The deepening and extension of wars reflect the growing impasse of capitalism

Faced with the total impasse in which capitalism finds itself and the failure of all economic "remedies", the bourgeoisie has no choice but to rush forward by means that can only be military. The aggravation of war and warlike tensions in Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa, and the growing threats in Asia (Philippines, Taiwan, etc.) are the main vectors of a world situation in which war, economic crisis and ecological disaster are worsening and reinforcing each other. The world proletariat is paying the consequences on the front lines in Russia and Ukraine, in Israel and Gaza, in Yemen and the Sahel, etc. In the face of increasing austerity measures to finance the war, misery, insecurity and fear for the future are deepening everywhere. Although the proletariat is reacting more and more through struggle to unbearable economic attacks, there is still a long way to go before the development and politicisation of its struggles make it possible to challenge capitalist domination.

While the polarisation of tensions between the United States and China constitutes the central axis of imperialist tensions in the world, and the various military clashes directly or indirectly linked to this major confrontation, the imperialist dynamic is not one of stable alliances leading to the formation of imperialist blocs with a view to a Third World War. This does not mean, however, that humanity can sleep soundly: the current trend towards uncontrolled imperialist chaos is also a threat to its survival.

Since the collapse of the blocs, the determination of the United States to maintain its position as the world's leading power, and to impose its imperialist order, has been a major contribution to the current imperialist disorder. Following the direction set by the Obama administration, the US bourgeoisie has implemented a policy of a "pivot" towards Asia, weaving a network of economic and military alliances (AUKUS, Quad) to isolate China, on the model of its encirclement of the USSR[1] which contributed to the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Undermining the alliance between Russia and China is an important objective of this policy, which is why the US helped provoke the war in Ukraine in order to "bleed" Russia. [2] Another strand of US imperialism's strategy was the Pax Americana in the Middle East, with the 2020 Abraham Accords which aimed to neutralise Iran and its proxy militias in the region and block the presence of China and its "Silk Roads". The chaos that gripped the region following the bloody attack by Hamas, and Israel's genocidal response, which together risk setting the region ablaze, ran counter to the interests of the United States, which had to mobilise considerable military resources to prevent any destabilisation threatening the order 'guaranteed' by the Abraham Accords.

To add to the confusion, the populist and Democratic factions of the American bourgeoisie defend different imperialist orientations, which would make the outlook even more unpredictable in the event of a Trump victory in the next presidential elections: "Trump vacillates between a desire to project US power abroad and isolationism; recently he has promised to withdraw from NATO, end imports of Chinese goods, deploy the US military on US streets to fight crime and deport immigrants, and ‘oust’ ‘warmongers’ and ’globalists’ from the US government. Other conservative leaders, such as Florida Governor Ron de Santis and businessman Vvek Ramaswamy, express outright hostility to the US honouring its international commitments. Most Republican Party presidential candidates have offered unconditional support to Israel in the wake of the Hamas attack [...] On Ukraine, party politicians are divided: just over half of House Republicans voted in September 2023 to end US aid to Kiev's defence against Russian invasion.”[3]

Stalemate in the Ukraine war

After two and a half years, the war appears to have reached a stalemate. The Ukrainian offensive has been a failure and Russia is struggling to advance beyond its positions. Both sides are faced with the need to mobilise more people and resources on the front lines, while the ruins of towns and cities and the losses and deprivation of the population continue to mount.

The cause of this impasse is not that Russia's resistance to the "bloodletting" and its ability to remain a world power have been underestimated. Rather, they have been overestimated. At the root of the current impasse is the spiral of chaos unleashed by the war in Ukraine.

Firstly in Russia itself, where economic growth is in reality the result of the war economy, which eats up all resources and heralds "bread today and hunger tomorrow": “More than a third of Russia's growth is due to the war, with defence-related industries posting double-digit growth rates [...]. The military sector benefits from a disproportionate amount of public spending and also siphons off the civilian workforce, resulting in an abnormally low unemployment rate of 2.9% [...] The interaction between military spending, labour shortages and rising wages has created an illusion of prosperity that is unlikely to last [...] Putin is faced with an impossible trilemma. His challenges are threefold: he must finance his war against Ukraine, maintain his population's standard of living and preserve macroeconomic stability. To achieve the first two objectives, he will have to spend more, which will fuel inflation and prevent the third objective from being achieved.”[4] This scenario of inflation, deteriorating state services (health, education, etc.) and family debt will no doubt change the way Russia's main working class concentrations have experienced the war so far.[5]

What's more, the productivity of the Russian economy and its technological level are so low[6] that the country has to buy arms from North Korea.[7] Added to this is a demographic problem and a shortage of skilled labour, exacerbated by the flight of young technology-sector workers.

