INCREASINGLY strident calls to defeat Russia’s military defence of the Donbass reached fever pitch yesterday ahead of the one-off ‘peace’ meeting between US President Trump and Russia’s President Putin in Alaska.
Excluded from the meeting, Ukrainian president Zelensky frantically pleaded with Trump, and EU leaders, plus visiting UK PM Keir Starmer, for no surrender in the Ukraine, no territorial swaps and for future defence guarantees and advanced weaponry from his imperialist allies.
Trump himself threatened Russia with ‘very severe consequences’ if his Russian counterpart does not agree to end the war and warned Putin ‘not to mess with me’ while dangling access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth and sanctions-relaxation as inducements for Russia to make a ‘peace deal’.
But on Thursday, the British military intervened to threaten war with Russia when Admiral Tony Radakin, Chief of the Defence Staff, warned that NATO allies must be ‘assertive’ and cautioned against submitting to Moscow’s peace demand.
‘NATO allies must be assertive in every domain – nuclear, land, sea, air, cyber and space – as well as in the diplomatic and economic arenas,’ he warned. Meanwhile the UK and EU are frantically rearming to prepare for the coming ‘war with Russia’.
Radakin added: ‘The armed forces will become stronger and more lethal and, in time, larger too. The army will be recapitalised, with new equipment to double its lethality by 2027. NATO is strong. Russia is weak. It is not complacent to point this out.’
Stoking the war fever, the British state revelled in celebrating the 80th anniversary of VJ Day when Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, finally ending WWII. In a VJ Day address, King Charles III remembered the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings of the two Japanese cities in 1945 that killed more than 200,000 people and said: ‘But in recalling so much suffering, we must not lose sight of how great was the cause and how sweet the victory.’
However, the imperialists are not acting from a position of strength, but are being driven by the biggest of all debt crises of the capitalist system with the US national debt topping $37 trillion dollars which they cannot repay with an economy sliding into recession and bankruptcy. Starmer’s UK economy is not healthier with a national debt of £2.7 trillion, incurring interest payments of around £100 billion annually.
Little wonder that Trump needed to call in the National Guard in Los Angeles and now in Washington DC to suppress the working class that refuses to accept being dumped into poverty and destitution like the 1930s Great Depression.
Trump is at war with the US working class, Russia and its erstwhile allies with tariffs and a trade war and is moving to open police military dictatorship and foreign wars abroad to regain control of the semi-colonial countries and even its imperialist allies.
Similarly in Britain, Starmer’s mass arrests of pro-Palestine supporters using anti-terror laws marks the beginning of the end of bourgeois parliamentary rule in Britain and the incipient emergence of dictatorships.
The decision of NATO nations to commit 5 per cent of GDP to defence and security – with 3.5 per cent for core military purposes – is a historic turning point.
Clearly the time has come for the capitalist system to be put out of its death agony before it embarks on war against Russia and also China.
The working class must take the opportunity at the forthcoming TUC Congress on 7th September to insist it calls a general strike now.
Action is needed to end the war in Gaza, end the frenzied attacks on the workers in Britain and end Britain’s warmongering in Ukraine.
This means bringing down this bankrupt pro-capitalist Labour government and going forward to a workers government, a socialist economy and a future for peace in the Middle East.
Build the revolutionary leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party and take the lead in this decisive struggle. Let’s see an end to barbaric capitalism and the victory of the world socialist revolution!
