By Sara Flounders
U.S. imperialism's every effort to assert itself and
reverse its declining global domination confirms its weakened position.
Washington increasingly looks to threats of sanctions and/or military attack to
resolve its every problem and challenge. But the Bush administration finds it
more difficult to line up its imperialist allies for each new aggression. Even
some U.S. puppet and client states now try to distance themselves from U.S.
initiatives.
Every major capitalist U.S. competitor looks first to its
own economic interests. Their calculations are that the U.S. has lost its
competitive economic position, with its financial institutions in crisis and a
weakening of the entire capitalist system. The overcommitted U.S. military
machine is bogged down in disastrous occupations, facing long-term resistance
movements.
This weakened U.S. position was never more obvious than
during Vice-President Dick Cheney's early September visit to Georgia,
Ukraine and Azerbaijan. It was confirmed when NATO members sidestepped U.S.
demands to impose sanctions on Russia after Georgia's Aug. 7 invasion of
South Ossetia and Russia's counterattack. Imperialist NATO members Germany,
France and Italy politely put on hold the U.S. push to include Georgia and
Ukraine in the U.S.-commanded NATO alliance.
The European imperialists need the oil and gas from Russia
to fuel their own industries. They also want to protect their own corporate
investments in Russia more than they want to back up a crumbling U.S.
position.
Militarism–the only option
Cheney visited Georgia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan in
Washington's effort to ratchet up military threats against Russia and to
show U.S. determination to control this strategic region on Russia's
border. As he visited, 18 NATO war ships, equipped with strategic weapons,
including cruise missiles, appeared in the Black Sea off the coasts of Georgia
and Russia. The USS Mount Whitney, flagship of the U.S. Navy's Sixth Fleet,
docked on Sept. 6 at Georgia's Black Sea port of Poti, six miles from a
Russian military base.
As Cheney visited, President George Bush announced $1
billion in new aid to Georgia, describing it as a multi-year commitment. The
U.S.-controlled International Monetary Fund will open access to another $750
million in immediate aid to Georgia. Billions more of military aid are
projected.
Simultaneous with NATO's aggressive stance in the
Black Sea is expansion of U.S./NATO military raids and bombings in U.S.-ally
Pakistan. This affront to Pakistan sovereignty has already enflamed anti-U.S.
and anti-NATO sentiment. In a Sept. 16 statement, Pakistan Prime Minister
Yousuf Raza Gilani called for an immediate halt to U.S. incursions, adding that
"the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country would be
safeguarded at all cost."
NATO's bombing of a village in Afghanistan killing
more than 90--primarily Afghan children and civilians--has forced even the
puppet Afghan regime to denounce the attack.
U.S. occupation forces in Iraq are still unable, after
more than five years, to secure their bases or provide even the most basic
services of potable water and electricity to a population that has
overwhelmingly refused occupation.
In the midst of all this the U.S. threats and leaks on a
possible military attack on Iran continue unabated. Half the U.S. Navy is in
striking distance of Iran.
At the same time the U.S. has pushed ahead with a wild
escalation–the plan to base anti-ballistic missiles in Poland and radar
sites in the Czech Republic in the face of overwhelming popular opposition.
Escalating U.S. military threats worry the business
interests of not only the imperialist allies in Western Europe. They have also
led to a sharp confrontation with the emerging capitalist class in Russia.
This grouping acted earlier as if they would remain
partners with U.S. imperialism in the long-term exploitation of the giant,
once-socially-owned industries of the Soviet Union. They were totally compliant
with the breakup of the USSR. Then they found to their chagrin that the
imperialist pirates didn't honor their agreements.
Many historical studies assert that in 1990 Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev made the astounding capitulation that a united capitalist
Germany could join NATO after Secretary of State Baker gave assurances that
NATO would not extend its jurisdiction to the East. German Foreign Minister
Hans Dietrich Genscher, Francois Mitterrand of France and John Major of Britain
made similar promises.
U.S. imperialism has no room for capitalist partners who
ultimately become capitalist rivals. Washington's policy, stated explicitly
in policy documents in the mid-1990s, was to transform NATO--a U.S.-commanded
military alliance--to prevent socialist planning and ownership from reemerging
and to assure that no new rival capitalist power in Russia or rival military
bloc in Europe was established. U.S. military and corporate domination of the
entire region was the goal.
NATO's bombing, dismemberment and occupation of
Yugoslavia from 1994 on set a precedent for the rapid expansion of NATO as a
U.S.-dominated military alliance.
The new Russian capitalist class watched all the countries
of Eastern Europe and many of the former Republics of the USSR turned into
pawns used as anti-Russian military bases. Now Russian Prime Minister Putin is
belatedly trying to assert some sovereignty over the vast, encircled country,
greatly weakened since the Soviet days.
