BY JACK BARNES  
The Bush administration presents the war against Iraq as the first triumph of the "new world order." It points to the fact that Moscow not only gave public backing to the U.S. war drive, but also voted for every U.S.-initiated motion in the United Nations Security Council, right down to the April 2 resolution rubber-stamping Washington’s stranglehold cease-fire conditions that in practice suspend Iraqi sovereignty. This enabled the U.S. rulers to use the UN as a fig leaf in a more brazen manner than any time since the opening of the 1950s during its war against Korea.... ¹

The truth is that Washington’s Gulf war and its outcome did not open up a new world order of stability and UN-overseen harmony. Instead, it was the first war since the close of World War II that grew primarily out of the intensified competition and accelerating instability of the crises-ridden old imperialist world order. It is the increasing internal strains within this declining order that drove Washington to launch its murderous military adventure. The irremediable social and political conflicts, and consequent instability, that existed before the Gulf war and that underlay it have all been exacerbated:

• between imperialism and the toilers of the Middle East and elsewhere in the semicolonial world;
• among the rival imperialist powers;
• between the various imperialist states and the oppressed nations;
• between exploiters and exploited within these oppressed countries;
• between the toilers and the bourgeoisified leaderships who speak in their name and claim to represent their interests;
• among the bourgeois states of the Middle East and other oppressed nations;
• between Washington and the governments of the deformed and degenerated workers’ states, first and foremost, the Soviet Union;
• between the U.S. imperialist rulers and the two workers’ states that pose the biggest problems for them, North Korea and Cuba; and
• between Washington and the revolutionary government and communist leadership right on U.S. imperialism’s very doorstep in the Americas--that of Cuba....

Coming out of World War II, U.S. imperialism emerged the dominant power in the world imperialist system, both economically and militarily. For a substantial period following that war the rate of profit, and for even longer the tempo of growth of the mass of profits, was rising in all the imperialist countries. As a result, competition between the imperialist powers over markets for commodities and capital and over sources of raw materials was buffered.

Since the mid-1970s, however, the combination of the declining rate of profit, halting growth in the mass of profits, and relative slowdown in economic expansion has precipitated growing, sometimes sharp rivalry among the imperialist ruling classes. The years 1974–75 saw the first worldwide recession since 1937, as economic interdependence among the major capitalist powers grew alongside their competition and conflict. Although the sheer size and output of the U.S. capitalist economy remains enormous, and while it remains the largest market in the world, its position as an industrial and trading power has slipped substantially in recent decades in the face of growing challenges from German, Japanese, and other rivals. U.S. strategic military power remains unchallenged, however, and is the main lever the U.S. rulers have to compensate for their relative decline....

The relationship of forces that existed prior to the Gulf war among the capitalist powers in Europe has not been altered, but the national and state conflicts between them have been exacerbated. The war underlined the limits of the European Community’s modest steps toward greater "economic integration" (lowered barriers to trade, investment, and travel). The U.S.-engineered war drive exposed beyond doubt that these measures do not translate into a "common European" foreign policy, a "common European" military policy, let alone steps to build up a "common European" armed forces. Nor do they even translate into a "common European" economic policy, let alone a common currency; in fact, strides in this direction were set back.

Instead, the rival capitalist classes in the European Community (EC) were further propelled toward defending their separate state interests, whatever their common stake in a trading bloc in face of U.S. and Japanese competition.