IMMEDIATELY following the US illegal attack and kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last Friday, the Trump administration has placed US imperialism on a collision course with Russia, China and its former allies in Europe.
On Wednesday night, US Navy forces seized the Russian-flagged oil tanker Marinera in the North Atlantic as it headed to the safety of a Russian port.
This vessel, previously named Bella 1, was boarded after being relentlessly pursued from the Caribbean Sea since late last year by US ships, as part of the US campaign of blockading all oil exports from Venezuela.
The Marinera is Russian registered and flagged and the decision to seize it represents a clear threat to Russia that US imperialism is determined to wage a war to control the world’s oil resources, a war in which all international laws will be contemptuously disregarded.
US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, confirmed that the seizure of the Marinera was related to the ‘blockade of sanctioned and illicit Venezuelan oil’.
Russia had dispatched a submarine and military vessels to the general vicinity, where the Marinera was eventually boarded by US forces, underlining the dangers of an armed confrontation between Russia and US forces.
Aiding and abetting this act of criminal piracy was the Labour government which provided UK spy planes and ships to support the US action.
Labour defence secretary John Healey said the Russian tanker was part of a ‘Russian-Iranian axis’ that was fuelling ‘conflict and misery’ from the Middle East to Ukraine and that the UK would step up actions against vessels accused of breaking oil embargos ‘to protect our national security, our economy and global security’.
Healey went on to claim the ‘US is the UK’s closest defence and security partner’, in complete denial of the facts that US imperialism has no close security partners, and that for the Trump administration the only driving force that matters is to control the oil and mineral wealth of the world.
Around the globe, from the Middle East to Latin America, US imperialism has waged countless wars to control the world’s resources, and withhold them from the main rivals to US capitalist supremacy – the deformed and degenerated workers states of China and Russia.
However, even the European and NATO ‘allies’ of the US are in the cross-hairs with the announcement by the White House that Trump is considering using the US military to grab Greenland as a ‘national security priority of the United States’.
Trump, last week, claimed that the semi-autonomous Danish territory was ‘surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships’ and that America would decide what happened to Greenland, a country prized for its strategic position close to Russia, and for its abundance of mineral wealth.
In a clear warning to his NATO ‘partners’, Trump has consistently refused to rule out the US putting troops on the ground in order to annex Greenland.
To pay for this drive to war, Trump is now demanding a massive increase of defence spending to $1.5 trillion in 2027, for what he called ‘these very troubled and dangerous times’.
This money will be paid for through cuts to federal spending that will hit a US working class already suffering from a cost-of-living crisis that has reached breaking point, with 73% of employed workers struggling to afford anything beyond their basic living expenses.
US workers and the working class across the world are to be made to pay the cost of an imperialist war.
The working class, however, has the power to put an end to the constant wars for oil and control of the world’s resources. They must force their trade union leaders to take action and call general strikes in the US, UK and Europe, to bring down their capitalist governments, replacing them with workers governments.
These will expropriate the oil companies, along with the banks and major industries, placing them under the ownership and control of the working class in a workers state.
Workers must now rise up and bring down the bankrupt capitalist system and advance humanity to the world socialist republic. Forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution!