But economic problems are not the only ones facing Putin. The Russian Federation has 24 republics (including the occupied territories of Ukraine) from which Putin's government has withdrawn  the prerogatives of autonomy (with the exception of Chechnya), though not without resistance and repercussions (in Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan and Central Asia, as witnessed by the recent Khorasan attack in Moscow). The uneven distribution of the war effort, with selective enlistment in peripheral regions and the withdrawal of resources to concentrate them in Moscow, all adds to tensions and, in the event of the collapse of the Russian army, would create a situation of possible break-up of the Federation and the emergence of multiple warlords armed with nuclear warheads, a nightmarish vision that the other powers, including the United States, want absolutely to avoid... while in fact helping to provoke it. Another element which is straining the cohesion of the bourgeoisie in Russia is the struggle between its different factions. Despite Putin's iron dictatorship, it is clear that Wagner's rebellion and the "accidental" deaths of Prigozhin and Navalny, as well as the successive changes in the military high command, illustrate the reality of harsh conflicts within the state.

In geostrategic terms, Russia has already lost its bid to prevent NATO's eastward expansion, which has seen the integration of Poland and the three Baltic states. Following the war in Ukraine, Finland and Sweden applied for membership. Moreover, Russia's international isolation is making it more dependent on China.

There is no guarantee that, in this chaos, Putin (or anyone else) will not, in desperation, resort to the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Impasse in the United States

The United States has consciously pushed Russia into a new offensive in Ukraine, but the prolongation of the war and the stalemate in the conflict are now working against its own interests. First of all, the war is draining economic, military and diplomatic resources that could be used to strengthen the US presence in Asia. It also reinforces the deep divisions within the American bourgeoisie: the Republicans were blocking a $60 billion support package for Ukraine and, for his part, Trump declared that if he were to win the election, he would not continue to support Ukraine. Pursuing this provocative line, he went so far as to say that he would let Russia "do whatever it wants" regarding its intimidation of Europe, even threatening to withdraw the United States from NATO should the European countries fail to increase [8]their military spending. The war is also a source of tension with the European allies, on whom the United States has imposed a policy of sanctions against Russia and increased spending on arms.

However, abandoning support for Ukraine is not a reasonable option for the US bourgeoisie, principally because it would weaken its credibility as an imperialist sponsor and deterrent8- as Taiwan's foreign minister said: "Support for Ukraine is essential to dissuade Xi from invading the island".

Like Russia, not only China but also India and the EU are watching what the United States is going to do and what a new Trump administration might entail. Ukraine is particularly worried. Faced with the risk of a withdrawal of military and financial support for Ukraine, the Biden administration's diplomacy has been intensely active in recent months,[9] starting with the draft security pact with Ukraine that is due to be approved at the next NATO summit in Washington "which would not bind NATO members to mutual defence, but would probably reaffirm long-term support for Ukraine".[10] This follows the decision at NATO's 75th anniversary summit in April to accelerate increases in military spending and to admit Finland and Sweden.[11] In Paris on April 2, US Secretary of State Blinken also urged the EU to "increase arms and munitions production to produce more, faster, and to support Ukraine against Russia [...] the challenges Ukraine faces will not go away tomorrow". The House of Representatives chaired by Mike Johnson (a Trumpist Republican) finally agreed to vote to release aid funds to Ukraine, bowing to pressure from the Biden administration.

The recent summit "for peace in Ukraine" in Bürgenstock, Switzerland (15-16 June) deserves a special mention. Zelensky brought together one hundred delegations, but since the spring, the French, German, British and American delegations compiled a Zero draft which reduced the 10 points initially proposed by Ukraine to four and excluded in particular those referring to the withdrawal of Russian troops and the territorial integrity of Ukraine, limiting themselves to pointing out the nuclear risk and the need not to block food trade. In July, Le Monde Diplomatique published an article based on a report by Foreign Affairs, according to which, since the beginning of the war in March 2022, Western countries had blocked a peace agreement by pushing Ukraine to continue the war until Russia was defeated. According to the article, Putin is quoted as saying that Boris Johnson (then British Prime Minister) called on Ukrainians "to fight until victory is won and Russia suffers a strategic defeat.”[12]

