Rivalries, trade wars and the growing threat of more shooting wars are a reality across the capitalist world today. This future underscores the stakes for working people in organizing to take political power out of the capitalist rulers’ hands.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Eastern Europe. Following the recent entry of Finland and Sweden into the U.S.-led NATO alliance, the Polish government called on Washington to station nuclear weapons on its soil. Governments across Eastern Europe are fortifying their defenses and seeking stronger alliances with U.S. and European imperialist rulers in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. This fits with the aims of U.S. imperialism, which is expanding the reach of its military might across the region.
Washington has sought to uphold its still dominant but weakened place as top dog in the imperialist world order, since it failed to emerge victorious after invading Iraq in 1991.
The threat of more wars has accelerated in the last two years, after Moscow’s attempt to conquer the Ukrainian people — the largest ground war in Europe since World War II — and Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel, the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Nazi’s Holocaust. These events confirm that working people are living through the opening guns of a third world war, and they’re growing louder.
Washington has yet to respond to Polish President Andrzej Duda’s April 22 call for U.S. nuclear weapons, but both governments are advancing military cooperation. Washington made a $2.5 billion loan for a massive Polish defense modernization program last year. The Polish government now spends 4% of its gross domestic product on its military, the highest of any nation in the NATO alliance. And Warsaw announced May 27 the construction of fortifications aimed at turning its eastern border into an “impenetrable” barrier to Moscow.
Fearing intervention by the Russian rulers, capitalist powers in Eastern Europe are transforming their militaries. The Romanian government has begun building the largest NATO base in Europe at Ramstein. It will host F-16 and F-35 bombers and 10,000 troops. In Finland, which has an 832-mile land border with Russia, the rulers are purchasing U.S. rocket systems and F-35 jets, and Israeli air-defense systems.
Governments of the Baltic states are hosting one of the largest ever NATO naval exercises June 7-20, involving forces from Washington and 18 other countries, 50 ships and 85 aircraft.
Moscow’s deadly course
The rulers of these countries each claim these steps are needed to counter Moscow. In response to the Polish government’s request to house U.S. nuclear weapons, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova April 25 threatened Warsaw would be added to its “list of legitimate targets for destruction.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime is stepping up the expansionist course it has pursued toward its “near abroad” for decades, with disastrous consequences for working people.
Shortly after its forces invaded Ukraine in 2022, Putin compared himself to Russia’s former czarist rulers and lamented Moscow’s loss of the prison house of nations that existed under the czarist empire. A few months earlier, Putin denounced V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, for unconditionally granting the right of self-determination to all nations oppressed by the czars.
More recently, Putin has claimed parts of Estonia belong to Russia. His regime plans to double the number of troops along Russia’s border with Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania. It announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus May 6. The Belarusian government provided Moscow’s forces a pathway for its failed attempt to seize Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, in early 2022.
Putin has cynically used the moves by Washington and other NATO governments to claim his invasion of Ukraine is a defensive response. But in fact an independent Ukraine is no military threat whatsoever to Russia.
US troops, weapons out of Europe!
The U.S. rulers established NATO on the ashes of their victory in the imperialist slaughter of World War II to put down rebellions by working people in Europe and elsewhere and advance Washington’s interests, including against the Soviet Union.
In the 1990s, the U.S. rulers and their NATO allies bombarded Serbia, Bosnia and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, breaking up the country along centuries-old national lines, demolishing the national unification conquered by working people during the 1945 Yugoslav Revolution. In the process Washington reinforced its position as the dominant “European” power.
“Washington and its capitalist allies in London, Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere shed crocodile tears over Ukraine’s national sovereignty and the plight of its people,” explains a Socialist Workers Party National Committee statement issued by Jack Barnes, the party’s national secretary, in March 2022. “Their only real concern is to protect their own profits and strategic political interests in the region.”
Some 100,000 U.S. troops are deployed in Europe alongside a further 40,000 troops from other countries under U.S.-led NATO command. The SWP statement calls for “the withdrawal of all US troops and both conventional and nuclear arms and nuclear missile systems from NATO member countries in Europe.”
In response to Moscow’s war, demands are growing in Germany for the rulers to acquire their own nuclear weapons. Capitalist politicians backing the move cross party lines and include Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, the main opposition party. Chancellor Olaf Scholz opposes the proposal.
Currently U.S. nuclear weapons are stationed in Germany, with the decision to use them lying solely with Washington. Under the 1990 agreement that paved the way for the unification of West and East Germany, Berlin renounced the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
The capitalist powers that make up NATO are themselves rivals, with sharply conflicting interests. One expression of this was the April 28 call by French President Emmanuel Macron for the French rulers’ nuclear weapons to form the bedrock of a non-NATO Europe-wide military setup. Days earlier, Macron declared, Europe should “never be a vassal of the United States.”