Iran and friends use bombs and missiles to give a taste of war to come

GULF OF OMAN (May 22, 2019). F/A-18F Super Hornet making an arrested landing on the flight deck

of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72). Photo: United States Navy.

by Paul Rogers

Power vacuums in the Pentagon as a pattern of attacks across the Middle East look suspiciously like a demonstration of Iranian ‘irregular’ power.

The evolution of the US-Iran confrontation gets more complex by the day, a matter of smoke and mirrors with multiple accusations and uncertainties, and domestic politics constantly driving international actions.

For Trump, the current complication is that his Acting Secretary of Defense, Patrick Shanahan, has suddenly withdrawn his application for the permanent job because of family issues dating back some years. Not only does this leave a leadership vacuum at the top of the Pentagon but Trump’s intended replacement for Shanahan, army secretary Mark Esper, leaves a gap in the army job only a month after the air force secretary, Heather Wilson, herself stepped down.

In spite of this uncertainty, the military rhetoric coming out of Washington is growing tougher. Much is being made of the air force and navy firepower being moved towards the Gulf just as the White House insists that Iran has been responsible for the recent attacks on tankers in the Gulf of Oman.

Iran is not the only country that the US is berating. One of the most senior US military commanders, Paul Selva – an air force general and vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – this week reminded other states which import oil and gas via the Strait of Hormuz that keeping the sea lanes open is not just a US responsibility. If a war comes, other countries will be expected to play a substantial role. Selva pointed out that the Gulf is far less important to the US than it was during the ‘tanker war’ of the 1980s, with fracking and other new technologies tapping more fossil fuels at home.

Interestingly the one country that could contribute almost overnight – the UK (as explained here a couple of weeks ago) – is in the middle of internal political upheavals. The rivals to replace Theresa May at Number 10 are vying with each other to be the most macho and pro-Trump. This is hardly likely to aid rational policy development, as both remaining candidates claim to want to make Britain great again.

Trump’s own rhetoric has been toned down but his problem with Iran remains and is made worse by that country’s own behaviour. It may be difficult to accept that almost everything that Iran is currently doing speaks of a canny assessment of Trump and a coordinated approach, but it is a possibility that does deserves examining.

Iran’s show of strength?

Earlier this week Iran announced that it would step up low-level uranium enrichment. This is the process that produces fuel for nuclear power stations; weapons-grade uranium must be enriched much further. [JR1] The nuclear deal that Iran signed in 2015 with China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK and the US – the US withdrew from the agreement last year – limits the amount of uranium it can enrich. Iran said that it would exceed that limit on 27 June. Meanwhile, consider the military and paramilitary happenings of the past couple of weeks.

All the tanker attacks have been low-level, typically using small limpet mines placed above the water line: enough to have an obvious effect but unlikely to cause serious casualties or sink ships. The attacks have all been outside the Persian Gulf, off the coast of the Arabian Sea and in the vicinity of Fujairah. This is the terminus for a pipeline that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz, with its Iranian coastline, to bring oil overland from Abu Dhabi.

Another pipeline that avoids the strait runs across Saudi Arabia from its eastern oilfields to a terminal on its Red Sea coast: the Saudis report that this was recently hit by an armed drone believed fired by the Houthi rebels in Yemen, allied to Iran.

In other developments this week, three Katyusha rockets were fired at Camp Taji, an Iraqi army base north of Baghdad where US trainers work. The Balad air base, also north of Baghdad, was hit by mortar fire in a separate attack.

Thus, tankers are attacked outside the Strait of Hormuz showing that bypassing the strait through Fujairah is still vulnerable to disruption, and an alternative pipeline route across Saudi Arabia is also attacked. Add to this the paramilitary attacks in Iraq on two bases used by US trainers of the Iraqi army, along with Iran threatening to respond to Trump’s abandonment of the nuclear deal, and you get a picture of a country not willing to buckle and also ready to send reminders of how an ‘irregular’ war could be waged.

This could all be coincidence, but it really is stretching things a bit when you put it together. Moreover, the risk of paramilitary attacks is certainly taken seriously by the Pentagon: witness the decision to send 2,500 extra troops to the region to help protect US bases and facilities.

Also being taken seriously is the shooting down of a US navy drone in what Tehran claims was Iranian airspace. The drone in question, a Northrop Grumman MQ-4C Triton, is one of the largest and most expensive uncrewed aircraft in the world, the size of a strike aircraft and costs $182 million apiece. It has a range of over 9,000 miles, can fly for 30 hours and reach an altitude of 60,000 feet. If it was flying anything like that high there will be questions asked in the Pentagon and the White House over how the Iranians could have managed to destroy it.

On the US side, Trump’s unpredictability and bombast, coupled with personnel upheavals in the Pentagon, do not make for sound judgement. Yesterday’s approval and then aborting of attacks on Iran in retaliation for the drone strike could have been a warning, or indecision, or both.