Stalemate in Europe

Washington has imposed its discipline on the European powers by applying sanctions against Russia, financing the war in Ukraine and increasing NATO's military spending, but the EU countries are trying to resist: their delivery of arms and support to Ukraine has been slow and limited, which does not contradict the fact that each country is increasing significantly its own arsenal and military reach. The EU's leading power, Germany, is an explosive concentration of all the contradictions of the unprecedented situation opened by the war in Ukraine. Threatened by the chaos in the East, the end of multilateralism is affecting its export-dependent economic power, forcing it to increase its military spending with a view to rearmament and finally, with the sanctions against Russia having dealt a major blow to its supplies of Russian gas, it is being forced to look for alternative sources of energy. In the current situation, Germany is obliged to submit to American military tutelage which is why, for the time being, it is one of the main supporters of American imperialist policies.

The war has caused divisions within the EU and NATO, between those who defend an openly pro-Putin policy, such as Hungary and Slovakia, and those who, like France, want greater independence from the United States. The recent European elections also showed that in various national capitals, populist factions are defending policies contrary to the interests of the national bourgeoisie as a whole, as in the case of Le Pen's RN in France, which favours greater entente with Moscow, and Salvini's La Lega in Italy. Chinese imperialism is trying to widen this divide by offering support to US dissidents, and Xi Jing Pin has organised selective trips to divide Europe, avoiding certain capitals like Berlin but travelling to Paris.

In any case, the war in Ukraine is forcing the European powers to adopt a policy of rearmament, austerity and sacrifices for the working class. In the EU, a war economy is being erected, with the bourgeoisie justifying it by the threat from Russia. Von der Lyden, the newly re-elected President of the European Commission, declared that "although the threat of war is not imminent, we must prepare for it".

But the working class in the core countries of Western Europe has shown that it is not prepared to accept further sacrifices without a fight. As shown by the "summer of anger" in 2022 in Great Britain, with the slogan "enough is enough", or the fight against the extension of the retirement age in France, we are witnessing a renewed combativeness that will develop in the face of attacks on our living conditions.

From Pax Americana to scorched earth policy

"Mr Biden's efforts to reach an Israel-Saudi normalisation agreement are the latest element in a long-running US campaign to strengthen cooperation between regional players who describe themselves as moderates. The normalisation talks built on the success of the 2020 Abraham Accords, which paved the way for Israel to establish diplomatic relations with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, and opened up unprecedented opportunities for bilateral trade, military cooperation and people-to-people engagement. Openness with Riyadh would have reinforced this trend, placing Iran at a disadvantage even as it sought to secure its own rapprochement with Riyadh.” [13]

The aim of this Pax Americana was to immobilise Iran and its proxy militias[14], as well as establish a trade route from India to prevent the deployment of China's Silk Roads project in the region; at the same time, it would allow military resources to be redirected towards Asia and the China Seas, the primary centre of imperialist tensions. This plan had been based on the recognition of a Palestinian state, demanded by Arab countries, and Saudi Arabia in particular, as a condition for the establishment of relations with Israel. As a result, the Palestinian Authority lost all credibility in Gaza to Hamas, and in the West Bank it proved powerless in the face of the occupation of land by Israeli settlers pushed by the extreme right-wing government and supported by the army. This strategy prevented the establishment of any Palestinian forces in the region and neutralised Iran's interests. Certainly, the previous Trump administration had no qualms about recognising the annexation of the Golan Heights or moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which could only be seen as provocations. All this left no room for anything other than a desperate reaction.

The murderous 7 October mission by Hamas, prepared and supported by Iran, was an attack on this strategy, which turned the whole region upside down. "Several US presidents had hoped to play down America's role in the Middle East without too much cost - in Biden's case, to focus on the challenge of China and the growing threat of Russia. But Hamas and Iran have brought the US back.”[15]

Indeed. The US’s largest aircraft carrier returned to the region's shores at the head of a strike force and a number of special operations selectively punished pro-Iranian militias: "Joe Biden's rapid deployment of US military assets to the region, as well as his diplomatic efforts with Lebanon and other key regional players, avoided the full-scale war that Hamas might have hoped to precipitate. A series of US strikes against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, Syria and Yemen degraded the capabilities of these groups and signalled to Tehran's partners that they would pay the price for their continued aggression against the Americans. However, the risk of American miscalculation and complacency will increase with time”. [16]

But what Washington could not stop was Israel's whirlwind of revenge. Hamas has lit the fuse to a scorched earth policy in the region, but it is Israel that is carrying it out. The Zionist state stopped obeying US orders a long time ago. Its far-right government has only reinforced this tendency to retaliate.

