AS the worldwide crisis of capitalism deepens, the war preparations of the US and the NATO powers are becoming more frantic, with plans to construct missile bases along Eastern Europe’s borders with Russia, starting with Poland and Romania.
The US is activating a land-based ‘missile defence station’ in Romania, with senior US and EU officials attending the ceremony in Deveselu in southern Romania. This US-NATO base is to form part of a larger ‘European Shield’ which the US and its allies are attempting to convince Russia is necessary.
The excuse being used is that the ‘Shield’ is necessary to protect the NATO European states from short and medium-range missiles from the Middle East. In fact, there is no missile threat from a Middle East which the US has laid waste with its wars in Iraq and its proxy wars in Syria and Yemen.
In fact, it now has a nuclear armed Israel negotiating with it for a $50bn dollar free package of military aid over the next five years, so that it can threaten Iran with the most advanced aircraft, missiles and tanks as well as the ongoing threat of nuclear annihilation.
With the US and the UK pouring billions of pounds and dollars-worth of the most advanced weaponry into Saudi Arabia, and with the UK building a naval base in Bahrain to take at least one of the two huge aircraft carriers that the UK is constructing, NATO is organising for offensive warfare in the Middle East. In fact, Saudi Arabia has Iran in its sights particularly for its refusal to cut back on its oil production, which after its nuclear deal with the US is now being released onto the world market.
In the Middle East, the threat is from one direction only and it’s from West to East, not vice-versa. The US statement that Russia has nothing to fear from its plans to build US-NATO bases in Poland, Hungary, Romania, and the Czech Republic is being made just for the record and is not meant to be taken seriously.
The US has spent spent $800m (£554m) on radar and SM-2 missile interceptors since 2013 on the Romanian air base in Deveselu. The station will have a battery of SM-2 missile interceptors. For years, the US has been testing the Aegis system on warships too. On Friday, another phase of the project will be launched in Poland with a ground breaking ceremony at Redzikowo, near the Baltic Sea. Aegis missiles are to become operational there in 2018.
Russia’s foreign ministry warned on Wednesday that the Aegis system violated a treaty on nuclear forces and was a breach of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed in 1987. Mikhail Ulyanov, head of the Russian foreign ministry’s department for proliferation and arms control issues, pointed out that the Americans’ MK-41 launch system could also be used to fire cruise missiles, not just air defence missiles.
The truth is that as the crisis of capitalism deepens, the massive slump and the threat of even bigger banking collapses are driving the Western powers eastwards in the same direction that an earlier crisis drove the Nazis, towards the untold mineral riches of the great Russian landmass.
The developing world crisis is however creating a war on two fronts. At home, the capitalists are seeking to destroy all of the gains that workers have made to finance the drive eastwards. In fact, it is the EU that began this drive with its encouragement and aid to the right-wing coup in Ukraine, overthrowing the Yanukovych government to turn Ukraine into a semi-colony of the EU.
The resistance to this drive has been enormous, not just in Donetsk and Lugansk but all over Ukraine. What NATO has learnt from getting its fingers burnt in Ukraine is the need to mount overwhelming military forces for the drive eastwards. In this situation of massive capitalist crisis, the workers in the West must adopt and fight for the old Leninist slogan, that ‘the enemy is at home’.
Workers in the West must aid the peoples of the east in their defence of the gains of the October revolution, by carrying out socialist revolutions at home. The issue that the world crisis has thrust to the fore is the need for a worldwide struggle for the victory of the world socialist revolution to smash capitalism and imperialism wordwide!
