US troops out of Middle East, Asia!

Washington’s decisions to send more troops to the war zones in the Middle East, for a new troop buildup in Afghanistan and to begin installation of the THAAD anti-ballistic missile system in South Korea and launch war games pointed toward the North have ratcheted up tensions in both parts of the world. This increases the possibility of uncontrolled events spiraling into military confrontation.

All these steps — coupled with Trump’s call for a multibillion dollar expansion of the Pentagon’s war machine, including upgrading its nuclear arsenal — build on war moves taken by the Obama and preceding administrations since Washington unleashed its bloody invasion of Iraq in 1991.

While still the most powerful imperialist power on earth, Washington is weaker today than in its heyday after its victory over enemy and ally alike coming out of World War II. The propertied rulers lost the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union left them without the counterrevolutionary Stalinists to strangle workers’ struggles in search of “peaceful co-existence.”

They can’t conclude the wars they’ve started in recent years, which increase in scope and destruction, leading to catastrophe for working people.

The growing war threat today is not rooted in the specific foreign policy of Trump’s or any of these administrations that aim to stabilize their crisis-ridden system in the interests of the ruling propertied families. It is rooted in the unfolding, slow-burning world capitalist economic depression and developing social crisis of world imperialism.

“Working people around the world face an unstable prewar situation, not a stabilized postwar period,” said the May 1991 introduction to an article by Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes, titled Opening Guns of WWIII: Washington’s Assault on Iraq, published in New International no. 7. “Washington’s assault on Iraq was the first of the wars that will mark the segment of the historic curve of capitalist development announced by the October 1987 crash of the stock markets from New York to Tokyo, from Bonn to Hong Kong. Capitalism today is marching not only toward more wars but at the same time stumbling toward a depression and world social crisis.”

The author was right on the money.

Barnes explained the only solution to decaying capitalism’s drive to war is the building of a revolutionary party and movement of millions of working people — the deplorables, as Hillary Clinton called us — to overthrow the capitalist warmakers and lead the working class to political power, as revolutionary Cuba’s workers and farmers did over 50 years ago.

This is what the Socialist Workers Party is all about. It is your party. Join us in this struggle, a life worth living.

Related articles:
Washington escalates Syria war, looks to attack Raqqa
US-led war games in SKorea exacerbate tensions in Asia

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