This is the probably going to be the last reply to cult leader David North whose WSWS.org website warned readers that nuclear war was imminent because a Pentagon official named Robert Scher told Congress that the USA could “could go about and actually attack that missile where it is in Russia”, referring to any weapon that was in violation of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed by the USA and the USSR in 1987. For North, the crux of the matter was establishing that the word “attack” came out of Scher’s mouth when it was not audible in the Youtube clip.
I never had any big issues with that word one way or the other since my analysis that was based on the objective economic conditions differed radically from that of the Socialist Equality Party and any number of groups or websites constantly warning about WWIII. (A search of WSWS.org reveals 3,350 articles containing the phrase “nuclear war” going back to 1998 when one titled “Risking a Nuclear War” about India and Pakistan can be found.)
The Armageddon brigade includes Global Research that reposted the WSWS.org article and the libertarian Antiwar.com website of Justin Raimondo, who like many others in the Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party lines up with the ultraleft on this matter as has been the case ever since the rightwing internationally has thrown in its lot with the Kremlin. Frankly, it is very difficult to distinguish between what Golden Dawn and North’s cult have said about Ukraine.
For Raimondo, David North, and other assorted hysterics along this ultraleft-libertarian-fascist axis, the danger of nuclear war exists because Washington is out of control and ready to make reckless decisions that will result in the deployment of nuclear missiles that will effectively end life on earth. Raimondo put this this way:
Yes, that’s how crazy the warlords of Washington are: in their demented calculus, nuclear war is just another “option.”
North said about the same thing in a July 2014 article titled “Are You Ready for Nuclear War” that had all the urgency of a Pentecostal tract urging believers to prepare for Armageddon. He likened it to events that took place a century earlier:
A hundred years ago this week, World War I was launched by small cabals of ministers, monarchs, and business interests throughout Europe, whose decision to risk everything on victory in war led to deaths numbering in the tens of millions. Today, similar forces are setting into motion a drive to a conflagration that could lead to the destruction of the planet.
Of course, it is possible to stoke the fears of the naïve reader when you summon up images of a sneak attack on Russia taking place in the next month or so as if the USA might follow Japan’s example from December 7th 1941.
That being said, one might feel a bit anxious if you interpreted Scher’s comments as a departure from American policy. As I stated (and still believe), the imperialist strategy is based on Mutually Assured Destruction. All nuclear powers consider their arms to be of a defensive nature since a first use would trigger a literal Armageddon that would rob the ruling classes of their privileges and status. It would be a suicidal act only conceivable in a scenario in which the stakes were enormous, such as the Cuban missile crisis that occurred during the depths of the Cold War but as I will point out later, the same conditions do not exist today.
But, more importantly, is the threat of a first strike something new? Did Scher introduce a new and much more dangerous element in American arms policy? A cursory search of Nexis reveals that a “first strike” has been part of imperialist calculations for the longest time.
While we associate such madness with the Reagan administration, Democrats have embraced it as well. In fact it goes back to Jimmy Carter, the “wimp” who Reagan replaced. The NY Times reported on August 6, 1980:
The Carter Administration has adopted a new strategy for nuclear war that gives priority to attacking military targets in the Soviet Union rather than to destroying cities and industrial complexes, Government officials said today.
The revised policy, the officials said, requires American forces to be able to undertake precise, limited nuclear strikes against military facilities in the Soviet Union, including missile bases and troop concentrations. They said it also calls for the United States to develop the capacity to threaten Soviet political leaders in their underground shelters in time of war.
In a nutshell, all Robert Scher was doing is reaffirming nuclear war policy that has existed for the past 35 years.
It continues with Bill Clinton. On November 24, 1998 the NY Times reported:
As NATO defines the new strategy it will unveil on its 50th anniversary next year, Germany’s new Government of Social Democrats and Greens has irked the United States by tentatively suggesting that NATO should renounce the possible first use of nuclear weapons.
