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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 31 August 22, 2016
(front page)
Debate over Russia shows crisis in US foreign,
military policy
BY MAGGIE TROWE
The increasing world disorder of capitalism and the growing crisis of
Washington’s foreign and military policy have deepened in the quarter of
a century since the Soviet Union collapsed because the U.S. rulers
erroneously concluded they had won the Cold War. They have reaped
unintended consequences as they’ve stepped up military intervention in
the Middle East and beyond.
This reality has produced a caustic debate between Democratic candidate
Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump over relations with Moscow
and its president, Vladimir Putin, and the extent to which Washington’s
war machine can be used from Iraq to Afghanistan to the South China Sea.
The debate takes place as the Barack Obama administration moves
provocatively to deploy battalions from the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance
around the Russian border in the Baltics.
When leaked email correspondence revealed Democratic Party officials in
Clinton’s camp had planned to discredit Bernie Sanders by calling him an
atheist and a Jew, implicated Democratic leaders tried to deflect
attention from their coarse and anti-Semitic actions by blaming Russia
and Trump.
“It was the Russians who perpetrated this leak for the purpose of
helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton,” Clinton’s campaign
manager, Robby Mook, said July 25. Democrats’ charges that Trump is soft
on Moscow are not new. In March Clinton said that if Trump is elected,
“it will be like Christmas in the Kremlin.”
After Trump jokingly suggested that Putin might dredge up missing
Clinton emails sought in a congressional probe of her conduct as
secretary of state, Michael Morell, former acting director of the CIA,
said that Putin had “recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the
Russian Federation.”
US imperialism lost the Cold War
Following the fall of the murderous Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet
Union in 1991, the U.S. rulers crowed they had won the Cold War and
acted accordingly on the world stage. But Washington had depended on the
help of Moscow’s repressive apparatus and counterrevolutionary Stalinist
parties around the world to derail and tamp down working-class struggles.
Washington’s false assumptions led Democratic and Republican
administrations alike to intervene abroad when the capitalist rulers saw
instability or threats to U.S. interests.
Far from resulting in stability for U.S. imperialist exploitation,
decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan have torn up the Middle East,
left in their wake widespread death and destruction, resulted in the
emergence of the reactionary Islamic State — led by former military
commanders from Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq — and sent millions of
workers from Syria and elsewhere to seek refuge in Europe.
Weakened and battered by a string of military disasters, Washington acts
in contradictory ways. Sensing their impotence in the Mideast, the
propertied U.S. rulers “pivot” to enlist Moscow’s help, along with that
of Tehran, to try to end the war in Syria and defeat Islamic State. At
the same time the Obama administration has moved provocatively to
strengthen its military presence in eastern Europe — what Moscow regards
as its “near abroad” buffer zone. The Kremlin considers this a direct
threat. As well, Washington is “modernizing” its nuclear weapons arsenal
in a $1 trillion 30-year upgrade.
Top Pentagon officials warn of Russian “revanchist” moves to regain lost
territory. But if there is a power trying to regain lost hegemony and
prestige, it’s Washington.
There is no new Cold War. Russia is no superpower. The collapse of oil
and gas prices with the world contraction of production and trade have
put the Russian economy in deep crisis and generated widespread
discontent with the Putin government. The Russian economy contracted by
4 percent in 2015. Some 19 million Russians were living below the
poverty level of $139 a month. Earlier this year truckers protested for
weeks against a new road tax.
However, Putin’s moves in Syria and the “near abroad,” and his efforts
to strengthen military and economic ties with China and Turkey, show he
senses U.S. imperialism’s post-Cold War weakness.
The wealthy U.S. rulers, feeling the pressure of the grinding depression
they can’t solve and unable to impose a new imperialist order, will
continue to veer on a vacillating and dangerous course no matter which
capitalist politician wins the White House in November.
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