Nato escalationheralds new coldwarAfter 15 years of war in Afghanistan, Nato

chiefs have have no intention of acquiescingto war-weariness and beating their swordsinto ploughshares.An existential Russian threat to European

order and stability is being conjured up inorder to bounce politicians into ramping uparms spending and deploying troops to Eu-ropes eastern frontiers.The pretext is the civil war in Ukraine, pre-

sented as a clear act of Russian aggression.This is despite the fact that the conflict is in-disputably the result of the Western imperial-ists attempt to drag that unhappy country intotheir orbit through a colour revolution, withAmerican and German funded NGOs as theirconduits.The revolution was in fact a coup carried

out with fascist muscle, which ousted theelected pro-Russian president and replacedhis regime with personnel handpicked by USAssistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.Far from being hatched in the Kremlin, theconflict was hatched in the White House andthe Pentagon, with Berlin providing the dem-ocratic veneer of European democracy.The scenario according to Nato is simple.

Putins little green men are poised to infil-trate the states of Eastern Europe from theBlack Sea to the Baltic. Since the existence oflarge ethnic Russian populations in thesestates apparently provides a pretext for Russ-ian invasion, these minorities must be re-garded with the utmost suspicion.Supreme commander of Nato, US General

Philip Breedlove is planning an advanced de-ployment of weaponry and forces along theborders of Russia, with a major deploymentin Poland.As a statement of intent, Nato forces from

the US, UK, Holland and others staged aprovocative military parade through Narva,Estonia, just yards from the Russian borderposts.It is no accident that Narva has an 87 per

cent Russophone population, and that 37 percent of its residents are Russian citizens. It isthe easternmost town in Estonia, only 85miles from Saint Petersburg.

Natos new strategy

At the September 2014 Nato Summit, a newcold war strategy was thrashed out. This wasfollowed by a February 2015 meeting ofNato defence ministers, which created aspearhead force, dubbed the Very HighReadiness Joint Task Force (VJTF). The en-hanced Nato Response Force will totalaround 30,000 troops.The ostensible purpose of this rigmarole is

to deter the supposed threat from Putins Rus-sia. The number of manoeuvres on the east-ern flank of the worlds biggest militaryalliance has increased, with more than 3,000air sorties in 2014, compared to just 200 byRussia.The rationales provided by our political

leaders would not win prizes for sophistica-tion of analysis. Last September, David

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Cameron likened Putin to Hitler: We run therisk of repeating the mistakes made in Mu-nich in 38. We cannot know what will hap-pen next. This time we cannot meet Putinsdemands. He has already taken Crimea andwe cannot allow him to take the whole coun-try.Michael Fallon, UK Defence Secretary,

claimed there is a real and present dangerthat Putin will launch a campaign to desta-bilise the Baltic states. A parade of senior mil-itary figures have been wheeled out in themedia to warn of the dangers we face. Justas turkeys dont vote for Christmas, so gener-als dont have a tendency to talk up prospectsfor peace. So we get Deputy Supreme com-mander of Nato, General Sir Adrian Brad-shaw, claiming that in an era of constantcompetition with Russia the latter repre-sented an obvious existential threat to ourwhole being.Air Commodore Andrew Lambert told the

Daily Mail that the Royal Air Force wouldlikely be overwhelmed by sheer numbers inthe event of a Russian attack. Sir MichaelGraydon, a former Chief of the Air Staff,thinks They have got us more or less at theirmercy.Any credible journalist should dismiss this

ludicrous Cold War era hyperbole. Yet theBBC, Channel 4 and the broadsheets parrotthis line without demur.It is the absolute unanimity of the propa-

ganda war that indicates that a serious andfundamental change in the policy of theWestern imperialist bloc has taken place.

