The U.S. ruling class has a lot on its plate. Inter-imperialist competition is forcing the bosses to prepare for both smaller, regional wars and the broader world war to come. China, Russia, Japan, and the European Union powers are vying with the U.S. to control oil and other resources and to maximize profits from cheap labor. History shows there is no way to negotiate or cooperate out of these conflicts. They can be solved only by war.
But the capitalists cannot successfully pursue these wars without boots on the ground to do the killing. They must gain loyalty and support from the world’s workers — the same workers they need to exploit and brutalize in their racist system (see box).

Most workers today are opposed to the bosses’ current dogfights. Even without a mass movement to galvanize them, they understand that capitalist wars cannot serve their interests. Here, then, is the opportunity for communists to turn these imperialist wars into class war — as the Bolsheviks did in Russia during World War I, as the Chinese communists did during and after World War II. Here is our chance to lead the working class in revolution to destroy the profit system. Then we can establish communism, a worker-run system free of bosses, profits, unemployment, poverty, racism, and sexism. That is the goal of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. 

Regional Wars vs. World War
Should U.S. capitalists continue to invest in regional invasions or keep their powder dry for an eventual World War III? Those are the strategic alternatives framed by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the U.S. imperialists’ leading think tank. The latest issue of the CFR’s Foreign Affairs (November-December, 2014) opens with two opposing pieces: “More Small Wars,” by Max Boot, and “Pick Your Battles,” by Richard Betts. This is no armchair discussion; these writers are active participants in the bosses’ mass murder. Boot advised U.S. commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, while Betts consults for the CIA and the Army War College. And the CFR itself represents the finance wing of U.S. capitalism, the interests who have most to gain or lose from armed conflict. Among its main backers are ExxonMobil, JPMorgan Chase, and the Rockefeller family.
But this either-or debate is a false formulation. Imperialist war is both inevitable and incremental. As U.S. bosses combat their many overseas rivals, we can expect both kinds of war.
Boot points to more than 30 potential targets for a U.S. invasion, including Syria, Colombia, Iraq, Israel, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine. “Given how many of these conflicts involve U.S. allies or interests, it is wishful thinking to imagine that Washington can stay aloof.... Since Washington doesn’t have the luxury of simply avoiding insurgencies, the best strategy would be to fight them better.” That, says, Boot, means more ground troops and a greater effort at “nation building,” code for long-term military occupation.
In rebuttal, Betts dismisses the slaughter of millions in the Middle East and South Asia by the last four U.S. presidents as “half measures” and mostly failures: “Of the U.S. military actions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, only the first can be counted a success.” He concludes:

[T]he time has come to focus again on first-order dangers. Russia is back, and China is coming. These prospective opponents could not just hurt U.S. allies; they could inflict epochal damage on the United States itself....Now the United States needs to temper the ambitions unleashed by its post-Cold War dominance [and] to prepare for bigger wars for bigger stakes against bigger powers.

Oil and ISIS
In response to territorial gains by the Islamic State, Obama is doubling to 3,000 the number of U.S. military “advisers” in Iraq. It’s not just Iraq’s oilfields, as vast and profitable as they are, that the U.S. capitalists worry about. ISIS seeks “the next step: control of an outlet to the Mediterranean Sea,” says industry insider Oil Price (11/4/14).
It continues: “Access to the sea is absolutely crucial to the group’s survival as an oil-and-gas-producing state. In recent weeks there have been repeated missile attacks from Islamist forces around Latakia,” Syria’s main port.
Meanwhile, General John Campbell, Obama’s Afghan warlord, posed a parallel question in Foreign Policy, another ruling-class journal: “Do...we need more NATO forces in certain locations for longer? I’ve got to do that analysis and we’re just starting that now.” Foreign Policy answered his question for him: “The Taliban are gaining ground in key districts in the south and east of Afghanistan” (11/8/14).
U.S. Elections Boost Warmakers
Back in the U.S., where liberal Democrats took a beating in the midterm elections, ruling-class media guardedly proclaimed victory for interventionist Republicans over isolationist Tea Party challengers. “Establishment Republicans, who had vowed to thwart the Tea Party, succeeded in electing new lawmakers who are, for the most part, less rebellious” (New York Times, 11/9/14).
Imperialist war hawk John McCain, who advocates a land invasion of Syria with land forces, will now chair the Senate’s powerful Armed Services Committee. With former isolationists Ted Cruz and Rand Paul now in the fold and backing U.S. bombing of ISIS, McCain is aggressively promoting the rulers’ war aims around the globe. In collaboration with his fellow Republican chairmen of the Foreign Relations Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence, he’ll be banging the drum on “arms for Ukraine’s government, examination of our strategy in the Middle East, our assets with regard to Russian President Vladimir Putin in the region, China’s continued encroachment in the South China Sea” (Daily Beast, 11/5/14).
Obama Unleashed
As chief executive, Barack Obama has the last word on war policy. Contrary to conventional wisdom about lame ducks (presidents completing their term of office and are ineligible to run for re-election) , Obama’s war-making powers may be enhanced in his last two years in the White House. The election results will give Democrat Obama greater freedom to side with Republicans on military appropriations.
As a historical parallel, the CFR website (11/8/14) cites George W. Bush, who made a number of pro-imperialist moves after GOP voting losses in 2006:

….freed from many domestic political pressures -- [Bush] instituted significant foreign policy changes. He fired Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and oversaw a major strategy shift in Iraq, including a troop “surge” and adoption of counterinsurgency doctrine....Looking ahead to the next two years, it’s easy to see a similar series of events unfolding....Indeed, President Obama will be free — should he desire — to implement an array of foreign policy “course corrections” via executive action. Obama can unilaterally set a policy regarding the U.S. stance toward Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (something urged by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel). He can revisit the glideslope for U.S. troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, as informally recommended by the general in charge of forces there.

Even more ominous is Obama’s strengthened ability to “correct course” on Russia, whose “military aircraft conducted aerial maneuvers around Europe this week on a scale seldom seen since the end of the Cold War, prompting NATO jets to scramble” (Wall Street Journal, 11/8/14). With gross understatement, a Pentagon spokeswoman said, “We don’t think those flights help de-escalate the current situation at all.”
China looms as another top target for Obama and his masters. On the eve of the president’s upcoming trip to the world’s second-largest economy, Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times top China hand, stated (11/9/14), “In tfhe East China and South China Seas, [President] Xi has taken an aggressive approach to maritime disputes. There may be a thaw, but risk remains of military accidents, escalation and even war.”
Whatever their differences, in short, U.S. capitalists are displaying greater unity around their central mission: the escalation of inter-imperialist war. Communists have their marching orders too — build the international PLP to smash racism and sexism, and turn imperialist war into class war for communism.

BOX:

U.S. Bosses’ Dilemma: Getting Boots on the Ground

As CHALLENGE has noted (10/29/14), U.S. capitalists are short on real allies in the Middle East, which contains the largest reserves by far of cheaply extractable oil. With only token support from other powers for their assault against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or the Taliban in Afghanistan, they need to step up military recruitment of U.S. youth. The bosses are flooding TV with commercials about “serving your country.” They’re re-instituting Reserve Officers Training Corps on college campuses, with a special emphasis on grooming more black officers. They aim to reform education  to focus more on patriotism and pro-war ideology. In Washington, as a bipartisan war coalition spends more billions of workers’ money on war, Barack Obama will pursue “executive actions” to pressure the GOP on immigration reform and other ploys to buy off workers and youth.
But with their system in crisis, U.S. rulers face a dilemma. Nearly seven years after the outset of the “Great Recession,” mass racist unemployment persists. Since the capitalist system depends on super-profits from the super-exploitation of black and Latin workers, along with lower wages for women workers, the bosses must ramp up racism and sexism. To divide the working class, they must scapegoat Muslim, South Asian, Arab and Chinese workers, blaming them for the shortage of jobs for black and Latin youth.
Despite the bosses’ best efforts, imperialist war is a hard sell. As their police kill and imprison black and Latin youth in cities large and small, from New York and Los Angeles to Ferguson, Missouri, it becomes much harder to recruit them to the military. Desperate to fill their enlistment needs, and fearing a compulsory draft would be too unpopular (at least for now), the capitalists are marketing military “careers” to unemployed black youth and promises of citizenship to undocumented Latin youth. They are even taking small steps to reduce the number of black and Latin youth behind bars, though the U.S. prison population of more than two million is still the largest in the world. (China and Russia, the U.S. bosses’ main imperialist rivals, rank second and third.)
Bosses’ Election Bust
U.S. workers’ alienation may be at an all-time high. In the recent U.S. elections, only 36 percent of eligible voters actually voted, “the lowest it’s been in any election cycle since World War II, according to early projects by the United States Election Project” (Washington Post, 11/10/14). The big story in the bosses’ media was that the Republicans trounced the Democrats. The real story is that both parties are controlled by the same big business interests that financed the elections. Whatever their differences, both parties are driven by the goal of U.S. imperialists to maintain their top-dog status. And both parties know they must enlist U.S. workers — whether with a “democratic” carrot or a fascist stick — to slaughter their working-class brothers and sisters around the world.
Opposing these ruling-class attacks means organizing workers and youth worldwide to wage class war against the exploiters. A communist party is essential to lead this war. Progressive Labor Party, active in more than twenty countries around the world, is dedicated to that aim. Join and build PLP!