However, there are signs of Washington drawing back. One key indicator is that the US Special Representative for Iran, Brian Hook, travels to Paris early next week to meet senior French, German and British officials. Hook is an experienced White House advisor going back two decades. If the Europeans put serious pressure on the Trump administration to reduce tension, that might just have an effect. The bigger issue, though, is that it may be Iran rather than the US setting the agenda.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy's international-security editor, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on twitter at: @ProfPRogers

This article first appeared on openDemocracy 21 June 2019

US Army tweet provokes outpouring of antiwar sentiment

Cityscape of Qayyarah town on fire.The Mosul District, Northern Iraq, Western Asia. 09 November, 2016

Photo: Mstyslav Chernov (Wikimedia Commons)

by George Marlowe

“It’s been hell for the world”

The United States Army did not get the response it intended when it asked in a tweet last week, “How has serving impacted you?” Instead of paeans to the military, the horrific reality of war on a world scale broke through the annual celebration of American militarism over the Memorial Day weekend.

By Monday night, there were over 11,000 comments in response to the US Army’s question. The official lies and platitudes employed by the ruling elite and the media to exalt war were shattered by stories detailing the living hell that has been imposed on millions of lives.

So massive was the outpouring of sentiment on social media that the response was covered by the mainstream news Monday night, a singular rarity on a day usually devoted to mindless jingoism. The incident even made headlines around the world, an expression of the vast global impact of US militarism.

Veteran suicides, depression, violence, recurring nightmares, post-traumatic stress disorder, drug abuse, addiction, alcoholism, rape and sexual assault by commanding officers, inadequate health care, generational trauma, exposure to chemical agents, war crimes. These were just some of the nightmarish tales that emerged.

Heartbreaking stories of veteran suicides were all too common. Shane Burley’s story was repeated in various forms by numerous people. “My best friend from high school was denied his mental health treatment and forced to return to a third tour in Iraq, despite having such deep trauma that he could barely function,” Shane wrote. “He took a handful of sleeping pills and shot himself in the head two weeks before deploying.”

Sean described what he called “the ‘Combat Cocktail’: PTSD, severe depression, anxiety. Isolation. Suicide attempts. Never ending rage. It cost me my relationship with my eldest son and my grandson. It cost some of my men so much more. How did serving impact me? Ask my family.”

Lies used to manufacture public consent for war were also opposed. “Don’t fabricate enemies and shove innocent Americans into wars that kill innocent civilians,” wrote one person. “You’ve gained nothing from all the wars combined. It’s been hell for the world.”

For all the nauseating glorification of the military by the media and the political establishment, those that serve in the military as cannon fodder are generally economic conscripts looking for a way out of poverty and the chance for a college degree. The reality is that they end up maimed, broken and scarred, with generations of families and friends affected by the trauma.

More than 5,500 veterans killed themselves last year, and active-duty military suicides were at an all-time high in 2018. More than 321 of those in active duty in the military killed themselves in 2018, with 138 in the US Army alone.

A 2018 study by the Council on Foreign Relations found that recruits from families with annual incomes less than $38,400 a year made up 19 percent of soldiers. Over 60 percent of recruits come from families with annual incomes less than $61,403, and over 80 percent come from families who make less than $80,912. The study did not show the levels at which the top 5 percent or the top 1 percent participated in the wars, but they no doubt constitute a tiny minority.

Numerous commenters on the US Army Twitter thread referred to the statements of Major-General Smedley Butler, who famously confessed in 1933, “War is just a racket. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”

There is deep opposition to war in the working class in the United States and internationally. As with every other political issue, however, the real interests of the vast majority of the population are excluded from official political life.

In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, this sentiment found expression in mass demonstrations of millions of people throughout the world. Opposition to the Iraq war was channeled behind the Democratic Party, culminating in the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Extending the Bush administration’s “war on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama attacked more than seven countries, including Libya and Syria, and killed thousands of innocent civilians through drone warfare.

The Trump administration now plans to dispatch 1,500 new troops to the Middle East and has threatened to “end” Iran. His administration also announced the doctrine of “great power” conflict, preparing even bigger military conflagrations against Russia and China that hurtle the world towards a third world war.

In 2017, the Department of Veterans Affairs under the Trump administration proposed to close more than 1,100 facilities in an effort to privatize health care. While only $220 billion was allotted to Veterans Affairs for the 2020 budget, more than $718 billion was requested by the Pentagon, a five percent increase over the previous year. If the trend continues, more than $7 trillion will be spent on war over the next decade.

With the support of the Democratic Party, moreover, the Trump administration is intensifying its campaign against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for exposing the crimes of American imperialism.

The Democrats have waged their opposition to Trump largely on the demand that the administration adopt a more aggressive position against Russia and expand the war in Syria and the Middle East. The Democrats have sought to position themselves as the party of the military and the intelligence agencies, hailing as heroes such arch warmongers as the late Republican Senator John McCain.

