U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria dramatically sharpens the split within the U.S. ruling class. It’s a big win for the Little Fascists, the domestic-leaning, isolationist wing of the U.S. ruling class, and a huge loss for the Big Fascists, the main-wing finance capitalists who have led U.S. imperialism since the end of World War II. It drastically weakens the U.S. position in the Middle East and has opened the door for Russia to take over—at least for now—as the region’s alpha dog enforcer.
Workers cannot be fooled into supporting either section of the blood-soaked capitalist class. Far from the end to “endless wars” promised by Trump, the intensifying inter-imperialist competition between the U.S. and Russia and China will inevitably lead to full-blown fascism and the next world war, one that will slaughter hundreds of millions of workers. Only communist revolution can overthrow and dismantle the lethal capitalist system.
U.S. pulls back, Russia steps up
In December 2018, when Trump first announced a troop withdrawal from Syria, he was sabotaged by John Bolton, his national security advisor, and the old-school interventionists in the Republican Party. Trump’s main wing secretary of defense, James Mattis, resigned over the decision, saying it would play into the hands of the Islamic State (ISIS), the small-time capitalists who’d threatened U.S. oil interests.
But the Little Fascists behind Trump, including the Koch family, persisted. They have now pulled off a major foreign policy coup, enraging the main wing and further eroding the old liberal world order based on U.S. military dominance. As U.S. troops pulled out of northeastern Syria, they left a vacuum that Turkey and Russia were eager to fill (NYT, 10/15). Turkey invaded Syria and began bombarding and slaughtering civilians along the Syrian-Turkish border. Russian and Syrian troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad moved to occupy much of the territory formerly held by U.S.-backed Kurdish nationalist rebels. The Kurdish bosses, who’d partnered with the U.S. in fighting ISIS, were forced to make a quick deal with the butcher Assad to contain the Turkish Army and rogue Syrian militias.
On October 22, two weeks after the U.S. withdrawal, Russian President Vladimir Putin sat down Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to dictate a power-sharing arrangement with Assad—and make clear who was in charge. “Russia agreed to help Turkey create a ‘safe zone’ in northeastern Syria that is free of Kurdish fighters that Ankara views as a terrorist threat” (Wall Street Journal, 10/22). Beyond setting the stage for a racist ethnic cleansing, the land grab confirms Russia’s new status “as the dominant force in Syria and a major power broker in the broader Middle East …. at the expense of the United States” (NYT, 10/22).
The next oil war?
Meanwhile, Russia’s imperialist bosses are also using the U.S. retreat to strengthen their ties with the biggest oil producers. On October 14, Putin met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to explore “more promising opportunities in the two countries in all fields, including cooperation in energy and investment in the infrastructure” (gulfnews.com, 10/15). In a statement that sent shivers through the boardrooms of ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, de facto leader of the United Arab Emirates, declared: “I think of Russia as my second home. We are connected by a deep strategic relationship” (NYT, 10/15).
Both Russia and U.S. arch-enemy Iran have trained and armed troops in Syria for years. With the U.S. bowing out, they are ready to cash in on their investment. Russia originally intervened to help Assad in 2015, four years into Syria’s bloody civil war. To keep workers submissive, Russia’s bombing campaign has deliberately maximized civilian casualties. Hundreds of bombs were dropped on hospitals “to crush the last pockets of resistance” to Assad (NYT 10/13). One unanticipated consequence of these atrocities may be to push Syrian rebels into the waiting arms of ISIS, still a factor in the area.
Now that they have taken charge, Russia’s capitalist rulers will be tested. Whether they can keep the Syrian, Turkish, and Kurdish bosses in check—while preventing an ISIS revival—remains to be seen. But the nightmare for the liberal Big Fascists is that Russia is now shaping events in the geopolitically crucial Middle East. The main wing bosses can’t accept this realignment without a fight. They’ll need to push back militarily in the region—which adds to their urgency in removing Trump by the 2020 elections, if not sooner.
Fortress America vs. liberal world order
Foreign Affairs, the journal of the liberal rulers’ top foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, has relentlessly attacked Trump’s Middle East policy. In a recent article headlined “Disaster in the Desert,” Martin Indyk rips the Trump team’s plan to offload responsibility for containing Iran and policing the volatile region onto U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia (Nov.-Dec. 2019).
Back in 2016, the libertarian Charles Koch Institute warned against the U.S. arming the anti-Assad Syrian rebels: “[T]o ensure [that] decisions truly serve our vital strategic interests, U.S. leaders should consider the difficulties of training unaccountable rebel forces and pursuing... regime change in the Middle East. These decisions can carry high fiscal costs for the United States….”
Trump is cynically harnessing the anti-war sentiments of tens of millions and twisting them to enlist support for the domestic wing’s Fortress America strategy. Little Fascists like the Kochs have no problem with the U.S. sending drones to bomb civilians—mass murder on the cheap. But they don’t want to pay the tax bill for an overseas land war to protect the Big Fascists’ investments. They’re willing to take a back seat and hope the Russian bosses get bogged down in the Syria quagmire.
Imperialist war vs. communist revolution
In response to Trump’s abandonment of the Kurdish rebels who helped the U.S. stop ISIS in northern Syria, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan measure condemning Turkey’s attack. Republicans in the U.S. Senate, on the other hand, are holding their cards close. Even as the Democrats move forward with impeachment, Trump’s base is holding firm. If the Republicans think they can keep their Senate majority in 2020 behind Trump, they’ll continue to back him. If they see Trump going down and threatening to take them with him, they may join the move to dump him. While the split between the Big Fascists and Little Fascists is primary, the opportunism of the bosses’ stooge politicians cannot be overestimated.
The world is swimming in volatility, from the looming Trump impeachment fight to mass rebellions in Lebanon and Chile to refugee crises in Syria and Central America. Workers have nothing to gain by allying with some “lesser evil” set of capitalist rulers. As the bosses prepare for their world war, the international working class must prepare to destroy the capitalist system. Only communism can wipe out the scourge of imperialism and create a world where wars for profit will become a distant memory.
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Syria provides a textbook example of what befalls the working class when inter-imperialist rivalry is combined with local thievery. An estimated 400,000 workers have been slaughtered and more than half the population turned into refugees, with five million forced to flee the country. Under Barack Obama, the U.S. imperialists fomented the “Arab Spring” and turned a 2011 rebellion against the brutal al-Assad regime into a bloodbath. To counter regional thugs in northern Syria like ISIS, the U.S. state terrorists armed their own thugs, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). Turkey organized a competing anti-Assad militia. Iran dispatched thousands of troops to Syria to support Assad.
In 2014, as ISIS overran large sections of Eastern Syria and Northern Iraq, the Obama administration launched a bombing campaign to beat back the smaller terrorists. The following year, Obama sent troops into Syria. After Russia intervened in 2015 to prop up Assad and his Iranian backers, who were at that point losing the war, ISIS and most of the other rebel forces were crushed. But the YPG, later dubbed the “Syrian Democratic Forces,” survived with U.S. protection to claim and control the northeastern quarter of Syria. With the Trump withdrawal, the YPG’s future is in doubt. The same can be said of millions of Kurdish civilians, who historically have been the victims of racist violence in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey.
