PRESIDENT Obama has urged a ‘reset’ in relations between the US and Russia.
This comes after the defeat that the US and NATO suffered in the recent Georgian-Russian war, and also after the banking crash, which has led to the US requiring Russia to help finance its colossal state debt, by continuing to use its reserves to purchase US Treasury bonds.
Obama made it clear that his chosen Russian partner is President Medvedev.
Before he arrived in Moscow, Obama pointedly described Prime Minister Putin as having one foot in the Soviet ‘past’, and by that definition unsuitable for the role of ‘partner’.
However, Obama continued to have breakfast with Putin yesterday morning. At it he swallowed his own spite and told the Russian Premier that he had done ‘extraordinary work’ for Russia.
Later in his speech to students of the Moscow Business School, Obama basically sought to peddle a lie, to try to prove that US imperialism and Russia were natural partners.
The leader of the NATO power bloc, with military forces to match the rest of the world put together, said that the era of great powers and spheres of influence was over.
It was as if the war on Iraq, waged by Bush and Blair in defiance of the UN, and the war in Afghanistan, that America is spreading into Pakistan, were just mirages.
Obama also ‘forgot’ the way that NATO has moved its front line from central Europe right up to Russia’s borders, and that while he declares that Iran must not have nuclear power, his ally in the Middle East, Israel, which is maintained by the US, has at least 100 undeclared nuclear bombs, plus the means of delivery.
Obama declared that power blocks were 19th century, and therefore from that base it was completely irrational to consider that having US missile systems and radars all along Russia’s borders from the Baltics to Georgia was in any way a threat to Russia.
But Russians have long memories going far back, even before the Stalin-Hitler pact. In fact, from the signing of that pact with their ‘partner’ Hitler, it took just two years before Hitler invaded the USSR.
Driving the ‘brown plague’ out of Russia took a deadly toll of some 40 million killed and wounded.
History and its scars are not skin deep to the Russian workers. They cannot be fooled by a few words and phrases, however amenable their leaders might be to the overtures of Obama.
The masses of Russia know that imperialism and its power blocs and its ambitions and its drive to reorder the world, and capture its oil and gas resources, not only continue but are more desperate than ever because of the current worldwide capitalist slump.
On Monday, after meeting Medvedev, Obama signed eight separate agreements with Russia, one of which was a pact to negotiate a new arms control treaty to replace the 1991 Start I pact which expires in December.
He desperately needs the help of the Stalinist bureaucracy to try to drive back the Iranian revolution and pacify central Asia and the Middle East.
In his speech to the Business School students, Obama had to ask ‘What world order will replace the Cold War?’ In his reply he had to admit that he did not have an answer saying ‘Those questions still do not have clear answers.’
However, the Marxist movement does have the answer. The worldwide capitalist crisis is revolutionising the masses of the working class and the youth of the world.
It is driving forward the world socialist revolution that contains within it the political revolution in the area of the USSR to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy, Obama’s potential partner.
The political revolution will destroy the Stalinist bureaucracy, while the victory of the world socialist revolution will destroy capitalism and imperialism and bring in world socialism.