And the organizations of the complacent and privileged upper-middle class that surround the Democratic Party have become the most adamant supporters of American imperialism.

The sentiments expressed in the response to the US Army tweet must and will find organized form. The mass opposition to war must be connected to the growing struggles of workers, in the United States and internationally, against inequality and exploitation. The growing support for socialism must be connected to a conscious political movement of the international working class against capitalism and imperialism.

This article first appeared on World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on 28 May 2019, and was republished with permission.

Tensions rise between US, Russia and China over Venezuelan coup

US/CIA Hands off Venezuela Philly Protest June 9, 2017, organized by Philly International Action Center (photo source: Flickr)

By Bill Van Auken

US President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House Wednesday that “Russia has to get out” of Venezuela. Asked how Washington would enforce this demand, he responded, “We’ll see. All options are open.”

Trump delivered his ultimatum during a White House photo op with Fabiana Rosales, the wife of right-wing opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who, with US backing, proclaimed himself “interim president” of Venezuela in January, calling upon the military to overthrow the existing government of President Nicolas Maduro.

Rosales, referred to by Trump administration officials as Venezuela’s “first lady,” is conducting an international tour aimed at drumming up support for the US-orchestrated regime change operation, which has flagged noticeably since the fiasco suffered last month with the failure of a cynical attempt to force trucks carrying supposed humanitarian aid across the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

Both Guaidó and his US patrons had predicted that the provocation would trigger a rising by the Venezuelan armed forces against Maduro. With a handful of right-wing opposition supporters and gang members turning out for the “humanitarian” hoax, security forces easily contained the attack.

The latest US provocation has centered upon the arrival in Venezuela over the weekend of two Russian aircraft carrying approximately 100 military personnel. An Antonov An-124 cargo jet and an Ilyushin II-62 passenger plane landed on Saturday at the Maiquetía airport outside of Caracas.

The arrival of the relative handful of Russian military personnel triggered a flurry of denunciations from top Trump administration officials, who have been orchestrating the bid to bring down the Venezuelan government.

White House national security adviser John Bolton declared that the US “will not tolerate hostile foreign military powers meddling” within the Western Hemisphere.

Earlier this month, Bolton invoked the Monroe Doctrine as the foundation of US policy in Venezuela. This 19th century declaration of US foreign policy initially was directed at opposing any attempts by the empires of Europe to recolonize newly independent republics in Latin America. In the 20th century, it was invoked by successive US governments as a license for US imperialism to use military force to impose its will throughout the hemisphere, resulting in some 50 direct armed interventions and the imposition of fascist-military dictatorships over much of South and Central America.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, meanwhile, told his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, in a March 25 telephone conversation, that Washington would “not stand idly by as Russia exacerbates tensions in Venezuela,” according to a spokesman for the State Department.

The State Department called the arrival of the Russian troops a “reckless escalation” of tensions in Venezuela, adding that “The continued insertion of Russian military personnel to support the illegitimate regime of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela risks prolonging the suffering of the Venezuelan people…”

What hypocrisy! Washington has imposed an ever-escalating wave of sanctions that have gravely exacerbated the intense crisis of the country’s economy, with Venezuelan working people paying the price. A Trump administration official briefing reporters last Friday boasted: “The effect of the sanctions is continuing and cumulative. It’s sort of like in Star Wars when Darth Vader constricts somebody’s throat, that’s what we are doing to the regime economically,”

The Russian Foreign Ministry quoted Lavrov as having responded to Pompeo by charging that “Washington’s attempts to organize a coup in Venezuela and threats against its legitimate government are in violation of the UN Charter and undisguised interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry said that the arrival of the Russian troops was in fulfillment of an “agreement on military technical cooperation” signed between Moscow and Caracas in 2001.

“As in colonial times 200 years ago, the US continues to regard Latin America as a zone for its exclusive interests, its own ‘backyard’ and they directly demand that it should obey the US without a word, and that other countries should steer clear of the region,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Tuesday. “[D]oes the US think that people are waiting for it to bring democracy to them on the wings of its bombers? This question can be answered by Iraqis, Libyans and Serbs.”

Meanwhile, a US official speaking to Reuters expressed concern that the Russian military personnel who arrived on Saturday included a team of specialists in cybersecurity.

This concern coincides with a new series of electricity blackouts that began on Monday, affecting much of Caracas and at least 16 states. The Maduro government has blamed the outages on sabotage, including cyber-attacks on the power system’s computerized infrastructure.

Meanwhile the Venezuelan situation has also ratcheted up tensions between Washington and Beijing, with the US forcing the cancelation of a 60th anniversary meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which was set to begin on March 26 in Chengdu.

The Trump administration had demanded that the IDB accept a representative named by its puppet Guaidó as Venezuela’s representative at the meeting. China refused to issue a visa to Washington’s man, Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard economist and former minister in the government of Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez, which oversaw the massacre of some 3,000 workers and youth in the suppression of the popular 1989 revolt known as the caracazo. Hausmann has publicly called for the US to invade Venezuela along with a “coalition of the willing.”

