Quad summit in Tokyo ramps up confrontation with China

Mike Head

Yesterday’s face-to-face meeting in Tokyo of the leaders of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) marked a sharp and systemic stepping up of the US-led war preparations against China.

On every front—military, economic, maritime surveillance, supply chains, and cyber and space warfare—the government heads from the US, Japan, India and Australia endorsed aggressive measures to encircle, isolate and provoke Beijing.

From left: Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, U.S. President Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the Quad leaders summit at Kantei Palace, Tuesday, May 24, 2022, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The summit was a key feature of US President Joe Biden’s five-day trip to South Korea and Japan to display what the White House called a “powerful message” that, even as Washington escalates its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine by pouring in another $40 billion of weaponry and support, it is prepared to fight a war on two fronts, against both Russia and China.

Biden set the tone as the summit began. “This is about democracies versus autocracies, and we have to make sure we deliver,” he insisted. In reality, the White House war drive is about reasserting the US post-World War II hegemony over the Indo-Pacific and extending it to the strategic Eurasian landmass.

The event was dominated by Biden’s deliberate declaration at an international media conference, standing alongside Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, that the US would intervene militarily if China sought to incorporate Taiwan, which is recognised internationally as part of China.

Kishida followed suit. In formally opening the summit, he repeated previous denunciations of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and linked it to US allegations of Chinese threats to Taiwan. “We should never, ever allow a similar incident to happen in the Indo-Pacific,” Kishida said.

Regardless of subsequent White House claims that Biden’s statement did not represent a ditching of the five decades-old US policy of “strategic ambiguity” on the issue of military intervention, the shift was clear. Today’s editorial in the Australian noted: “The US President, however, has said virtually the same thing on three occasions since August last year—a point not lost on Beijing.”

The editorial said Biden’s “timely warning in Tokyo should disabuse the leadership in Beijing” of assuming that the US “would be unable to afford a two-front war.”

Notably, the US shift was welcomed yesterday by editorials in the Washington Post, which praised it as “less ambiguous and more strategic,” and the Wall Street Journal, which urged Biden to go further by including Taiwan as a nation-state member of the new anti-China economic bloc unveiled at the Quad summit.

As with the US-NATO operation against Russia, the US ruling class is seeking to goad Beijing into a reaction over Taiwan that could become a pretext for war, with reckless disregard for the risk of a catastrophic nuclear conflict.

The official Quad communiqué was bland, as is customary, and avoided overt mention of China. But its language and every initiative announced at the event were directed at accusing China of aggression and blocking Beijing strategically and economically.

The four government leaders said they “strongly oppose any coercive, provocative or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo” in the Indo-Pacific. These included “the militarization of disputed features, the dangerous use of coast guard vessels and maritime militia, and efforts to disrupt other countries’ offshore resource exploitation activities”—all accusations levied against China’s activities in the South China Sea.

The Quad leaders reaffirmed their resolve to “uphold the international rules-based order where countries are free from all forms of military, economic and political coercion.” Far from standing for “freedom,” these are code words for maintaining the “order” erected and dominated by the US and its allies since World War II.

Two new programs were unveiled at the summit. One was a “Maritime Domain Awareness Initiative.” Under the guise of cracking down on alleged “illegal Chinese fishing,” this will ramp up US-led maritime monitoring and intervention. It will connect existing surveillance centres in Singapore, India and the Pacific to track vessels across South East Asia and the entire Indo-Pacific. The use of satellite imagery and active intelligence sharing has obvious military implications.

The other initiative was an anti-China economic bloc, labelled the “Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity” (IPEF). Unlike supposed “free trade zones,” this 13-member bloc is clearly protectionist, designed to bolster US and allied access to regional markets without offering reduced tariffs or greater access to US markets. The White House said it would enable the US and its allies to “to decide on rules of the road.”

The IPEF dovetails with other measures, expanded at the summit, to strengthen global supply chains—which will be vital in a war against China, the world’s second largest economy—reinforce “digital security” by excluding Chinese telecommunications companies, and develop cyber and space war capacities.

In a bid to counter Chinese investment and aid, the four leaders said they would “seek to extend more than $US50 billion of infrastructure assistance and investment in the Indo-Pacific, over the next five years.” They claimed to be “committed to bringing tangible benefits to the region,” but the real thrust is to block Chinese programs.

