A REPORT issued yesterday by the highly respected and influential Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) has bluntly warned that the drive to war by US imperialism against North Korea has reached such a high stage that a war is now a ‘real possibility’.
Its analysis of the conflict being stoked up by the imperialist powers, behind the increasingly bombastic threats and demands of US president Donald Trump, is that the overwhelming risk is that Trump will carry out his threat to ‘resolve’ the issue ‘sooner rather than later’.
According to the report: ‘War is now a real possibility. With North Korea making rapid progress in its missile and nuclear programmes, time is not on diplomacy’s side.’ This assessment follows the correct claim made by the North Korean Foreign Minister, Ri Yong-ho, that the threat by Trump that the regime of Kim Jong-un ‘won’t be around much longer’ was in itself a declaration of war by Washington and that North Korea had every right to defend itself.
Indeed, Trump has gone much further than threatening regime change. In his speech to the UN General Assembly, Trump stated that the US would ‘if forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.’
The crisis of capitalism is now so intense that US imperialism is quite prepared to ‘totally destroy’ a country of 25 million people, despite the fact that the North Korean military now has the nuclear means to hit the US and Japan in a counterstrike.
This situation cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a deranged president, but part of the death agony of a capitalist system, whose leader, the US ruling class, has already begun a trade war with its imperialist rivals, witness Boeing and Bombardier.
There is a real intention not just to turn North Korea into a vassal state of US imperialism or destroy it completely, but to return US capitalism to being the supreme capitalist power.
What is worrying RUSI is that North Korea has learnt the lessons of Iraq and Libya. The leader of Iraq was accused of having weapons of mass destruction (knowing that he did not) and both he and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were murdered after the 2003 attack.
In the case of Libya, Gadaffi was promised peaceful coexistence if Libya gave up its wmds, and when it did, NATO invaded the country using Islamists as their tool and murdered Gadaffi. These countries were invaded, pillaged and the lives of their peoples destroyed by US imperialism and its allies.
Knowing that submission will not save them, the North Korean government has made it clear that any pre-emptive strike by the US against the country will be met with an armed retaliation, setting the scene for a possible nuclear armageddon that would inevitably draw in China and Russia.
The RUSI report notes that if the US launches a ‘preventative strike’ on North Korea without the agreement of its ally South Korea it would send a signal that the US was prepared to ‘sacrifice Seoul to protect New York’ as the South Korean capital would inevitably be obliterated even if only conventional weapons were used.
In fact, the signal being sent out is that US imperialism is prepared to ‘sacrifice’ the lives of millions of people throughout the world in a nuclear war to dominate the whole of Asia and destroy its main rival, China.
The report calls on the UK government to urge the US to rule out preventative strikes adding that the UK should not give unconditional support to any surprise attack launched by the US and that the ‘UK government would have, at the most, only a few hours to make clear how it stood on what would be one of the most momentous strategic shocks of the post-Cold War era. Its decision would have as profound an impact on the UK’s international standing, and on its domestic politics, as the fateful decision to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the US in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.’
No amount of urging will deter US imperialism from the road to an all-out war. In its final and most barbaric imperialist stage, capitalism is, as Trotsky analysed, in its death agony, in an epoch of wars and revolutions.
The only way to stop the imperialist slaughter on a world scale is to support North Korea and for the working class of the world to disarm the imperialist powers with socialist revolutions and the victory of the world socialist revolution!
