IRAN has responded with a heroic defiance to the new economic sanctions imposed by the US ruling class that target its military defence, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, and three state-owned banks.
The Iranian foreign ministry said the sanctions were doomed to failure, while the military pledged that any attack on Iran will meet a massive and undefeatable opposition.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the measures are to ‘confront the threatening behaviour of the Iranians’, when the only bully in the region is the US and its financially maintained mercenary and mad-dog, Israel.
However, the United States has not been able to isolate Iran, and showed its anger at the degenerated and deformed workers’ states, Russia and China, which refused to support the sanctions.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin likened the US move to ‘mad people wielding razor blades’, while the Chinese government said it was ‘opposed to imposing sanctions too rashly in international relations’, adding it ‘can only make the situation more complicated’.
The US response was made by US Assistant Secretary of State Nicholas Burns who told the BBC: ‘It’s very difficult for countries to say we’re striking out on our own when they’ve got their own policies on the military side, aiding and abetting the Iranian government in strengthening its military.’
Here Russia and China are being depicted as sponsors of the Iranian ‘Axis of Evil’.
Burns, however, added that despite these differences with both Russia and China, the US still hoped that the UN Security Council would approve a third resolution imposing new sanctions this November.
The US ruling class understands the nature of Stalinism and knows that it wants a deal. It remembers Gorbachev’s go ahead to allow the US to invade Iraq in 1991 and Yeltsin’s deal that allowed it to enter Kosovo in 2000. It is still hoping that China and Russia will not veto new UN sanctions on Iraq.
Putin, despite the ‘razor blades’ talk does want a deal, despite the fact that Russia is being surrounded by NATO and its bases, and the fact that the US and UK ruling class make no secret of the fact that their strategic aim is to dismember the Russian Federation to steal its colossal mineral resources.
However, such a deal will be very difficult to accomplish, since history teaches that past Stalinist deals, such as the Hitler-Stalin pact, actually prepared the way for the German invasion of the USSR and that the next one will provide the basis for an assault on the Russian Federation.
The United States is now set on a course to attack Iran so that it can dominate the Gulf and Central Asia.
The refusal of Russia and China to support such an attack can hold up such an assault for a limited period until the imperialists are able to break down the resistance of the Stalinist bureaucracy or defy it, as they did during the Korean war.
What this means is that the working class of the world have got a certain amount of time to fight the US, British and EU ruling classes that are driving forward to redivide the world, at the same time as they are being forced by the growing economic crisis of capitalism to mount large scale and vicious attacks on the working class at home.
This is what is happening in the US and the UK and in France, Germany and Italy. Workers’ jobs, their wages, their pensions and their basic rights are under the most vicious ruling class attacks.
The essence of the world situation is that the crisis of capitalism and the massive resistance of the working class is creating the conditions for world revolution.
What revolutionaries must do in this situation is to build sections of the Fourth International in every country. These must mobilise the working class for socialist revolutions to overthrow capitalism and imperialism, and political revolutions in Russia and China to overthrow the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy to bring in soviet power.