By Mark Buckley
There is growing mass resistance to US imperialism across the globe. The highest points of that are the armed resistance to the aggression of the US and its allies, NATO and Israel in Ukraine and across West Asia respectively, as well as the heroic resistance of the Cuban people and leadership to the murderous US siege.
In addition, there is the remarkable resistance of countries of the Sahel against the terrorism and airstrikes from the US, abetted by France, Israel and Ukraine.
A new factor has entered calculations in the form of mass mobilisations in Chile (against cuts to social programmes and schools), France (against cuts to schools), Germany (against conscription), Greece (against Rubio’s visit, the Iran war and austerity), Italy (against police brutality and racism), Pakistan (for the release of jailed ex-PM Imran Khan), South Korea (against support for the Iran war) and in Spain (against evictions and the housing crisis). No doubt, there are many others, or will be.
There is a single thread connecting all these mobilisations. The US is both consciously and inadvertently destabilising the world economy and established political formations. This began with Tump’s announcement of tariffs, which largely backfired on him because of Chinese opposition.
But the wars against Russia and especially against Iran have driven up the price of fossil fuel energy, leading to knock-on price rises in other sectors, as well as increasing the price of fertilisers. In many cases this has led to a further lowering of living standards, including in the US itself, which seems set to hurt the Republican in the US mid-term elections.
Higher prices have also led to second-round effects, such as rising government outlays because of inflation as well as higher borrowing costs. Indirectly, these will also have the effect of curbing social spending and public sector wages.
Trump’s demand for higher military spending from the NATO countries dramatically increases these budgetary pressures. The NATO countries have already raised the banner of shifting from ‘a welfare state to a warfare state’. As the French school protests were at their height, President Macron took time for a propaganda video praising a new French missile system.
Destabilisation is also a conscious policy of this Administration, without any criticism from within US ruling circles. In Europe it is promoted by the pernicious lie that it faces an ‘existential threat’ arising from immigration. In reality, it is a deliberate attempt to reshape European politics to achieve much more US-compliant leaderships, even more so than currently. The subservience of Berlin, Paris and London is not yet anywhere sufficient for the US war machine.
Different projects are underway on every continent. But they all aim to restore the US hegemony by political and military means that had been dissipated by economic failures.
As a result, the US will not remain passive in relation to the new protests. In South Korea, a rival movement opposing President Lee and his unwillingness to fight US wars has been launched. There are blatant and concerted attempts to oust both Lula in Brazil and Sanchez in Spain. In every country, far right and pro-US forces have been showered with US oligarch money.
Yet increasingly US policy is creating the resistance to it. These protests offer wider hope to society. The more each movement can link their own cause to its ultimate source, the demands of the insatiable US war machine, the stronger they will be. And they will need to be on guard to prevent every attempt to pervert their cause and to divert it in a pro-US direction.
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Stop the Massacre – Protest in London’s Trafalgar Square; Author Alisdare Hickson; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