The United States has supported Israel's murderous response in Gaza (over 38,000 deaths to date), while trying to contain the escalation of open warfare against Iran. But this situation undermines their rhetoric in Ukraine, where they are supporting a country invaded by its neighbour (Russia), while in Gaza, they are in practice supporting Israel's invasion and its extermination of Palestinians. It also undermines their propaganda as the leader of world democracy. Furthermore, the continuation of the war and its extension across the Middle East undermines the path previously favoured by the United States in the region. For this reason, "Washington's most urgent task is to end the war in Gaza” [17]. Whether the US can impose its authority on the region, and in particular restrain Israel's belligerent rampage, is another question.

The head of US diplomacy, Blinken, has already made eight visits to the region since the start of the war, with the aim of building on the alliance with Saudi Arabia. For the first time since 7 October, in March the United States did not veto a ceasefire resolution at the UN, allowing it to pass, albeit on the grounds that it was "non-binding". The Americans also concocted a plan with Qatar and Saudi Arabia for the release of Hamas prisoners, which was approved by the UN Security Council in June. Netanyahu has already ignored other calls for a ceasefire, leading in April to Benny Gantz's resignation from the war cabinet, effectively forcing its dissolution and accepting his call for early elections in September.

Faced with US initiatives to contain Israel's imperialist aspirations and discipline it, the Israeli government is opening up new war fronts  with provocations such as the attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which killed seven commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the attacks on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and recently the attack on Yemen, in an attempt to force Washington to assume its role as regional policeman; but this has been at the risk of setting the region ablaze by fostering war with Iran. For the first time, the Mullahs’ regime in April launched a direct attack against Israel.

The Netanyahu government is also trying to buy time in anticipation of Trump's victory in the forthcoming US elections, after he announced his unwavering support for an Israeli war against Iran. For Netanyahu himself, beyond imperialist interests with the United States, the pursuit of war is also a personal matter, an attempt to save his skin in the face of numerous public protests against him and the threat of being tried for corruption.

The victim of these imperialist manoeuvres is the population of the whole region, exterminated under the fire of the struggle between the imperialist camps, in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Yemen between Iran and Saudi Arabia (and now Israel) and in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel.

Africa: the weak link in US imperialism

Global imperialist chaos is taking concrete form in Africa[18] with the intensification of imperialist conflicts resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees and unprecedented famine. The conflicts involve 31 countries and 295 clashes between militias and guerrillas.[19] Washington and the Western powers are finding it increasingly difficult to counter the growing economic and military influence of China and Russia on the continent. The most glaring example is France's loss of position there.

Africa is crucial to the Chinese economy in terms of supplies of basic raw materials for technological development and oil; but above all, through the Silk Roads project, China has strengthened its military and geostrategic presence in North Africa and the Horn of Africa, even though it currently only has a military base in Djibouti. As for Russia, its mercenary troops (Wagner) have been involved in coups d'état in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and recently in the conflict between Congo and Rwanda.

But the nerve centre of imperialist tensions today is the Horn of Africa, which is directly linked to the Middle East conflict and where control of the Red Sea, through which around 15% of world trade passes, is at stake. Iran is trying to influence the region through the Houthis, China through its presence in Djibouti and Russia through its intervention in Sudan. The famine in Sudan (the third largest country in Africa), where 25 million people (15% of the population) need humanitarian aid and from which more than 7 million people have fled, confirms the interaction between war, crisis and ecological disaster on a global scale.

Implications for the proletariat

In the United States, the divisions within the bourgeoisie present the working class with false grounds for reflection and opposition to the war. Trump presents himself as the supporter of workers who don't want to get involved in wars that don't concern them and where their children are dying. But his seemingly ‘pacifist’ scenario is mixed with a defence of the homeland, economic sacrifices to rebuild the economy, a rejection of immigration and rampant xenophobia – all of it an alien terrain for the proletariat. Biden and the Democrats, on the other hand, present themselves as the defenders of peace and "international solidarity", while their government is in fact the ‘bad actor’ responsible for the current chaos.

