GUEST BLOG: Dave Brownz – AUKUS is another fateful step towards World War 3
AUKUS is another fateful step towards World War 111. Why? Previous world wars resulted from the economic rivalry of the great powers to repartition the world. WW3 will be the consequences of the US bloc and Russia/China bloc driven to take their economic rivalry the political/military level.
The arrival of QUAD and AUKUS signifies the US ramping up its military containment of China because it is losing the economic contest. China (and Russia) have both made big economic gains against the US bloc in Eurasia, penetrating the EU and challenging European powers loyalty to the US. The defeat of the US in Afghanistan marks the failure of 20 years of US intervention to win control of Eurasia. Despite the defeat of the Soviet Union and opening up of China to US investment, China and Russia have emerged from these defeats, resisting re-colonisation by the West as rising imperialist powers challenging US hegemony.
The US in decline is forced to meet this strategic defeat in Eurasia, by rallying its remaining allies and recruiting new ones to contain the Russia-China bloc.
QUAD brings India, Japan and Australia into a closer political alliance with the US against China. AUKUS brings the historic Eurocentric, white supremacist nations, Australia, UK and US together in a military alliance focused on building a steel ring from India to Japan to contain China from expanding its influence in the Indo-Pacific.
Even as AUKUS was being announced, China applied to join the CPTPP, the trans Pacific trade pact between Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and New Zealand. China is seeking to advance its economic interests with countries that are increasingly dependent on trade with it.
The US, clearly failing to maintain its economic lead, is relying on military provocations to disrupt such plans. The prospect of military flashpoints such as in the South China Sea and Taiwan escalating into wider regional wars, dragging many other states into a conflagrations, is becoming more likely.
Revolutionaries need to make it clear that we reject imperialist wars between the two blocs. We are for the defeat of both in the event of war as the lesser evil. We resist our own nations involvement in such wars. Our policy is that the class enemy is at home and that we refuse enlistment to fight workers in other countries, and call for mutinies in the ranks, that raise the question of power – which class shall rule, the class that destroys nature and can only survive by wars, or the class that can unite workers internationally to overthrow that ruling class and create a socialist world.
Dave Brownz is TDBs guest Marxist blogger
Dave China is a socialist nation. Is this what you want us to become?
China is not a socialist nation. It is ruled by a autocratic communist party that has nothing in common with Marxism except claiming to be Marxist to fool the people.
Its President Xi Jinping has made himself President for life (at least a third term).
Socialism is where the majority of those who work to create the wealth also rule society, democratically deciding how the economy should work to meet the needs of all and with no cost to nature.
Back in the day we built a nuclear free South Pacific and then the Americans and Russians pulled their nuclear weapons out of Europe – and then the Warsaw Pact and the USSR fell.
Unfortunately NATO remained and went westward towards Ukraine. And so “peace” with Russia did not endure.
I think you’ll find that this move in the south will reverberate back into the north as it did then, and with the refolding of the two blocks into three.
The EU is likely to leave NATO (Germany was never going to spend 2% GDP in defence by 2024) and form both free trade and defence agreements with Russia and Ukraine (sans Crimea and parts of the East in return for Russian debt relief). And together they will form a partnership with the One Belt and Road as an equal to China.
That should include membership in the WTO for Russia, and the EU should be promoting its carbon tariff ideas within it to reduce emissions from traded production. We should be encouraging Biden’s USA to renew the WTO after the damage Trump tried to do to it.
Otherwise its the UK and Canada and the Quad 4 – USA, Japan Oz and India to “contain” China – NAIPTO (North Atlantic Indie Pacific) to prevent it “assuming” hegemony from Hawaii to Djibouti is there waiting to be acquired/inherited from a declining USA.
But with both the UK and China seeking to join TPP, there is a tacit awareness that one need not assume the outcome will be decided by military action/build up.
Yeah all that can happen except the US is declining at a rapid rate, so somehow its military response to China has to be stopped by the working people opposing escalation of nuclear standoffs. That means strong antiwar action by the masses linked up globally to stop war and stop climate crash.