Letter from a reader:

Imperialists Conducting Dangerous Dress Rehearsal for War in the Western Pacific

July 5, 2021 | revcom.us

 

A huge flotilla of North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) warships, machinery of mass death and destruction, are now facing off with the war machines of Russia and China. The Western Pacific is so crowded with U.S., NATO, Russia, and China’s air and sea weaponry, nuked up to their gills, that the danger of an accident or intentional incident leading to full-scale war runs high, with potentially catastrophic consequences for humanity.

At the March 2021 NATO Summit, the U.S. imperialists led the 30-country NATO allied members to target Russia as the main current threat to the global status quo, while also pivoting their aim towards China. Also in March, the Pentagon set up a China Task Force.

The Russian navy, with its anti-submarine ships and high-altitude fighter aircrafts, held its largest war practice maneuvers in decades, just off the coast of the Hawaiian Islands. As the Russian naval forces roamed the west side of these islands, the U.S. had its aircraft carriers with a guided-missile destroyer circling the east side. The French and British imperialists, as part of NATO, joined this war practice in late June with their own nuclear-armed fighter aircraft and destroyers.

The Western Pacific is so crowded with U.S., NATO, Russia and China’s air and sea weaponry, nuked up to their gills that the danger of an accident or intentional incident leading to full-scale war runs high, with potentially catastrophic consequences for humanity.

June 2021 Was a Busy Month of (World) War Preparations

In mid-June, NATO issued a communiqué that they pledge to maintain “an appropriate mix of nuclear, conventional and missile defense capabilities…” In just the month of June, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command military forces took part in war rehearsals with more than 35 other countries. The largest war rehearsals in the Western Pacific region began in June in Australia. They involve more than 17,000 military forces from the U.S., Canada, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Britain. This includes “combined Special Forces operations, parachute drops, amphibious [marine] landings, land force maneuvers, urban and air operations and the coordinated firing of live ammunition from late June until mid-August. France, India, and Indonesia will participate as observer nations.”¹

The “pivot to Asia” that began under Obama has increased U.S. and NATO presence in the Pacific, aiming at encircling and warning China about its growing global economic, political, and military ambitions that pose a challenge to the post-World War 2 dominance of the U.S. and its allies.

Xi Jinping, leader of the CCP, or Chinese Capitalist Party, deceptively called the Chinese Communist Party,² has issued an imperialist threat of his own that the “rise of China cannot be stopped.” A specific focus on contention in the growing war tensions is over the island of Taiwan, which China has historically claimed as part of its territory, but which the U.S. had maintained as an island fortress against socialist China under Mao’s leadership (1949-1976) and as a base area against capitalist China since the defeat of socialism in that country after Mao’s death.

The war rehearsals now taking place in a large swath of the Pacific Ocean is more akin to a gathering of capitalist/imperialist piranhas and hyenas—every single one of them. None are acting in the interest of humanity. The people of the world must act in our own interests, rise up and oppose the inter-imperialist war looming on the horizon, and make genuine new communist revolutions.

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1. Increasing Pressure on China, by Ann Wright, PopularResistance.org, June 28, 2021. [back]

2. See “China's Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party: Not the Party of Mao and Revolution... But of Counterrevolution and Capitalism-Imperialism,” by Raymond Lotta, revcom.us, July 5, 2021. [back]