World War 3 in the Asia-Pacific?
The Daily Blog is running a war agenda in Ben Morgan’s columns where Russia and China are painted as the main protagonists of the rush to war against the West. Yet Russia and China are clearly not the main instigators, nor the warmongers in this scenario. What is going on?
Neither have projected their military outside their borders since 1990 except over competing border claims or at the invitation of political allies. Neither have foreign military bases apart from Russia in Tartus, Syria, and China in Djibouti, alongside the US, France, China, Britain and Japan!
True, they have become big powers despite coming very late onto the world stage as restored capitalist imperialisms. Yet their rapid economic growth does not currently need any resort to military offensives to boost their expansion.
It is the US acting militarily to counter this rising economic challenge to its declining hegemony that poses the greatest risk of escalation to WW3 sealing the fate of humanity.
Therefore, to claim that Russia and China are the main drivers of the geopolitical agenda is far from true. It takes two to tango – Zero and Sum – and this dance didn’t start in the early 21st but the late 19th century. It was called the ‘Great Game’ for Eurasia, pitting the European powers against Tzarist Russia.
This game has continued ever since under various guises, including the Russian Civil War and the post WW2 Cold War, and today raises its ugly head again as the End Game between the Western and Eastern imperialists blocs led by the US and China.
Economically, both Russia and China are growing relatively fast (approx. 3% and 5%) compared to the stagnation and recession of the West. That growth reflects their common legacy as former bureaucratic worker states in which the bureaucrats ruled but still defended state property in the name of workers.
The bureaucratic caste was forced to restore capitalism because without workers in control of the plan, the economies stagnated and with it, the caste’s parasitic lifestyle. Restoration of capitalism turned the Red bureaucracy into the Red bourgeoisie as Western investors were welcomed.
The restoration of capitalism around 1992 did not guarantee Russia and China independence from re-colonisation by the West, though the advantages of a strong centralised state and huge national resource base, inherited from the former bureaucratic states, made it possible. It was the power of the bureaucratic caste now converted into a new bourgeoisie managing capitalism that turned the possible into the probable.
It took Russia 10 years to repel the impact of the Western economic invasion. In 2000 Putin came to power and converted the former soviet state apparatus to serve the interests of Russian state capitalism, against those of Western or Russian oligarchs. From that point the conditions were created to open the road to imperialism.
But what was critical in unleashing Russia’s potential as a great power was the foreign policy of the US and its European NATO allies to systematically engage in economic and proxy wars to provoke its breakup through regime change. This is what drove Russia ultimately to a defensive war in Ukraine. It was that war that forced Russia to abandon its economic ties to Europe and turn towards an alliance with China to protect its growing imperialist interests.
China was much more successful in its conversion of the former bureaucratic workers’ state apparatus into a capitalist state serving Chinese capitalism. Since 2000 it has ‘gone out’ internationally to become the biggest imperialist economy threatening the rule of the West.
Far from declining (from 10% to 5% growth) China is expanding rapidly. The property collapse is no threat (the private investors are the loser in this collapse), nor is the Chinese population decline given China’s tech advances impact on labour productivity all over the world.
So, what is really driving geopolitics and producing crises, wars and revolutions everywhere, is the decline of the West, specifically the US as its sphere of influence dwindles against the rise of Russia and China as leaders of the Global South, BRICS, etc.
And as is always true, the imperialist ruling classes, East and West, download their crises onto the backs of their imperialist rivals, neo-colonies, and ultimately the workers and most marginalised oppressed through depressions and wars. So what ends up as a proxy war in Ukraine, a US war against China, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, or a ‘police state’ in Aotearoa, this is what happens when rival imperialisms facing terminal crisis go to war over who rules the world.
The decline of the West and the rise of the East is merely resetting the pecking order between the great powers over who gets the lion’s share of our labour while the system collapses. That is why fiddling around in parliament, the UN and ICJ, is being played for suckers.
When capitalism is in terminal decline and cannot stop its own death march, workers have to unite globally to stop it and create a new society that can rescue humanity and restore it to nature. We call for a New Zimmerwald to unite workers to turn their guns on their own ruling classes!
