US President Barak Obama, in his speech to both houses of parliament last Wednesday, did little more than restate the old George Bush doctrine of the ‘New World Order’, albeit dressed up in more coherent language and with less cowboy baloney.
He opened with a brief, and highly inaccurate sketch of the shared history of the US and Britain, from the Magna Carta through to the Second World War, in which Obama claimed that the US and UK had stood shoulder to shoulder to confront and defeat the forces of Nazi Germany.
In reality, the defeat of the German forces was down to the enormous sacrifice and struggle of the workers of the Soviet Union and the Red Army, but it is no accident that they didn’t even warrant a mention in this re-writing of history.
Obama’s intention was to lay out in the clearest fashion that US imperialism is prepared to declare war on the entire world in order to save capitalism and that the capitalist system is the ‘only game in town’.
He also brought out that in this war the role assigned to his weak sister, British imperialism, is that of a sub-contractor, providing the cannon fodder as required for dirty little colonial wars.
This is to be the new ‘special relationship’, refashioned into an ‘essential’ one, similar to the relationship between the ‘black hundreds’ and the Tsar of all the Russias.
The task ahead came out clearly in the speech when Obama alluded to the huge international crisis of the capitalist system and the weakness of US imperialism and the apparent growth of the economies of China, India and Brazil.
He said: ‘It has become fashionable in some quarters to question whether the rise of these nations will accompany the decline of American and European influence around the world. Perhaps, the argument goes, these nations represent the future, and the time for our leadership has passed.
‘That argument is wrong. The time for our leadership is now. It was the United States, the United Kingdom, and our democratic allies that shaped a world in which new nations could emerge and individuals could thrive. And even as more nations take on the responsibilities of global leadership, our Alliance will remain indispensable to the goal of a century that is more peaceful, more prosperous and more just.’
Stripped to its bones this statement is a clear warning to the upstart nations, who may harbour delusions of grandeur, that the US is in control and, along with its UK retainer, will exert all its power to see that it remains this way.
Leading the defence of US imperialism will be NATO.
Obama made this clear when he talked of a ‘revitalised’ NATO that ‘will continue to hew to that original vision of its founders, allowing us to rally collective action for the defence of our people, while building upon the broader belief of Roosevelt and Churchill that all nations have both rights and responsibilities, and share a common interest in an international architecture that keeps the peace.’
The Libyan people are daily experiencing what this ‘international architecture’ means as NATO bombs and kill civilians in Tripoli, while announcements are made in the UK that the war is to be escalated by dispatching Apache attack helicopters to take the ground war to Tripoli.
NATO, led by Britain and France, is clearly playing the role assigned it, as attack dog for US imperialism.
Looming over the entire speech, however, was the simple fact that despite Obama’s claims of ‘victory’ in Afghanistan and Iraq and the complete supremacy of US imperialism, it has been defeated in its attempts to re-conquer the world and exert the same dominance that Britain had in the hey-day of imperialism in the 19th century.
The essential truth is that far from being dominant, Imperialism today stands rotten-ripe for overthrow by the developing world socialist revolution!
