If World War Three Happens, U.S. Imperialism Will Break Itself

People all over the world are now discussing whether a third world war will break out. On this question, too, we must be mentally prepared and do some analysis. We stand firmly for peace and against war. However, if the imperialists insist on unleashing another war, we should not be afraid of it. Our attitude on this question is the same as our attitude towards any disturbance: first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it. The First World War was followed by the birth of the Soviet Union with a population of 200 million. The Second World War was followed by the emergence of the socialist camp with a combined population of 900 million. If the imperialists insist on launching a third world war, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the imperialists; it is also likely that the whole structure of imperialism will utterly collapse.-Mao Zedong, 1957

Such is the reality that we face again, when the reactions from a U.S. imperialism in crisis threaten to engulf the globe in a war between Washington and the pro-Chinese bloc. And such is the reality that the imperialists, in their hubris, overlook to the effect that they’re sealing their own doom.

As Biden and his team of neoconservatives build upon Obama and Trump’s cold war escalations against Russia and China, putting forth inflammatory rhetoric at nearly every opportunity and continuing with the economic warfare and military buildup in Washington’s “great-power competition,” the U.S. military intelligentsia soothes itself with promises that such maneuvers can only end with victory for U.S. capitalism. They’re envisioning an outcome within this next decade or so where the imperialist bloc both decisively triumphs over its rivals, and where class tensions are neutralized within the empire’s core.

This is the message from the new book 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. Written by former NATO commander James Stavridis and novelist Elliot Ackerman, it depicts a scenario where China and the U.S. send missiles at each other’s largest urban centers, causing tens of millions to die and the survivors within the U.S. to flee into disease-ridden refugee camps. As the World Socialist Website’s Andre Damon observes in a review of the book, the authors underestimate both the damage that a third world war would cause and the inflammation which such an event would bring to class conflict:

Millions are killed, tens of millions are displaced domestically in the United States….Amid all of this, there is no domestic social response. The end of World War I toppled the Russian, Austrian, Ottoman, and German empires in a massive revolutionary upheaval. The end of the Second World War completely redrew the map of Europe. But in Stavridis’ account, the population somehow remains complacent throughout a third world war while millions are slaughtered. This has nothing to do with the real world, dominated by class polarization and conflict. War will be accompanied by massive state repression. The pretext for a domestic crackdown and the need to divert intense internal social conflicts outward are, in fact, among the major unstated reasons why ruling classes are embarking upon military confrontations that can end in the acts of mass murder depicted in 2034. Finally, the military dynamics are themselves totally unrealistic. The central assumption of the book is that there exists such a thing as a “tactical” nuclear war.

With fantasies like these, the arbiters of imperialist war are handicapping themselves in terms of intelligence, are making themselves blind to the scale of damage that they’ll do if they instigate such a conflict. If a nuclear war were to break out between the U.S. and another nuclear-armed power, it wouldn’t be contained to the range the novel’s authors portray; in all likelihood, it would set off another World War II-level global conflict where even the core imperialist countries experience devastation. Damon assesses that “for its intended audience within the Beltway and the Pentagon, the tactical nuclear exchanges depicted in the book, constitute, in the words of Dr. Strangelove’s Gen. Buck Turgidson, ‘getting our hair mussed’ — an entirely acceptable consequence of the use of nuclear weapons.” If these beltway figures are so convinced of their own technocratic intelligence and strategic expertise that they think using nuclear weapons won’t blow back at them, they’re going to push their system past its breaking point.

The rationale for pushing forward with these geopolitical escalations is that in an environment of total war, the national security state will have an excuse to enact a massive crackdown against anti-imperialists and organized labor. Already in the current nuclear environment-which is perilous enough for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to classify as being more at risk of nuclear war than was the case for the Cold War’s tensest moments-the state has been able to wage an unprecedented internal war against dissent. Online censorship measures against anti-war voices have been tightened, the war on whistleblowers has progressed into Julian Assange being held in the U.K. version of Guantanamo, and the intelligence agencies have developed a Ministry of Truth via social media micro-targeting.

But what will happen when the state goes too far? When law enforcement again bombs city blocks to suppress a revolt, like they did in Philadelphia in 1985? When U.S. police start massacring protesters, like the U.S.-installed Latin American dictatorships have done? When the military carries out its already explicitly stated plans to invade cities within the U.S. to and tovbring Israeli-style combat maneuvers to our neighborhoods? These types of drastic internal repression measures from the U.S. empire, which will get more likely the more class tensions escalate, represent a line. A line where the masses rise up in a revolt which could be far more organized and impactful than the Black Lives Matter protests of this last year, their outrage galvanized by the atrocities that their government has committed.

Already, the U.S. capitalist state has demonstrated its commitment to this dynamic of escalation by sending unidentified federal agents to terrorize protesters by shoving random people into unmarked vehicles. These kinds of internal warfare tactics are going to produce blowback, as are the external moves towards total war. If conflict breaks out with China, or Russia, or Iran, or Venezuela, the military will need to bring back the draft, which would provoke massive resistance that upsets the balance the U.S. war machine has found in the post-Vietnam War era. The military would also have to spread its resources thin, utilizing more forces than it currently has abroad while rebellions explode at home.

There are plans to try to mitigate this blowback, of course. In its proposed strategy for carrying out domestic invasions and occupations, one U.S. Army report from 2016 outlines an operation to shut down internet and cell phone access within the zones surrounding these urban military maneuvers, and to “identify online opinion-makers who could have a major impact in any controversy over US military intervention.” Their goal is to cut off the flow of information surrounding America’s near-future internal wars so that whatever atrocities the Army commits, it won’t inflame further rebellion by exposing the government’s war crimes against its own people.

These kinds of censorship measures with the intent of covering up atrocities are already being used by the U.S. in the forms of Biden’s recent ban on journalists photographing border facilities, and of Trump’s (still not reversed) cancellation of the old policy of reporting drone strike deaths. Since the U.S. military intends to expand these heavy-handed suppressions of the truth even towards our own neighborhoods, it’s clear that the government is deathly afraid of its future war crimes-both abroad and at home-destroying its perceived legitimacy among the U.S. populace. To make these fears come true, we must build revolutionary cadres in our local areas which are prepared both to expose the state’s planned atrocities, and to use this to rally the masses towards anti-colonial, proletarian revolution.

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