Working people around the world face more wars than at any time in recent decades, while the world’s capitalist rulers engage in an escalating arms race and seek new alliances. Washington’s efforts to reinforce its waning global domination are at the center of most of these conflicts.
Capitalist rulers across the globe are driving humanity toward a third world war. They’re impelled by deepening competition and rivalries that are inevitable under imperialism. They fight over the redivision of the world and plunder of the wealth they extract from the labor of working people and the earth’s resources.
In the Caribbean, Washington has assembled its largest military presence since the 1989 invasion of Panama. It’s carrying out deadly attacks and provocations aimed at toppling the government in Venezuela, reasserting its domination of Latin America and pushing back at the influence of its main global rival, Beijing.
A central target of the U.S. rulers is Cuba’s socialist revolution. They fear its example for working people worldwide. Their decadeslong efforts to crush it have been met by resistance from Cuban workers and farmers, who are determined to defend their conquests. Today the Donald Trump administration, the Cuban government says, is intensifying its “policy of maximum pressure and economic suffocation” against the Cuban people.
In the western Pacific, two nuclear-capable U.S. B-52 strategic bombers flew with Japanese jet fighters over the Sea of Japan Dec. 10 in a joint show of force. The day before Moscow and Beijing had demonstratively flown long-range bombers side by side between Japan’s Okinawa islands and South Korea, where there are large U.S. military bases. The Moscow-Beijing probe coincided with maneuvers by a Chinese aircraft carrier nearby.
Tensions have flared between the rulers of China and Japan over Taiwan. Beijing insists it will take over, if necessary by force, the self-governing island. Tokyo and Washington declared Dec. 11 their joint opposition to “any unilateral attempt to change the status quo by force.” Taiwan is a key flashpoint as Washington tries to defend its weakening domination in the Pacific, won as a result of its victory in World War II.
The largest armed conflict in Europe since that imperialist slaughter — Moscow’s war to conquer Ukraine — has revolutionized drone warfare. Today every capitalist power is racing to equip its own forces with this new destructive technology.
Capitalism threatens a world war
“Capitalism today is marching not only toward more wars but at the same time stumbling toward a depression and world social crisis,” Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, wrote in “Opening Guns of World War III: Washington’s Assault on Iraq,” available in New International no. 7.
The 1991 Iraq war announced “the conflicts that lie ahead as the imperialist rulers follow the historic logic of their declining world system of exploitation and oppression,” Barnes wrote.
For the past decade, world military expenditure has been soaring. Last year it reached a new peak, jumping by 9.4%, to $2.7 trillion. In 2024 Washington’s military spending alone was almost $1 trillion, while Beijing’s was an estimated $314 billion. The five biggest military powers, which include the governments of Russia, Germany and India, accounted for 60% of this armament spending spree.
Moscow’s war spending will swallow nearly one-third of its state budget next year. The imperialist powers in Europe, led by the rulers of Germany and France, boosted their total military spending by 17%, to $693 billion last year.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called European leaders “swine” Dec. 17 after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz compared the Kremlin regime to Hitler’s Nazis of the late 1930s.
U.S. ‘national security’ course
The National Security Strategy document issued by the Trump administration Dec. 4 outlined Washington’s aim to build “the world’s most powerful, lethal, and technologically advanced military.” Rebuilding basic industrial capacity in the U.S. is essential for this.
As part of a July trade deal between the South Korean government and the White House, shipbuilding giant Hanwha Group is to expand production at its newly acquired shipyard in Philadelphia from less than two ships a year to 20. This will boost the building of warships and submarines in the U.S. to try to close the gap on China’s global shipbuilding domination.
The U.S. rearmament drive is bipartisan. The Trump-hating New York Times editors warned Dec. 11 that the U.S. rulers were “at risk of falling behind China.” They credited Trump for taking steps toward building “a bigger, stronger and more efficient defense industry.”
The U.S. rulers fear the challenge posed by Beijing’s expansion of trade and investment across Latin America in recent decades in what they consider their “backyard.” The White House national security document threatens that Washington will keep the Western Hemisphere “free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets.”
The statement lists the U.S. rulers’ “core, vital national interests,” including keeping open crucial sea lanes across the Pacific and Indian oceans.
Washington wants to “prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass,” the statement says. The imperialist system breeds more deadly conflicts. Growing capitalist exploitation causes deepening struggles by working people. The solution for humanity lies in the working class taking power into its own hands from the capitalist war makers.