A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry defended Beijing’s action on Tuesday, declaring that “Guaidó himself is not a president elected through legal procedures and thus lacks legitimacy,” adding that “changing Venezuela’s representative at the IDB won’t help solve the Venezuelan issue.”

In response to a question about US denunciations of the Russian military presence in Venezuela, the Chinese spokesman stated: “First of all, countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Latin American countries, are all independent and sovereign states. They have the right to determine their own foreign policy and their way to engage in mutually beneficial cooperation with countries of their own choosing.”

He added, in a pointed criticism of US imperialist policy, “Latin American affairs are not a certain country’s exclusive business, nor is Latin America a certain country’s backyard.”

The heated exchanges between Washington, on the one hand, and Moscow and Beijing, on the other, expose the geo-strategic interests that underlie US imperialism’s regime change operation in Venezuela. Both Russia and China have established extensive economic and political ties with Venezuela, which boasts the largest proven oil reserves on the planet.

China has invested upwards of $50 billion in Venezuela over the past decade in loan agreements repaid with oil exports. Russia’s total investments in the country are estimated at close to $25 billion, including in the exploitation of a significant share of the country’s oil fields.

Washington views the Venezuelan crisis through the prism of the “great power” conflicts with “revisionist” states that it laid out in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy and the Pentagon’s strategy document elaborated at the end of 2017.

US imperialism is determined to wrest control of Venezuela’s vast oil resources for the US-based energy monopolies and deny them to its global rivals, particularly China and Russia. To that end, it is prepared to starve the Venezuelan people and turn Latin America into a battlefield in a third world war.

This article first appeared on World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on 28 March 2019, and was republished with permission.

Trump says there is no set date for Syria troop withdrawal

U.S. Marines with SPMAGTF-CR-CC practice company size reinforcement, live fire ranges in Syria (photo: U.S. Central Command)

By Bill Van Auken

In a meandering and at times incoherent White House cabinet meeting held in front of the media, US President Donald Trump defended his surprise December 19 announcement of his decision to withdraw all US troops from Syria, while indicating that there is no set timetable for doing so.

Initially there were reports from within the administration that US forces—officially numbered at 2,000 but possibly consisting of as many as twice that number—would be brought out of Syria within 30 days. Subsequently, the time frame was put at 60 to 100 days. Since the beginning of the new year, it has been reported that the deadline has been extended to 120 days.

The withdrawal decision provoked the resignation of Defense Secretary General James Mattis, who penned a letter implicitly criticizing Trump for abandoning allies and failing to confront Russia, as well as that of Brett McGurk, the US envoy to the so-called war on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The announcement likewise provoked a storm of criticism from both Democratic and Republican members of Congress.

At Wednesday’s cabinet meeting, Trump answered a reporter’s question on the timetable for the Syria withdrawal by denying that he had signed off on a three-month period or that he had ever used the words “fast or slow.” Instead, he merely reiterated, “I’m getting out—we’re getting out of Syria.”

CNN reported that the 120-day framework had been presented by the US military command, which claimed that it would be impossible to organize a safe and orderly pullout any sooner. Part of the problem is the huge amounts of weaponry and ammunition that the US military has sent into Syria, which cannot be removed as quickly as the troops themselves and which the Pentagon refuses to leave behind.

Pressed on how soon US troops would pull out of Syria, Trump responded: “Over a period of time. I never said I’m getting out tomorrow. I said we’re pulling our soldiers out, and they will be pulled back in Syria, and we’re getting out of Syria. Yeah. Absolutely. But we’re getting out very powerfully.”

He justified his decision by citing his election campaign pledge to bring US troops home from “endless wars” as part of his “America First” agenda.

At the same time, he stated in virtually the same breath that it was time to withdraw from Syria because the US had “decimated ISIS” and that “Syria was lost long ago.”

He attributed this loss to the failure of the Obama administration—under which the CIA-backed war for regime change was launched in 2011—to carry through on its threat to initiate a direct US military onslaught against Syria over alleged chemical weapons attacks in 2013.

“So Syria was lost long ago,” Trump said. “It was lost long ago. And besides that, we’re talking about sand and death. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about, you know, vast wealth. We’re talking about sand and death.”

The US president’s crude and rambling remarks provide at least a glimpse into the real thinking within the US ruling class. The unending wars in the Middle East and Central Asia have not been about “weapons of mass destruction,” a “war on terror” or “human rights,” but rather about “vast wealth” in terms of energy reserves.

Syria’s oil and natural gas resources are insignificant compared to other countries in the region. The war that Washington and its allies provoked, killing hundreds of thousands and turning millions into refugees, was about denying Russia a foothold in the region and rolling back the regional influence of Iran.

