On the day that Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak addressed parliament – to justify bombing Yemen last Friday without bothering to consult MPs – his defence secretary Grant Shapps announced that the UK would be sending 20,000 troops to eastern Europe.
Shapps pledged these troops to join a major NATO exercise on the border with Russia, warning that the so-called post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ is over and that ‘battle lines are being redrawn’.
Shapps told his audience at Lancaster House: ‘We are in a new era and we must be prepared to deter our enemies, prepared to lead our allies and prepared to defend our nation whenever the call comes.’
He concluded: ‘The foundations of the world order are being shaken to their core. We stand at a crossroads.’
Shapps’ commitment to sending UK troops to the border of Russia follows the announcement by Sunak that Britain’s military funding to the Ukrainian regime would be increased to £2.5 billion in the coming year.
The total failure of imperialism to weaken Russia through the war being waged by its proxy in Ukraine has not dented the war preparations being made by its imperialist NATO war machine which is planning the biggest military exercise since 1984.
Imperialism is being driven to war across the globe by its epic economic crisis – a crisis that dictates that to secure its profits capitalism must reorder the world by regime change in Russia, opening up that country and its massive resources for capitalist exploitation.
At the same time, it is driven to wage war in the Middle East in support of its client state Israel.
The Zionist state of Israel was created by world imperialism to act as its military base to secure the region and all its mineral resources and strategic importance through violence and genocidal campaigns of terror against the Palestinian people.
On Sunday, Tory foreign secretary David Cameron applauded the bombing of Yemen by the US and UK, saying it was ‘necessary’ and ‘proportionate’.
Cameron made it clear that he was not going to repeat the mistake he made when he put the proposal to bomb Syria to a vote in parliament in 2013 only to see it defeated. Not that any such vote would have faced opposition from the Labour Party under Keir Starmer.
Starmer, when running for leader of the Labour Party in 2020, vowed to introduce a law allowing MPs a vote on military intervention – a ‘prevention of military intervention act’ to stop ‘more illegal wars’.
Like all Starmer’s pledges this has been dumped in favour of unlimited support for war in the Middle East and war throughout Europe as the world capitalist system in its imperialist death agony drives inexorably towards world war as the only solution to its economic crisis.
On Sunday, Cameron made the extension of the war in the Middle East clear when he said that the ‘malign actor in the region’ was Iran, which followed a statement by Tory defence minister James Cartlidge that the UK is preparing aircraft carriers to be deployed to fight the Houthis and threaten war with the Iranian revolution.
Shapps got one thing right when he said the foundations of the world order are being shaken to their core.
The capitalist world order has been ripped apart by its world crisis, drowning under debt and desperate to regain its stranglehold over the world’s resources in order to keep the profits of the bankers and giant corporations rolling in, and with no way out but to dive into world wars – war abroad and class war at home – to inflict the cost of capitalist collapse on the backs of the working class.
The working class has shown it will never accept this as the future.
Millions of workers and youth took to the streets in cities across the world on Saturday calling for victory to Palestine and against imperialist war.
The working class has emerged onto the scene as a revolutionary force that has the power to smash world capitalism and imperialism and advance humanity to a world socialist system.
The time is ripe to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership required for the victory of the world socialist revolution.