Moreover, the funds promised, even if provided, are drops in the bucket compared to the needs throughout the impoverished former colonial territories stretched across the strategic ocean.

Likewise, the much-promoted focus on climate change is about escalating US and allied “security” operations, especially in the Pacific, to counter Chinese moves, such as Beijing’s recent security agreement with Solomon Islands.

As if to reinforce that reality, Biden was accompanied at the summit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Indo-Pacific adviser Kurt Campbell. Last month, Campbell visited Solomon Islands to warn that the US would “respond accordingly” if its government allowed China to establish any military presence.

For all the purported and belated concern for the impact of global warming on the Pacific islands, the newly-elected Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, in his opening public statement to the summit, directly linked “climate action” to the “security of our region.”

Albanese’s presence at the event, and the commitments he gave there, underscored how much is at stake for the US. Biden effusively praised the Labor Party prime minister for jumping on a plane to join the summit just three hours after being sworn into office on Monday following Saturday’s national election.

It would have been a blow to US credibility if no Australian leader had attended the summit, especially given the strategic importance of Australia as a platform for any war against China, as it was for the US war against Japan in World War II.

Albanese was at pains to swear allegiance to the Quad, saying it was “an honour that this is my first act as prime minister, to attend this important Quad Leaders’ meeting here in Japan.” He was anxious to dispel any doubts in Washington about his government’s commitment, after the last Labor government pulled out of the Quad in 2008, concerned for its impact on relations with China, Australia’s largest export market.

A White House statement released following a side meeting between Biden and Albanese said the pair had also reiterated their support for the US-NATO war against Russia and the “swift progress” of the AUKUS security pact with the UK, a military alliance against China that features the supply of nuclear-powered submarines and hypersonic missiles to Australia.

“He (Mr Biden) commended Australia’s strong support for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, and the leaders agreed on the importance of continued solidarity, including to ensure that no such event is ever repeated in the Indo-Pacific,” the statement read.

That language indicates that Albanese understood and embraced the US shift on military intervention in Taiwan, despite his later nervous insistence that Australian policy had not changed.

Evidently, Biden made little progress in his ongoing efforts to strongarm the Indian government into lining up behind the US war on Russia, with which New Delhi has longstanding strategic, economic and military ties.

A White House readout of Biden’s meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Biden “condemned Russia’s unjustifiable war against Ukraine,” adding that the two leaders committed to providing humanitarian assistance. But India’s government made no mention of Ukraine or Russia in its readout.

Instead, an Indian foreign ministry spokesman said Biden and Modi “discussed ways to strengthen cooperation in trade, investment, technology, defence” and “concluded with substantive outcomes adding depth and momentum to the bilateral partnership.”

This was the fourth Quad summit in less than two years, following an in-person gathering in Washington last September and two virtual events. That underscores the increasing importance of this alliance, which has been revived and placed at centre stage by the Biden administration as an essential spearhead of its offensive against China.

Provocatively, US national security advisor Sullivan said Biden’s trip, capped by the Quad summit, sent a message that “will be heard everywhere” and “we think it will be heard in Beijing.”

19 children, two adults killed in Texas elementary school shooting

Chase Lawrence

Another horrific mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas Tuesday left at least 19 children and two school employees dead at Robb Elementary School. It was the 30th shooting at a K-12 school so far this year in the US and the deadliest since the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut where 20 children and six adults were killed.  

The shooting started around 11:32 a.m. local time. The district told Robb Elementary parents to stay away from the school during the day, which was put in lockdown. Children were transported to a nearby civic center from the school to be reunited with their parents afterwards.

The 18-year-old suspect, Salvador Ramos, a student at Uvalde High School, was killed in a gun battle with police, including federal Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents who responded to the shooting. Uvalde is just 65 miles from the US-Mexico border and the site of a CBP station.  

Police outside Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

Ramos allegedly shot and killed his grandmother and had ditched his car before running into the elementary school armed with an AR-15 and multiple magazines. Sgt. Erick Estrada of the Texas Department of Public Safety told CNN Tuesday night that Ramos was wearing body armor and was able to fight his way past police already at the school and began going classroom to classroom. 