Trump suggested that the withdrawal of US troops would serve to undermine Moscow and Tehran, which would be forced to confront the remnants of ISIS in Syria. “But you know where else they’re going?” Trump said in relation to ISIS. “To Iran, who hates ISIS more than we do. They’re going to Russia, who hates ISIS more than we do.”

Again, through the bravado and incoherence, a glimmer of truth. The Islamist militias in Syria, ISIS included, were armed and financed by the US and its allies for the purpose of toppling the Assad government. These same forces can and will be turned against US imperialism’s rivals and regional opponents, including Russia, China and Iran.

Trump turned to Iran in his rambling monologue, declaring, “Iran is a much different country than it was when I became President…. I had a meeting at the Pentagon with lots of generals. They were like from a movie. Better looking than Tom Cruise, and stronger. And I had more generals than I’ve ever seen, and we were at the bottom of this incredible room. And I said, ‘This is the greatest room I’ve ever seen.’”

The room apparently included a “big board” showing a map of the Middle East with Iran advancing on all fronts.

“I saw more computer boards than I think that they make today,” Trump said. “And every part of the Middle East, and other places that was under attack, was under attack because of Iran. And I said to myself, ‘Wow.’ I mean, you look at Yemen, you look at Syria, you look at every place. Saudi Arabia was under siege.”

What emerged from Trump’s longwinded and disjointed presentation is that the Syria troop withdrawal, if it is executed, represents merely a tactical shift in what will be a continuation of the decades-long military campaign to assert US hegemony over the Middle East.

“We are continuing the fight,” Trump said at one point, adding that “there was a lot of misinterpretation.” He said that the US was doing “very exciting” things in the Middle East that he did not want to talk about. “A lot of great people understood it. Lindsey Graham understood it.”

The Republican Senator Graham, an influential figure on national security issues, had condemned the withdrawal decision as “a huge Obama-like mistake.” After meeting with Trump on December 30, Graham said that Trump had told him “some things that I didn’t know that make me feel a lot better about where we’re headed in Syria.”

Meanwhile, a senior congressional Democrat attacked Trump from the right for allegedly abandoning a military challenge to Russian and Iranian forces in Syria. Steny Hoyer, the new House Majority Leader, responded to Trump’s remarks by describing the withdrawal decision as “dangerous and reckless” and charging that it “creates a vacuum for Iran, Russia, and other adversaries to exploit.”

The essential component of the Democrats’ opposition to Trump is over imperialist strategy and tactics. Speaking for layers of the military and intelligence apparatus, they oppose any lessening of the confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia, particularly in the Middle East.

Trump and his supporters within the ruling establishment see domination of the Asia Pacific region as the key priority. General Mattis’ replacement as acting defense secretary, the 30-year Boeing aircraft executive Patrick Shanahan, during his first meeting with civilian leaders at the Pentagon told them to focus on “China, China, China.”

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reported Thursday that the US military has sharply escalated its bombing campaign against alleged ISIS targets in eastern Syria, including villages packed with civilians who have fled other areas that came under siege.

“The civilians in these areas have no place to go or hide from the US bombardment of their villages,” a civilian activist told Al Jazeera.

The bombing campaign, dubbed Operation Roundup, has struck numerous civilian targets, including the Yarmouk Hospital, the last public health facility treating civilians in the region. Striking such a facility is a war crime.

According to the report, the bombing campaign is also targeting internet cafes used by civilians, on the grounds that ISIS fighters also frequent them.

“They [the US] backstabbed all their allies and they’re killing the people here, and eventually the Islamic State will survive and spread, or it will fall,” an ISIS fighter interviewed for the report said. “But there will be people here who will remember what happened here, and they will carry on this information and it will spread throughout the Middle East.”

This article first appeared on World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on 4 January 2019, and was republished with permission.

US-China trade war intensifies

Photo: “China and the World Trade Organization” – Wikipedia

by Nick Beams

China has ruled out any further trade talks with the United States as long as the Trump administration continues to threaten and impose further tariffs on its exports.

The latest round of measures—the imposition of a 10 percent tariff on $200 billion worth of goods, set to escalate to 25 percent next year—came into effect on Monday. Just an hour after the new tariffs were enacted the official Xinhua newsagency published a white paper setting out Beijing’s position.

“The door for trade talks is always open,” it stated, “but negotiations must be held in an environment of mutual respect” and could not be carried out under the threat of tariffs.

In addition to the escalation of the latest tariffs to a rate of 25 percent, Trump has also issued a threat to strike levies on an additional $267 billion worth of Chinese goods, meaning that, if implemented, all of China’s exports would carry some form of tariff.

Tensions have been further heightened by the imposition of sanctions by the State Department on a Chinese military agency for its purchases of equipment from Russia in defiance of a unilateral ban imposed by the US over Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Speaking to Fox News last Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made clear that the US intends to escalate its actions, saying that Trump was not starting a trade war but engaging in one that was already underway. The Trump administration considers that since China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001 it has benefited to the detriment of the US.