U.S. policies rebuked
That Putin would denounce the role of U.S. warships in the
Black Sea supposedly delivering "humanitarian aid" to Georgia is
hardly surprising. But even French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner—who
had called NATO's 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia a
"humanitarian war"--questioned current U.S. tactics and pointedly
said that "the use of warships to deliver humanitarian aid risks enflaming
tensions with Russia."
Kouchner's statement shows all the tensions, fissures
and weaknesses within this major alliance that can unravel it. Kouchner said
that the crisis "can only be solved politically and not with
warships." He also cast doubt on the political value of Cheney's trip
to Georgia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan. (Bloomberg News, Sept 6)
Cheney's visit to Azerbaijan, an oil-rich country on
the Caspian Sea that was once a republic of the Soviet Union, was a big
setback. The U.S. financed the building of a $4- billion, 1,000-mile,
million-barrels-a-day oil pipeline from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, across
Georgia to its capital Tbilisi to Ceyhan, a port in Turkey.
This vast and expensive construction project--called
the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan or BTC line--was a U.S. effort begun during the Clinton
administration. Its whole purpose was to route oil for Western markets away
from transit through Russia. For the same reason, billions were also spent for
the Nabucco gas pipeline that runs from Baku via Georgia to Turkey.
According to a Sept. 8 Times of London article entitled
"How the West is losing the energy cold war," Azerbaijan President
Ilham Aliyev publicly snubbed Cheney, phoned Russian President Medvedev the
moment after he met with Cheney and ruled out supplying gas for the Nabucco gas
line. "A disgruntled Mr. Cheney apparently then failed to appear at an
official banquet."
Then on Sept. 16, the two pro-U.S. parties in the Ukraine
regime split and brought down the government despite Washington's efforts
to keep them united against Moscow. This is quite a turnaround after almost two
decades of growing U.S. corporate and political domination of the entire
region.
Collapse of a U.S. puppet
The dangerous escalation of NATO ships in the Black Sea,
the further expansion of NATO membership, the attempt to line up the other
Western imperialist members of NATO to impose sanctions on Russia, Cheney's
heavy-handed visit and the dramatic increase in aid are all desperate U.S.
imperialist efforts to reinforce its position. But these measures can't
reverse the U.S.'s big setback in its Georgian client state.
The Georgian army had received five years of U.S. and
Israeli military training and millions of dollars of Pentagon high-tech
equipment, along with U.S. political support and encouragement to join NATO.
Thousands of U.S. corporate-funded nongovernmental organizations ran most of
the state apparatus, keeping Georgia firmly in the U.S. orbit.
The Georgian President Saakashvili then initiated a
devastating attack on the tiny autonomous region of South Ossetia on Aug. 7,
bombing its capital Tskhinvali and the surrounding area and killing many South
Ossetians.
Within a day of the Russian counterattack, the Georgian
military collapsed in utter chaos. Officers abandoned their posts, high jacked
ambulances and fled back to the capital of Tbilisi. Units could not
communicate. The ranks of soldiers then dumped tons of new U.S. weapons on the
roadway and also fled.
A Sept. 3 New York Times article explained:
"Georgia's military shortfalls were serious and too difficult to
change merely by upgrading equipment." The article, however, went on to
say that "training and equipping new brigades, re-equipping existing
forces and installing a modern air-defense network could cost $8 billion to $9
billion," and that this was under discussion.
Only U.S. solution is more war
The U.S. corporate
ruling class sees no other option except war to salvage its position. This is
reflected in both Republican and Democratic support for U.S. aid to Georgia,
along with continuing support for a further expansion of NATO, troops in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and U.S. bases around the world.
Even though the U.S. is suffering political, economic and
military setbacks, the contradiction that leads invariably to increased threat
of war is that militarism is an endless subsidy for the dominant U.S.
corporations--the military corporations of Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, McDonald
Douglas and GE--along with thousands of contractors and subcontractors. The war
in the Caucasus was "a bell-ringer for defense stocks." (Wall Street
Journal, Aug.16)
The excuses for new wars and new arms shipments are
mother's milk to these merchants of death.
The U.S. military budget is already larger than that of
the rest of the world combined, and it is growing. U.S. imperialism today has
no solutions to the crises emerging around the globe except militarism, war and
the threat of war. This makes the entire capitalist system more dangerous and
more desperate.
It is essential that the working-class movement and
progressive and anti-war activists oppose not just the individual wars of U.S.
imperialism. Opposing all U.S. wars and calling for the abolition of NATO is
now on the agenda.
