The capitalist rulers in the U.S. triumphantly declared the birth of a “new world order” after they emerged as top dog out of the second imperialist world slaughter in 1945. They declared another giant step forward with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1990-91.
But neither Washington, nor any of its rivals, won the Cold War. The U.S. rulers’ Iraq war in 1991 showed that what lay ahead was not decades of an American Century, but sharpening imperialist conflicts.
In the years that followed, the U.S. rulers have proved incapable of winning wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Big new watershed developments — stiff competition from Beijing, Moscow’s war on Ukraine and the fallout from Hamas’ murderous Oct. 7 pogrom against Jews in Israel — reveal growing world disorder.
Washington has shown it cannot prevent ruinous economic breakdowns in the world, nor sharpening clashes with and between rival powers. Nor have the U.S. rulers been able to crush working-class resistance at home, as today’s renewed labor struggles show.
Washington is rearming for the wars that lie ahead. The U.S. ruling families are strengthening their military forces and alliances with the rulers in Japan and Australia to counter Beijing and to try to defend Washington’s supremacy in the Pacific, a result of its bloody victory in World War II.
For decades the U.S. rulers have deployed tens of thousands of troops, warships and jet fighters across the Middle East. Everything Washington does there is to protect its own imperialist interests. That includes pressing Israel to end its war against Hamas without a victory that would prevent the reactionary group and its backers in Tehran from carrying out more massacres of Jews.
Capitalist powers across the region are advancing their own rival interests against each other, reaffirming what the Socialist Workers Party explained in 1991. “Washington’s war against the Iraqi people signaled the opening guns of broadening class, national and interimperialist conflicts,” wrote SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes in “Washington’s Assault on Iraq: Opening Guns of World War III.”
“What is far from inevitable is that these battles will culminate in a third world war,” Barnes said. “That will depend on the outcome of the class battles in the years ahead, in the course of which workers and farmers will have our chance — the opportunity to win revolutionary victories and take the power to make war out of the hands of the imperialist ruling classes.
“Such victories, however, can be won only if proletarian communist parties can be built as part of a world revolutionary leadership of the toilers,” Barnes said. “Such a party can and must be constructed here in the United States.”
It is along that road that those who set out “to throw off the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in Cuba led a victorious revolution in 1959 and forged a Communist Party with revolutionary leaders of the caliber of Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara,” Barnes said.
The Socialist Workers Party exists to emulate that example. Leading working people in the U.S. to take political power and disarm forever the imperialist rulers will open the door to end the horrors of the imperialist epoch for all time.