“The trade war by China against the United States has been going on for years,” Pompeo said. “To the extent one wants to call this a trade war, we are determined to win it.”

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer is on record as saying that the US decision to support China’s accession to the world trade body was a mistake.

The escalation of the conflict and the growing recognition that it is not a temporary spat, able to be solved through negotiation, has led to expressions of concern in sections of the financial media.

In a comment piece, Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar wrote that while it would be easy to see the latest round of tariffs as just another provocative shot fired off by a president in need of overseas distractions, that would be wrong.

“In fact, far from being an ill-advised and hasty policy decision emanating solely from Donald Trump’s White House, this latest tariff round represents something much more dangerous and lasting: a true reset of economic and political relations between the US and China, and the beginning of something that looks more like a cold war than a trade war.”

Foroohar went on to point out that the “reset” is supported by sections of the political establishment extending well beyond Trump, including the Pentagon and what she called the “labour faction of the progressive left”—that is, the trade unions. To this list could be added the Democrats who are just as bellicose towards China as Trump, if not more so.

“They have different agendas, but coalesce around the idea that the US and China are in a long-term strategic rivalry, and that, as a result, US trade policy and national security policy should no longer be separated,” she wrote.

This connection has already been made clear in the latest National Defense Strategy issued by the Pentagon in January which labelled China a “strategic competitor” of the US using “predatory economics” to advance its regional and global position.

Viewed in this context, to label the conflict with China as simply the start of a “cold war”—drawing a parallel with relations between the US and the former Soviet Union—is misleading. The US never regarded the USSR as an economic threat that could undermine American hegemony. But that is a central concern of the anti-China hawks in the administration and their supporters in the wider political establishment.

They fear that the tides of economic development, which has seen the rapid expansion of China, especially since its entry into the WTO, are moving against the US, threatening its economic and ultimately military dominance. This must be prevented by all means necessary.

China’s entry into the WTO was promoted by the Clinton administration and carried through in 2001. The view at that time was that the low-cost manufacture and assembly of consumer goods by China, which had proved very beneficial to the US during the 1990s, would continue, and that China would remain at the bottom of global value chains.

However, capitalist economy has its own inherent objective logic and China has not remained in that position. It continues to supply cheaper consumer products, but the past decade and a half has seen it move rapidly up the value chain.

China overtook Germany as the world’s top exporter of goods in 2009 and its share of global manufacturing exports has expanded from 12 to 18 percent over the past decade.

Xu Bin, a professor at the China Europe International Business School told the Financial Times: “Chinese companies are abandoning low-end goods to move to middle-range goods, it’s actually a very fast change.”

The newspaper reported: “China is now the dominant producer in medium high-tech industries, with its global share nearly tripling in the past decade to 32 percent, according to the US National Science Board, surpassing the US in the late 2000s, and the EU this decade.”

Telecommunications, transport equipment and auto parts have grown as a proportion of China’s exports to the US, while the share of textiles and footwear has contracted. According to the World Bank, China’s share of the global capital goods market rose from 5 percent to 20 percent between 2007 and 2016.

The trade war launched by the US is driven by a determination to halt the next stage of China’s economic expansion as it moves to expand its industrial and technological base under the “Made in China 2025” plan.

The official position of the White House was set out by White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters in a statement last Saturday as the latest trade measures were due to go into effect. “We remain open to continuing discussions with China, but China must meaningfully engage on unfair trading practices,” she said.

Such “meaningful” engagement goes far beyond any action by China to reduce its trade deficit with the US. China has already advanced proposals to increase its exports from the US but they have been rejected as inadequate.

The central demand of the US administration is that China ceases its alleged theft and acquisition of intellectual property—a practice no doubt engaged in by China as it has been by other capitalist powers, including the US—and ends state subsidies to key industries, via the promotion of “national champions” and other so-called “market-distorting” policies: in other words, that Beijing essentially scraps its central economic strategy.

At this point, China still lags behind the US and other major powers in the next stage of technological development. However, on the basis of the vast changes over the past decade and a half, the fear is that this situation could rapidly change and pose a direct threat to US economic dominance.

This is the essential driving force of the US trade war which it intends to prosecute by all means at its disposal, both economic and, if necessary, military.

This article first appeared on World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on 26 September 2018, and was republished with permission.

US preparing for regime change and war against Iran

By Peter Symonds

Just days after President Donald Trump publicly threatened Iran with “consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered,” his National Security Adviser John Bolton held a top-level meeting to discuss US plans to confront Iran.

Notorious for his own belligerent threats against Iran, Bolton chairs the Principals Committee on national security matters, whose members include Defence Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Officials told the Wall Street Journal it was only the third such meeting Bolton had convened since his installation as national security adviser in April.

In May, the Trump administration effectively sabotaged the 2015 deal with Iran, under which Tehran severely restricted its nuclear programs and placed its nuclear facilities under intense international scrutiny in exchange for the winding back of crippling economic sanctions.

