The opening guns of World War III are getting louder, and the reality of the imperialist epoch is becoming clearer to millions. While the ruling capitalist families wield state power, their drive for profit, dog-eat-dog competition and sharpening clashes inexorably push them down the road toward the horrors of fascist pogroms, new world conflict, and the threat of nuclear destruction.
Only the working class — in the U.S. and around the world — has the capacity to halt this trajectory and end capitalism’s exploitation, crises and wars.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion in Ukraine is the biggest war in Europe since World War II, conducted with far-reaching brutality against civilian targets and infrastructure. The Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom, orchestrated by the counterrevolutionary rulers of Iran, slaughtered over 1,200 Jews in Israel. These have accelerated this march to war. Capitalist powers the world over, from Europe to Latin America, Washington to Beijing, are driving to protect their rival interests with military buildups, shifting alignments and growing threats.
A declaration by Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes, issued a week after Putin’s invasion began, explained why defending Ukraine’s sovereignty is in the interests of working people worldwide. It called for the defeat of Moscow’s forces and for U.S. troops and nuclear arms out of Europe.
Opposition to Washington’s foreign policy is crucial for the working-class movement today, as the U.S. rulers look to use their military might to preserve their weakening but still dominant place at the top of the fragmenting imperialist world order. Its NATO alliance is used to assert its interventions in Europe for its own strategic and exploitative purposes.
In the Middle East, Washington plays Israel, the Arab states and the Iranian regime against each other in an effort to protect its own imperialist interests.
The term “a new iron curtain” has been used for the hardening dividing line emerging across Europe as eastern European governments, fearing Moscow’s aggressive expansionism, are seeking closer alignment with Washington and its NATO allies.
Washington’s war against Iraq in 1991 announced what the SWP called “the opening guns of World War III.” What looms now isn’t a new Cold War but the growing inevitability of new, and more threatening, “hot” wars around the world.
From Romania to Bulgaria, the capitalist rulers are taking steps to line up with Washington. Those of Sweden and Finland dropped their professed neutrality to join NATO. The Polish rulers are negotiating to host U.S. nuclear weapons. Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey all have U.S. tactical nuclear weapons based on their soil.
At the same time, as Barnes said in his 2022 statement, “Putin’s efforts to excuse his bloodthirsty invasion of Ukraine on grounds of moves by Washington and other NATO governments are as cynical as they are false. A sovereign and independent Ukraine poses no military threat to Russia of any kind.”
The threat to humanity of escalating conflicts leading to another world war where heavily armed nuclear powers face off against each other poses the need to build a leadership that can mobilize working people in their millions to take political power from the capitalist warmakers into our own hands.
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