The United States is firmly opposed to any change in the doctrine allowing first use of nuclear weapons, arguing that it proved an effective deterrent during the cold war and remains one today against new threats like chemical weapons.
Four years later it should not come as a big surprise that George W. Bush was totally committed to a “first use” policy as the Sydney Morning Herald reported on March 12, 2002:
A secret Pentagon report which reveals plans for a “first-strike” nuclear arsenal reverses decades of American military thinking which effectively defined nuclear warheads as weapons of last resort. It also indicates just how far the Bush Administration is prepared to go to entrench America’s role as the self-appointed global policeman that its military power affords. So dangerous are nuclear weapons to the very continuance of life on Earth that their existence has long been justified because of their power to “deter”, not to defeat. The “Nuclear Posture Review”, however, details plans to integrate nuclear and conventional weapons, develop “bunker-busting” nuclear warheads, and specifically target seven nations. Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria are listed with Russia, China and North Korea as possible nuclear targets.The complex moral, political and strategic questions raised in each of these cases might not trouble the United States, but it will surely unsettle even its closest allies.
One would not expect Obama, a big fan of the Reagan presidency, to retreat from a “first use” policy. The Wall Street Journal reported on April 6, 2010:
The Obama administration will release a new national nuclear-weapons strategy Tuesday that makes only modest changes to U.S. nuclear forces, leaving intact the longstanding U.S. threat to use nuclear weapons first, even against non-nuclear nations.
But the new policy will narrow potential U.S. nuclear targets, and for the first time makes explicit the goal of making deterrence of a nuclear strike the “sole objective” of U.S. nuclear weapons, a senior Obama administration official said Monday.
So if you are going to single out Robert Scher for war mongering, you at least need to understand that he was simply telling the Congressmen what they (and our ultraleftist friends) should have already known. Based on the analysis of David North and Justin Raimondo, we have been on the eve of destruction going on for at least 35 years and counting.
Now it just might be a coincidence but the warnings about WWIII tend to crop up whenever some former colony of the USSR gets on the wrong side of the Kremlin. Back in 2008 when Georgia and Russia were at war over the future of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, you could read exactly the same sorts of articles from the Armageddon brigade. Global Research invoked 1914 just as WSWS.org did in the above-cited article:
So far, each step in the Caucasus drama has put the conflict on a yet higher plane of danger. The next step will no longer be just about the Caucasus, or even Europe. In 1914 it was the “Guns of August” that initiated the Great War. This time the Guns of August 2008 could be the detonator of World War III and a nuclear holocaust of unspeakable horror.
Nobody talks about South Ossetia or Abkhazia today because Russia was able to achieve its goals without any big obstacles put in its path by NATO. Global Research insisted that “Ossetia has been an important strategic base near the Turkish and Iranian frontiers since the days of the czars” as if the geopolitical imperatives of the late 19th century remain intact.
Of course, if you were serious about the threat of imperialist war, you might want to take the trouble to analyze the world economy as Lenin did when he wrote “Imperialism, the highest stage of Capitalism”. If you are going to invoke 1914, there is after all an expectation that you can make the case that there are irreconcilable conflicts between the West and Russia that can only be resolved by a new world war.
I would only warn you that if you are looking for such an analysis on the WSWS.org website, you will be wasting your time. The tab “World Economy” will point you to articles about “How the richest one percent controls nearly half of global wealth”, etc. but nothing remotely resembling the sort of analysis Lenin carried out. I should add that there’s nothing wrong with writing denunciations of rich people but you don’t really need WSWS.org for that. Huffington Post does as good a job, if not better.