US sanctions will be re-imposed next month on Iran’s auto industry, as well as trade in gold and other metals. In November, bans will come into force on Iran’s energy sector—the mainstay of its exports and government finances—along with shipping and insurance and central bank transactions. Washington has vowed to reduce Iranian oil exports to near zero.

The Trump administration’s decisions have provocatively ramped up a dangerous confrontation with Iran. They also have worsened relations with US allies in Europe, which have developed economic links with Tehran since 2015. Washington has refused to exempt European companies from the sanctions, thus threatening to exclude them from the US financial system if they continue to do business with Iran.

No official statement was made following the Principals Committee meeting, but its purpose was clearly to plan how to ramp up the pressure on Iran. Officials told the Wall Street Journal the meeting discussed a “holistic” strategy to undermine Iranian influence throughout the Middle East. While it was unclear what military options were discussed, the article noted that the Defence Department had in the past “worked on limited military options.”

An Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) article last Friday provided further evidence that the Trump administration is preparing to attack Iran. “Senior figures in the Turnbull [Australian] Government have told the ABC they believe the United States is prepared to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, perhaps as early as next month, and that Australia is poised to help identify possible targets,” it stated.

Citing senior government sources, the ABC reported that Australian facilities would likely play a role in providing the US military with intelligence to wage war against Iran. While the sources denied that Australia would be involved in “active targeting,” the joint US-Australian spy base at Pine Gap in central Australia provides intelligence for a broad sweep of territory from the Middle East to East Asia, and also has provided targeting information for US drone assassinations.

The ABC suggested that “analysts from the little-known spy agency Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO) would also be expected to play a part.” The AGO uses satellite and aircraft imagery to provide geographical intelligence (GEOINT) that could be used for targeting in various military operations.

US Defence Secretary Mattis and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull tried to dismiss the ABC report. Mattis declared it was “fiction,” adding: “I’m confident that it’s not something that’s being considered right now.” Turnbull, however, stopped short of a complete denial, saying only that the ABC story “has not benefited from any consultation with me, the foreign minister, the defence minister or the Chief of the Defence Force.”

Mattis insisted the Trump administration had no plans for regime change in Iran. “There’s none that’s been instituted,” he claimed, but declared that “we need them to change their behaviour on a number of threats that they can pose with their military, with their secret services, with their surrogates and with their proxies.”

In reality, far from Iran posing a threat to the US, successive American administrations have menaced Iran with the full force of the US military, and sought to destabilise the regime in Tehran. Having torn up the 2015 agreement, the US is undoubtedly considering all its options, including military ones, in order to end what it regards as a significant obstacle to its domination in the Middle East.

The Israeli-based Haaretz newspaper reported late last month on tactical differences within the Trump administration over Iran, with Bolton pressing to exploit social unrest to engineer regime change. “One person who recently spoke with senior White House officials on the subject summarised Bolton’s view in the words: ‘One little kick and they’re done’,” it stated. Mattis, on the other hand, reportedly warned that such efforts could lead to full-scale war.

In early July, Axios reported that Israel and the US had “formed a joint working group a few months ago that is focused on internal efforts to encourage protests within Iran and pressure the country’s government.”

Ahead of next month’s sanctions, on the weekend the Iranian rial plunged in value to 111,500 against one US dollar on the unofficial market, from about 97,500 rials, according to a foreign exchange website. The currency has lost half of its value since April amid fears about the sanctions’ impact on the economy.

Deliberately exacerbating social tensions inside Iran, however, could fuel an explosive movement of working people against the Islamic regime in Tehran that would not be to Washington’s liking. In late 2017 and early 2018, mass protests of workers erupted over worsening social conditions and widening social inequality. These demonstrations had a completely different class character to the so-called Green Movement of the upper-middle classes of Tehran that sought to overturn the 2009 presidential election.

A mass movement of the Iranian working class would reverberate throughout the region, where workers in every country face a deepening social crisis.

This article first appeared on World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on 30 July 2018, and was republished with permission.

NATO, at war with itself, rearms for war with the world

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Photo: Imago/Eibner Europa

By Andre Damon

Media coverage of this week’s NATO summit was dominated by the deepening tensions between US President Donald Trump and Washington’s military allies, in particular Germany, amid a mounting international trade war launched by the White House last month.

Despite the displays of division, capped by Trump’s mafioso-like demands for greater military spending by his “delinquent” NATO allies, all members of the alliance reaffirmed their commitment to massive military rearmament, to be paid for with sweeping cuts to public infrastructure and attacks on the social position of the working class.

Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary-General of NATO, declared at the end of the summit that “after years of decline, when Allies were cutting billions, now they are adding billions.” He boasted that over the past year and a half, “European Allies and Canada have added an additional 41 billion dollars to their defense spending.”

The most immediate and tangible outcome of the summit was a NATO plan to expand the number of high-readiness military forces ready to attack Russia, or any other country, at a moment’s notice. The summit resolution declared that “Allies will offer an additional 30 major naval combatants, 30 heavy or medium manoeuvre battalions, and 30 kinetic air squadrons, with enabling forces, at 30 days’ readiness or less.”

