last at least until Biden leaves office.
To those who lived and were active politically in the first years of Reagan, before Gorbachev came along, this is not unfamiliar. Though it may be worse. Remember Reagan’s joke: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I have just signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes”? Remember the Reaganite ideologue Richard Pipes – the father of Daniel Pipes – today’s counter-jihad nut -: “The Soviet Union faces the choice of changing its Communist System in the direction of the West, or going to war”. Remember when Soviet vessels were rammed by US military ships on the high seas? These are very similar times. They are driven by a ruling-class ideology, and quite hysterical.
It’s not anti-Communism in the pure, old form. But it’s rooted in that anti-Communism, morphed into an ethnic hatred of Russians. It’s similar to Hitler’s hatred of Jews which was driven by the obsessive belief that Bolshevism was a Jewish creed, and that Jews generally were organically subversive. Russians are seen as organically communist inclined, subversive and disobedient to the world order. That hatred is what drives Western Russophobia ideologically. They cannot easily back down, because far from inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia, NATO is staring a strategic defeat in the face. Why?
The de-industrialisation of the West is what at bottom has led to the atrophy of US power, economic and military. Whereas Russia has to a real extent re-industrialised. or arguably refused the ‘medicine’ of deindustrialisation that imperialism sought to force on it through Yelstin. Putin reversed much of Yeltsin’s shock treatment from the 1990s and thankfully, he began doing so when there was still the capacity to reverse it. This may perversely be why Trump appears to admire Putin – he was able to do what Trump would like to do, but the class realities in the US prevent: reindustrialisation. He made no progress in this in his first term, and no doubt will be equally frustrated now. But this is also underlines what Biden – or rather most likely Blinken and Sullivan – are doing with this. Trying to pre-empt Trump on Russia-Ukraine. They are trying to stitch things up to the point that Trump cannot negotiate his way out of Ukraine.
Trump is a fascist domestically, as we point out in our statement. But there is at least rhetorical isolationism in his international policy. Trump’s election is extremely ominous, and the responsibility for it lies with the Democratic Party under Biden (and Harris). Trump represents extreme right-wing reaction. Though Ukraine played a huge role in propelling Trump to the White House because of the surge of inflation that coursed through the Western economies, including the US, as a result of sanctions, and particularly oil sanctions, against Russia. He intends mass deportations of millions of so-called ‘illegal migrants’, possibly up to 13 million, using the military.
He plans nationalist economic policies such as imposing 25 % tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and 10% on China. Now he is threatening all the BRICS nations: half of humanity with a 100% tariff, to try to stop a BRICS trading currency being created.
He intends a further stamping out of abortion rights, possibly a federal ban, not on abortion itself, but the posting of abortion-related medication to make abortion qualitatively more difficult to obtain even in states where it is legal. He proposes to weaponize the US military for domestic attacks on his political opponents, including the Democratic Party. He is likely to use a “terrorism” law – based on abuse of the term – to be used to drive non-profit publishers who dissent on Zionism, or other issues, out of business. The law to permit this is already in train. And of course, the left and any movements against police violence and killings will come under heavy repression of some sort. The same is likely true of any determined labour struggles. Though the benefit of this is that it will tear to pieces the false ‘working-class’ appeal of Trump. The first amendment of the US constitution is likely to be gutted in some such cases where people try to evoke it against Trump, as are labour gains. Trump’s crony Musk, who boasted of his involvement in a coup in Bolivia, is also seeking to get Trump’s judges to declare the National Labour Relations Board to be ‘unconstitutional’. That is, the NLRB that was set up by Roosevelt under the pressure of the historic labour upsurges in the United States in the 1930s.
All these things are on the immediate agenda because Trump stacked the Supreme Court with his far-right appointees in his first term. For the past four years of the Biden administration, he retained his far-right supermajority on the supreme court. That’s how Roe-vs-Wade – the de facto federal right to abortion – was overturned even though Trump was not in office. Biden did nothing about it. But because of this supermajority, when push came to shove, the Biden administration failed in its bid to hold Trump minimally accountable for the attempted putsch of Jan 6th, 2021. The Trumpian Supreme Court conveniently ruled that Trump, as president, was immune from prosecution for that as these were ‘official acts.’ And the Democrats did nothing to deal with that, like expanding the court, even in the first half of Biden’s term when they could have tried.
This is fundamentally because doing so would require mobilizing a mass movement of the working class to crush Trump’s far right movement. The US ruling class, Democrat and Republican, fears that more than they do fascism and a likely Trump dictatorship or semi-dictatorship. So that is the political reality in the US. It is obscured by the fact that the still (in domestic terms) bourgeois-democratic Democratic Party – is cowardly and subservient before the Republican Party – whose majority is now fascist, or proto-fascist, in their political programme.
This is somewhat obscured by the backing of the Democratic Party Biden administration for fascists in Ukraine, its funding of Azov, of Banderists and their front man, Zelensky, who applauded a Ukrainian SS-veteran in the Canadian parliament last autumn. But this kind of separation is not new. If is only a modern manifestation of something that Karl Marx observed in the Middle of the 19th Century, about British imperialism and its supposedly ‘civilised’ norms:
“The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from its home, where it assumes respectable form, to the colonies, where it goes naked” (Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” New York Daily Tribune, January 22, 1853).