If you are serious about the conflict between the West and Russia having assumed the dimensions of 1914 (or 1940), you are obligated to back up your analysis with data. It would have to examine FDI flows in Eastern Europe and Russia and other economic trends that would lead to the conclusion that war is inevitable. If you want to understand why Japan launched a “first strike” against the US navy in Pearl Harbor, you might want to consult chapter four of Michael Zezima’s Saving Private Power: the hidden history of ‘The Good War’, where he writes:
The build-up to Pearl Harbor began two decades prior to the attack when, in 1922, the U.S., Britain, and Japan agreed that the Japanese navy would not be allowed more than 60 percent of the capital ship tonnage of the other two powers. As resentment grew within Japan over this decidedly inequitable agreement, that same year the United States Supreme Court declared Japanese immigrants ineligible for American citizenship. This decision was followed a year later by the Supreme Court upholding a California and Washington ruling denying Japanese the right to own property. A third judicial strike was dealt in 1924 with the Exclusion Act which virtually banned all Asian immigration. Finally, in 1930, when the London Naval Treaty denied Japan naval hegemony in its own waters, the groundwork for war (and “surprise attacks”) had been laid.
Upon realizing that Japan textiles were outproducing Lancashire mills, the British Empire (including India, Australia, Burma, etc.) raised the tariff on Japanese exports by 25 percent.
Within a few years, the Dutch followed suit in Indonesia and the West Indies, with the U.S. (in Cuba and the Philippines) not far behind. This led to the Japanese (correctly) claiming encirclement by the “ABCD” (American, British, Chinese, and Dutch) powers.
Such moves, combined with Japan’s expanding colonial designs, says Kenneth C. Davis, made “a clash between Japan and the United States and the other Western nations over control of the economy and resources of the Far East and Pacific…bound to happen.”
Is anything like this taking place between the USA and Russia? If so, it would probably come as surprise to the most powerful oil executives in the world. This is from the Kremlin, straight out of the horse’s mouth so to speak:
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Shaking hands with the CEO of Exxon-Mobil
President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, friends and colleagues,
I am very happy to welcome you to the St Petersburg International Economic Forum. Without a doubt, energy has always been one of the key strategic sectors in the world economy and very much remains so today.
The first steps in this direction are already being taken. Rosneft and ExxonMobil have created a research and development centre for Arctic technologies. I will take this opportunity to also congratulate the winners of the Global Energy Prize awarded today. This year, it was awarded to Japanese scientist Akira Yoshino and Russian researcher Vladimir Fortov. I must note that basic research in the field of energy is what lays the foundation for the future of energy security in our nation and the world overall.
Today, several new documents were signed at this forum on partnerships between Rosneft and international oil and gas companies ExxonMobil, Statoil and Eni (I am happy to see our old friends here today and to greet them), as well as an agreement on technological partnership with General Electric and agreements on the principles of supplying LNG.
This is basically a new era in cooperation the essence of which, as regards our interaction with strategic partners, is to move away from just importing raw materials to establishing full-fledged cooperation in production and technology.
This was a speech given just two years ago. It is a good place to start if you are trying to understand whether we are 5 minutes away from nuclear Armageddon. The conflict in Ukraine, just as was the case in Georgia, raises tensions and leads to saber-rattling.
If you are serious about removing the threat of nuclear war, you have to create a world in which the Russian oligarchs and their pals at Exxon-Mobil do not have the power to exploit the working class and use violence to achieve their ends. Oil companies use their influence over governments in places like Saudi Arabia and Nigeria to make war on their own people and those in bordering territories, as Yemen would indicate.
Russia is just as capable of wreaking havoc on defenseless people as its support for the genocidal policies in Chechnya and Syria would point out. In order to have a world in which social justice and peace prevail, we have to build an international movement that is based on class struggle politics but that rejects the sectarianism that hobbles progress toward that end.
While I doubt that anybody who takes these goals seriously would waste their time joining a bizarre, conspiracy-minded cult-sect like the Social Equality Party, there is a need to understand how they operate and why they ultimately lead to political and personal ruin. My suggestion to David North and company is to continue writing articles that rail against economic inequality since someone here or there might need reminding of that. But for those of us trying to build revolutionary parties based on the kind of rigorous economic analysis that distinguished Lenin or Trotsky, another path awaits us.