The resolution reaffirmed NATO’s moves to deploy “four multinational combat-ready battalion-sized battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland,” including “over 4,500 troops from across the Alliance, able to operate alongside national home defence forces,” all within hundreds of miles of Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg.

The summit further agreed to create two new command headquarters: one in Norfolk, Virginia, “to focus on protecting the transatlantic lines of communication,” and a new command center in Germany to “ensure freedom of operation and sustainment in the rear area in support of the rapid movement of troops and equipment into, across, and from Europe.”

The summit resolution reaffirms the expansion of NATO’s nuclear arsenal, declaring, “As long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance. The strategic forces of the Alliance, particularly those of the United States, are the supreme guarantee of the security of Allies.”

It further vowed to continue NATO’s eastward expansion, reiterating NATO’s plans to invite Macedonia, Ukraine and Georgia to join the anti-Russian alliance.

The massive military build-up throughout Europe will be paid for with stepped-up attacks on the working class, through the dismantling of social safety nets and, as pioneered by the government of French President Emanuel Macron, wage and benefit cuts for state workers and the privatization of state assets.

Trump made clear that his demand for greater European military spending is inseparable from his mercantilist economic policies aimed at improving the US balance of trade with Germany, the world’s third-ranking exporter after China and the United States.

His denunciations of Germany for its purchase of natural gas from Russia became a focal point of the summit. In Trump’s view, Germany, which exports twice as much to the United States as it imports, must buy US natural gas at premium prices if it is to receive “protection” from the US military.

In pursuit of his trade conflict with Germany, Trump has consciously sought, as with his statement in support of a “hard” Brexit Thursday, to destabilize the European Union. He has promoted far-right, Eurosceptic political movements, whose denunciations of the “Brussels bureaucracy” are little more than a cover for national antagonisms with Germany, the dominant power within the EU.

But this is a dangerous game. Stratfor, in an analysis of the NATO summit, warned that Europe is a “continent riven with rivalry.”

“The U.S. strategy to deal with Russia will remain inextricably linked to how it manages a balance of power on the European continent,” it continues. “The United Kingdom is too consumed with its divorce from the bloc to assume its traditional balancing role for the Continent. That knocks out the third leg of the triad of great European powers, leaving an uneasy pair in France and Germany to prevent the Continent from descending into an all-too-familiar pattern of conflict.”

Stratfor adds, “But it is one thing for the U.S. president to recognize and operate within the limits of an uncomfortable reality without losing sight of its core imperative: maintaining a balance of power in Europe is still essential to the United States’ ability to manage growing competition with Russia and China and any peripheral distractions that may emerge. It is another thing to actively stoke nationalist embers on the Continent and encourage the unraveling of an imperfect bloc through trade assaults and transactional security threats. The latter is playing with fire.”

But “playing with fire” is exactly Trump’s strategy in both domestic and international politics. Trump, expressing the instincts of a semi-criminal real estate speculator, is intent on calling everyone’s bluff – allies and enemies alike.

Edward Luce, commenting Thursday in the Financial Times, noted that “Trump knows more than his critics give him credit for” because “he instinctively grasps other people’s bottom lines.” He adds, “The most lethal demagogue is one who grasps an underlying reality. Mr. Trump knows that Europe needs America more than America needs Europe.”

While “wrecking” alliances “reduces Washington’s global clout,” the “bigger loser is Europe. Its survival depends on America’s guarantee.”

In other words, Trump’s actions, “unconventional” as they are, reflect something objective in the US position in the world geopolitical and economic order. Recognizing the United States’ role as the reactionary keystone of global imperialism, Trump is demanding “protection” money from its “allies,” no matter the cost to the stability of the geopolitical order.

The American president, in the whirlwind of the past month, in which he scuttled the G7 summit, launched a trade war against Europe and China, held a summit with North Korea hoping to turn it against China, and is on the verge of a summit with Vladimir Putin aiming to turn Russia against Iran, has thrown all international alliances up in the air, aiming to extract maximum trade, economic and military concessions from “ally” and “enemy” alike.

This turbulent and chaotic world order recalls nothing so much as the geopolitics of the 1930s, with an endless parade of alliances created one day and overturned the next. In that period, each alliance created, no less than each alliance broken, was the prelude to the eruption of world war.

And in the 1930s, as now, every country was re-arming to the teeth amid the eruption of trade war and the rise and promotion of fascist movements throughout Europe.

The outcome of the NATO summit, with is peculiar combination of massive rearmament and explosive divisions, substantially heightens the risk of world war. Who will be the combatants in such a conflict, over what nominal cause, cannot be foretold. But all those who claimed that, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO would be converted into a “peaceful” and “democratic” alliance have been exposed as charlatans.

This article first appeared on World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on 12 July 2018, and was republished with permission.