THE US and its South Korean puppets are set to begin their largest ever joint military exercises amid the high tensions that they have created on the Korean peninsula.
A massive army supported by nuclear armed naval and air forces, including 300,000 South Korean and 15,000 US troops are massed on the border to take part in aggressive manoeuvres which the North Korean government rightly says are a rehearsal for an invasion of the northern half of the peninsula that constitutes North Korea.
The South Korean defence minister Han Min-koo has already been boasting that the exercises will be twice the size of last year. The manoeuvres start today, just days after the UN Security Council passed unanimously a resolution that condemned North Korea for its nuclear testing and imposed more sanctions on the country.
Russia could have vetoed the resolution, but as part of the manoeuvring of Stalinist leader Putin to establish an agreement with his ‘western colleagues’ that would respect each others ‘interests’, leading to a lifting of sanctions against Russia, the Russian delegate voted to sacrifice North Korea, thereby assisting the war drive against North Korea, and obviously weakening Russia in the process.
The Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy also says that it agrees with the sanctions, despite the fact that the USA is already preparing for a war in the Pacific and daily threatening that China must not construct island military bases in the China Seas in the eastern Pacific.
Both Russia and China have learnt nothing from the way that a UN Security Council resolution was used to launch the NATO air attack on Libya, after Colonel Gadaffi was persuaded to give up Libya’s weapons of mass destruction by Tony Blair.
Having destroyed Libya as a modern advanced state, the imperialists then moved onto Syria, seeking to destroy another advanced Arab country, creating millions of refugees, and forcing Russia to intervene since bringing down Assad would lead to the Islamic hordes being despatched to southern Russia and the Caucasus.
With Putin now looking for a diplomatic settlement in Syria, he does not want any complication over Korea – so the imperialists were given the green light on the Security Council, a move that will rebound against Russia before very long!
The North will not make the same mistake as Gadaffi. Indeed it has matched the statements of Tory leaders like Cameron and Foreign Secretary Hammond who have stated that only the prospect of mutually assured destruction at the hands of Trident submarines has kept the Russian hordes from ‘our shores’.
In fact North Korea, unlike the UK, is really threatened with nuclear annihilation and has legitimate rights to take measures to defend itself. The North has said that it is readying nuclear weapons for ‘pre-emptive’ use. As is well known it has not even got one per cent of the US and UK nuclear arsenal – it has got just enough to keep the imperialists at bay!
The exercises, which begin today run until 30th April. Meanwhile, the US and South Korea are in formal talks on the deployment of the US missile defence system to the peninsula, a move strongly opposed by North Korea, Russia and China.
Beijing says the Thaad anti-missile system compromises its security and would undermine its nuclear deterrent. It is obvious that bureaucratic diplomacy, or even nuclear weaponry cannot guarantee Russia and China from imperialist attack. While imperialism exists, Russia, China and North Korea have a right to nuclear weapons.
However, the only real way to defend all of the gains that followed on from the 1917 October revolution is to smash imperialism through the victory of the world socialist revolution. This requires the construction of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to organise socialist revolutions to smash capitalism and imperialism and create the revolutionary conditions for the formation of the World Socialist Republic.
