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Vol. 80/No. 31      August 22, 2016

 
(front page)

Debate over Russia shows crisis in US foreign,
military policy

 
BY MAGGIE TROWE
The increasing world disorder of capitalism and the growing crisis of Washington’s foreign and military policy have deepened in the quarter of a century since the Soviet Union collapsed because the U.S. rulers erroneously concluded they had won the Cold War. They have reaped unintended consequences as they’ve stepped up military intervention in the Middle East and beyond.

This reality has produced a caustic debate between Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump over relations with Moscow and its president, Vladimir Putin, and the extent to which Washington’s war machine can be used from Iraq to Afghanistan to the South China Sea.

The debate takes place as the Barack Obama administration moves provocatively to deploy battalions from the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance around the Russian border in the Baltics.

When leaked email correspondence revealed Democratic Party officials in Clinton’s camp had planned to discredit Bernie Sanders by calling him an atheist and a Jew, implicated Democratic leaders tried to deflect attention from their coarse and anti-Semitic actions by blaming Russia and Trump.

“It was the Russians who perpetrated this leak for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton,” Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said July 25. Democrats’ charges that Trump is soft on Moscow are not new. In March Clinton said that if Trump is elected, “it will be like Christmas in the Kremlin.”

After Trump jokingly suggested that Putin might dredge up missing Clinton emails sought in a congressional probe of her conduct as secretary of state, Michael Morell, former acting director of the CIA, said that Putin had “recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

US imperialism lost the Cold War

Following the fall of the murderous Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. rulers crowed they had won the Cold War and acted accordingly on the world stage. But Washington had depended on the help of Moscow’s repressive apparatus and counterrevolutionary Stalinist parties around the world to derail and tamp down working-class struggles.

Washington’s false assumptions led Democratic and Republican administrations alike to intervene abroad when the capitalist rulers saw instability or threats to U.S. interests.

Far from resulting in stability for U.S. imperialist exploitation, decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan have torn up the Middle East, left in their wake widespread death and destruction, resulted in the emergence of the reactionary Islamic State — led by former military commanders from Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq — and sent millions of workers from Syria and elsewhere to seek refuge in Europe.

Weakened and battered by a string of military disasters, Washington acts in contradictory ways. Sensing their impotence in the Mideast, the propertied U.S. rulers “pivot” to enlist Moscow’s help, along with that of Tehran, to try to end the war in Syria and defeat Islamic State. At the same time the Obama administration has moved provocatively to strengthen its military presence in eastern Europe — what Moscow regards as its “near abroad” buffer zone. The Kremlin considers this a direct threat. As well, Washington is “modernizing” its nuclear weapons arsenal in a $1 trillion 30-year upgrade.

Top Pentagon officials warn of Russian “revanchist” moves to regain lost territory. But if there is a power trying to regain lost hegemony and prestige, it’s Washington.

There is no new Cold War. Russia is no superpower. The collapse of oil and gas prices with the world contraction of production and trade have put the Russian economy in deep crisis and generated widespread discontent with the Putin government. The Russian economy contracted by 4 percent in 2015. Some 19 million Russians were living below the poverty level of $139 a month. Earlier this year truckers protested for weeks against a new road tax.

However, Putin’s moves in Syria and the “near abroad,” and his efforts to strengthen military and economic ties with China and Turkey, show he senses U.S. imperialism’s post-Cold War weakness.

The wealthy U.S. rulers, feeling the pressure of the grinding depression they can’t solve and unable to impose a new imperialist order, will continue to veer on a vacillating and dangerous course no matter which capitalist politician wins the White House in November.  
 
 
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