A new bipolarity

The financial crisis of 2008 and the long re-cession has altered the economic balance ofworld forces against the USA and the EU. Asa result, we are now witnessing a long marchto conflict between the two real superpowers:the USA and China. Although by far theworlds hegemonic economic and militarypower, the preeminence of the USA is begin-ning to wane and its rulers know it.Chinas dynamism has obliged the USA to

declare South East Asia its priority strategicregion - the Pivot to Asia. Military bases inSouth Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, In-donesia and Malaysia are now more carefullymaintained than ever before. Japan has beenencouraged to upgrade its military and adopta more aggressive stance.In response, Chinas president Xi Jinping

announced a strategic change of course inNovember 2014. China no longer considers

relations with the United States and Europe apriority. That position is to be replaced by areorientation to the BRIC states, especiallyRussia, and to neighbouring Asian countries,as well as to Africa.China has concluded several gigantic en-

ergy contracts with Russias state-ownedGazprom and Rosneft. In time, these cancompensate for the threatened loss of exportsto Europe. The two countries are buildingnew gas pipelines together, and increased useof the yuan in bilateral trade is likely to sta-bilise the beleaguered rouble.If China is the USAs long term rival for

domination of the global economy in the 21stcentury, then Russia is its short term obstacleto preserving its hegemony in key areas likeEurope, Central Asia and the Middle East.When Russia recovered from its prostrationat the hands of Yeltsin and Western imperial-ism in the 1990s, and emerged under Putin asa new imperialist power, it inherited certainassets from the Soviet Union. Amongst thesewere its nuclear deterrent and its veto on theUN Security Council, but also strategic alliesin the Middle East.Through its alliances with Syria and Iran,

Russia poses a major obstacle to US hege-mony over the Middle East. Russias militarypower, its UN veto and its nuclear capabilitiesmake it the most powerful regional militaryopponent of the US empire. The shift in therelative balance of military force in the regionhas even provoked restiveness amongst theUSAs oldest allies there: Saudi Arabia, Israeland Egypt.

The main enemy

Nevertheless, the worlds largest superpowercan still impose its will on its Nato and Seatoallies. This gives it a greater ability to inter-vene globally than any other power. In addi-tion it has proven adept at drawing its alliesinto its conflicts, even against their own inter-ests, as with Germany and Japan, who havegood reasons to pursue closer economic tieswith Russia and China respectively.The phony character of the USAs Russ-

ian threat narrative is revealed in a recent in-terview given by US President BarackObama, in which he argued that we donthave a peer in terms of a state thats going toattack us and bait us. The closest we have,obviously, is Russia, with its nuclear arsenal,but generally speaking they cant project theway we can around the world. China cant,either. We spend more on our military thanthe next 10 countries combined.

And in any case, as Obama said in his Stateof the Union speech in January, Russia isisolated with its economy in tatters, due tosanctions.Russia, as a much weaker imperialist

power, remains at the mercy of the USAs in-fluence over world markets, and is confinedin its ambitions to the surrounding parts of theEurasian land mass. It is not seeking to domi-nate or conquer Europe (it couldnt), but toally itself with a German-led European Unionto its west, as well as to build links with theeconomic powerhouse of China to its east.Or at least it was until recently. Thwarting

a resurgent Russia and reining in Germanysappetite for trade and investment openings tothe east via Russia are the real driving forcesbehind the USAs intervention in Ukraine,and behind its policy of reviving Nato as acold war instrument needed to protect Eu-rope from the consequences of Natos ownprovocations.Of course, the USAs allies have their own

agenda, and they do not always willingly sub-mit to policies whose consequences wouldhurt them far more than they would the USA.As Obama stated: we occasionally have totwist the arms of countries that wouldnt dowhat we need them to do if it werent for thevarious economic or diplomatic or, in somecases, military leverage that we had if wedidnt have that dose of realism, we wouldntget anything done, either.Such aggressive talk, reinforced by the real

threat of actual aggression does not comefrom a positions of unassailable strength,such as the USA enjoyed in 1945. Instead it isthe bravado overlaid with arrogance sympto-matic of a declining power. However thisdoes not make the USAs new cold war anyless dangerous, but more so, since it is forcedto take ever greater risks to maintain its posi-tion.It is the duty of socialists to expose the

plans of our own imperialist rulers as plansprepared and enacted to defend the interestsof our ruling capitalist class at home and itsallies abroad. These plans, if unchecked, willlead to more regional wars as in Ukraine, Iraqand Syria today. They will lead ultimately to aworld war, as the major powers are drawninto defending their own regional allies andproxies.In Britain, the USA, Germany, France and

Russia we need to rally opposition to ourrulers war drive by raising the slogan of theGerman Communist Karl Liebknecht and theRussian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin: themain enemy is in our own country.

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