Those who entertain illusions in Trump because of his oppositional posture over Ukraine should remember that it was under his presidency, as Scott Ritter noted, that Zelensky was groomed for the role he was to play, as Jewish camouflage for the Maidan regime whose Nazi proclivities had become too obvious and well-publicised since Maidan in 2014. And Trump tore up the INF treaty between Reagan and Gorbachev, which was an obstacle to the use of the missiles that the West are now firing at Russia from Ukraine (as well as Russia’s response). Trump’s differences on international policy with the likes of Biden, where there is any substance to them, are tactical, not ones of principle or strategy.
Their aim is to preserve US Hegemony just as much as Biden’s. As in “Make America Great Again.” A key element of these differences is visceral pro-Zionism – Israel is more important than Ukraine for Trump and others. Part of it is a dispute over whether Russia or China are the most important adversary for US imperialism. And some of Trump’s picks for his posts are ultra-warmongers against Russia. Like Sebastian Gorka and Marco Rubio. Others, like Mike Waltz, National Security Adviser profess to be concerned about ‘escalation’ and to want a deal with Putin. But Waltz says he is “working closely” with Jake Sullivan on the transition. Including this escalation? We will see.
But what Sullivan – and the bourgeois ‘deep state’ – military etc., are up to – seems designed to frustrate this element of Trump’s policy. Scott Ritter describes it as a kind of coup. It is certainly unprecedented for a lame-duck president to behave like this, aiming to screw up his successor. Only Trump did it before – Jan 6 for a start. But that went outside the constitution and was also mainly domestic in its motivation – anti-migrant. This does not break with the US constitution as such. It remains to be seen what effect this will have. They could at the outside start a nuclear war, but short of that, I don’t see what they can do to Trump. Short of a nuclear exchange, any policies can be modified or scrapped.
Moving on to the International Criminal Court’s indictments against Netanyahu, Gallant, and the Hamas leader Mohammad Deif. Deif is likely dead. But that is minor, an index of the cowardice of the ICC. More to the point is the political impact. Netanyahu and Gallant are indicted for murder, persecution and using starvation as a weapon to commit “crimes against humanity”. The US condemned the ICC, and some Trumpian threatened to invoke the ‘Hague Invasion Act’ if Netanyahu and Gallant were arrested.
Whereas most European counties, Canada, and much of the world has signed it, or if not, it is not for pro-US reasons. Will cause problems for all of these. This has not quite matured yet – the separate International Court of Justice judgement on genocide from January is not complete. But they will find it very difficult in the light of the ICC warrant, to acquit Israel of genocide. Germany say they won’t implement the warrant, supposedly because of their history of persecuting Jews, but they signed up to the ICC, so this is a legal minefield. Macron has said something similar. In Britain Starmer and Cooper have tried evasion, but the legal position is clear. The government is in the High Court right now. Activists are looking for a judgement to force an arms embargo. They may get it. That’s not the half of it -there could be big problems to come for politicians who backed Israel.
These differences within US imperialism involve issues that are intertwined, and rapidly becoming more so. For instance, it is known that the reason Israel has just signed up for the ceasefire in Lebanon, and vice versa, is because both sides have taken major casualties in the last 14 month of war. Hezbollah has neither endorsed nor rejected the ceasefire. But Israel has been fought to a standstill in Southern Lebanon, despite the loss of Nasrallah, the pager attacks, and the terrible Gaza-like destruction Israel has inflicted.
So now the Israelis and Americans have re-activated their terrorist networks of pro-US, pro-Zionist Al Qaeda/ISIS jihadists in Syria. The purpose is obvious – to try to sabotage Hezbollah’s supply lines though Syria, which make it impossible for Israel to besiege Hezbollah the way they are able to do to Hamas in Gaza. They try to restart the jihadists’ war against Assad. Though it appears the Syrian army is already making short work of them. But to attack Assad brings Russia and Iranian forces into play. Both played a major role in preventing a repeat of the imperialist criminal destruction of Libya, being repeated in Syria, over a decade ago. And Iran is also an ally of Russia now and has rendered it some technological help in Ukraine. So, the logic of Zionist militarism in this situation can point to a clash with Russia. Even though it may be that Trump is seeking to avoid that. All these contradictions point to the strategic defeat of US Hegemony.
Communists need to be providing revolutionary leadership in this situation, advocating anti-imperialist united fronts to deal with these barbarities. The problem of Zionism and its genocidal aggression against the Arab peoples needs to be resolved by an anti-imperialist united front. We must demand that Russia and China throw their full economic and military resources into fighting the Zionist genocide and defeating Israel in this life-and-death struggle for the Arab peoples.
We advocate the independent mass mobilisation of workers wherever it is feasible. Previously we have advocated a ‘coalition of the willing’ to intervene militarily to stop the Zionist slaughter wherever it is happening – the recent Iranian retaliatory actions against Israel also underline that this is feasible. But in the end, even an anti-imperialist united front is not completely adequate. Every such united front needs a consciously revolutionary, working-class component to make it effective and viable.
The only permanent road to peace, the only solution to all the deadly problems that beset humanity in this situation, from the threat of nuclear annihilation to disaster through the capitalist-induced destruction of the biosphere, is through the creation of a mass Communist movement internationally. We need a new world party of socialist revolution to unite all subjective communists, all consistent anti-imperialists, under one banner based on free discussion of differences, but unity in action, in pursuit of international socialism. For workers revolution is the only road to real peace!