This false choice leads the American proletariat to the bourgeois terrain of anti-racism, anti-populism and the defence of democracy, as we saw during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations or in the mobilisations in opposition to the assault on the Capitol.

It is only on the terrain of the struggle for their living conditions, for their demands, as in the Big Three (car industry) strike or the struggles for education and health in California, that the proletariat is able to fight outside the false alternatives proposed by the bourgeoisie.

In the same way, in the Middle East, the war prevents the expression of an internationalist proletarian struggle against both sides, diverting solidarity with the victims on the ground towards support for the Palestinian or even the Iranian side.

As for the proletariat of Europe, in the region of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, we cannot expect a massive response from it on its class terrain. This includes Russia, even if the continuation of the war means a greater involvement of the central battalions of this part of the proletariat. In the future, the aggravation of the economic and financial crisis will pose, more in Russia than in Ukraine, the conditions for a mobilisation of the proletariat to defend its living conditions.

The workers' struggle in Britain under the slogan "enough is enough", and in other countries such as the United States and France, shows that the proletariat is not prepared to sacrifice itself for war and has been stimulated to reflect on the links between economic crisis and war as well as the disastrous future that capitalism has in store for us.

The impact of the war in the Middle East is, however, a momentary obstacle to the development of class struggle. It favours appeals to choose one of the imperialist camps, to take sides in the war, which the proletariat must reject and fight with the greatest energy.

H.R. (23 July 2024)

 

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[1] See previous ICC articles "The war in Ukraine, a giant step into widespread barbarism and chaos"; "The significance and impact of the war in Ukraine."

[2] At the start of the war, in March 2022, the French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, summed up Biden and Von der Lyden's statements as follows: "We are going to cause Russia's economic collapse".

[3] ‘The Case for Conservative Internationalism’ by Kori Schake, a member of the Security Council and the State Department under Bush Jr, Professor and Director of Foreign and Defence Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

[4] ‘Putin's Unsustainable Spending Spree’, by Alexandra Prokopenko (former adviser to the Russian central bank until 2020, currently working at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre think tank), Foreign Affairs, 8 January 2024.

[5] "Russia ranks last in the world in terms of the scale and speed of automation of production: its robotisation is a microscopic fraction of the global average". From ‘The five Futures of Russia’, by Stephen Kotkin, (Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution), in Foreign Affairs May/June 2024

[6] Between the beginning of the 21st century and today, the working-age population has lost more than 10 million people, and the population aged between 20 and 40 (considered to be the most productive age group in terms of labour) will continue to decline over the next decade.

[7] "The limits of the country's shrinking workforce are increasingly evident, even in the priority sector - war production - which has some five million fewer skilled workers than it needs", “The five futures of Russia”.

[8] “If he (Trump) wins”, Time, vol 203, nos 17-18.

[9] “‘Biden is growing bolder on Ukraine’, by Ian Bremmer, in Time, vol. 203, nos. 21-22, 2024

[10] "According to NATO spokesman and Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, NATO plans to provide €10 billion over five years...‘Ministers discussed how best to organise NATO's support for Ukraine to make it stronger and more sustainable’, a senior NATO official said" (“Western countries plan to release €100 billion to support the Kiev regime”, in Diplomatie International no. 5).

[11] “Secretary of State Antony Blinken is active on all fronts and is multiplying initiatives”, Karin Leiffer in Diplomatie International no. 5.

[12] “The negotiations which could have ended the conflict in Ukraine”, abridged version of an article in Foreign Affairs, April 2024, by Samuel Charap (political scientist) and Sergueï RadchenKo (history professor at Johns-Hopkins University), in Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2024.

[13] “Iran's Order of Chaos”, by Suzanne Maloney (Vice President of the Brookings Institution and Director of its Foreign Policy Programme), in Foreign Affairs, May/June 2024.

[14] Pro-Iran militias, such as Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas itself.

[15] See note 13.

[16] Idem.

[17] “The war that remade the Middle East”, by Maria Fatappie (Head of the Mediterranean, Middle East and Africa Programme at the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, and Vali Nasr Majid Khadduri, Professor of International and Middle Eastern Affairs at the John Hopkins University School of International Studies, (previously Senior Advisor to the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2009 to 2011) cited in Foreign Affairs January/February 2024.

[18] According to Zhang Hongming, deputy director of the Institute of West Asian and African Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Africa is "the weak link in the United States' global strategic design".

[19] Wars in the World website.