University Health in San Antonio said it had two patients from the shooting, a child and an adult, with their condition unknown at this time. There may be another fatality, according to State Senator Roland Gutierrez, but authorities have not confirmed it.

School shootings have occurred so far in 2022 at a rate of more than one per week. There have been 200 mass shootings so far this year, including a shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York by a fascist gunman who killed ten people.

President Joe Biden, having come back from his warmongering tour in Asia, held a nine-minute press conference where he gave perfunctory remarks, quoting scripture, calling for prayer, and denouncing the gun lobby. “So tonight, I ask the nation to pray for them, to give the parents and siblings the strength in the darkness they feel now,” he said. “As a nation, we have to ask when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?” Biden also ordered flags to be flown at half mast at all public buildings for four days. 

Once again Biden, and the political establishment more broadly, are evading the deeper, fundamental issues which give rise to the phenomenon of mass shootings.

The US indeed has the highest per capita gun ownership in the world, in no small part due to lobbying by weapons manufacturers. Former president Donald Trump, Texas Governor Gregg Abbott, Senator Ted Cruz and other fascistic representatives of the Republican Party will be speaking at a conference of the National Rifle Association in just three days. Last year Abbott proudly signed a law which allows Texans to carry a handgun without a license or a permit. 

This, though, does not come close to explaining the mass shootings that have become a horrific part of American life. If anything, the focus of the Democrats on the gun lobby and gun control serves to obscure the real causes of these outburst of violence. 

More information will emerge in the coming days to shed light on the particular circumstances behind the mass shooting in Texas. However, the regularity of such horrific acts of homicidal violence can only be understood in relation to the social reality of the United States, which is riven by extreme levels of inequality and overseen by a ruling class that promotes violence at every turn.

In the US, over 1,000 people a year are killed by the police. Summary executions by the police continue to occur at a rate of three every day. Some of the most recent victims include Patrick Lyoya, a Congolese refugee and auto parts worker who was shot execution style after a traffic stop, and DeAnthony VanAtten, who was shot running away in the parking lot of a grocery store.

The US government under both Biden and Trump has racked up over one million deaths from COVID-19, the highest absolute death toll in the world. The Biden administration has completely embraced Trump’s pursuit of “herd immunity” and dropped all protective measures, preparing the way for the next million deaths. 

Biden is also working to escalate the US/NATO war with Russia, funneling $20 billion in arms to keep the bloodbath in Ukraine continuing. The administration is deliberately and recklessly seeking to provoke a war with both Moscow and Beijing, the largest and third largest nuclear superpowers respectively. 

This is following 30 uninterrupted years of US warfare around the world since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, where US soldiers, tanks, drones, planes and death squads are sent to impose neocolonial rule at the end of a bayonet. Millions around the world have perished at the hands of US arms during this period, with whole societies reduced to rubble. 

This is not the picture of a rational, healthy society. The mass death, wars of aggression, militarism and police killings are the product of a bankrupt ruling class, and this product finds its reflection in the massacres in schools, shopping centers and elsewhere that have become a part of daily life in America.

Turkey denounces Greece as tensions mount in NATO over war with Russia

Ulaş Ateşçi

On March 23, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan bitterly denounced the May 16 trip by Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to Washington. Declaring that Mitsotakis “no longer exists” for him, Erdoğan made clear that he viewed the trip by Mitsotakis as a breach of trust with far-reaching implications for the NATO alliance.

Erdoğan denounced Mitsotakis for involving the United States in Greece’s conflict with Turkey in the Aegean Sea. “We had agreed with him not to include third countries in our dispute. Despite this, he visited the US and spoke to the Congress, warning them not to give F-16 [fighter jets] to us,” Erdoğan said. He also accused Greece of harboring supporters of the failed NATO-backedmilitary coup in Turkey on July 15, 2016 that nearly succeeded in assassinating Erdoğan.

Erdoğan also let it be known that he viewed the US building of NATO bases in Greece, targeting Russia and growing Chinese economic influence in the region, as a threat to his government. He said: “And most importantly there are nearly 10 bases in Greece. Whom does Greece threaten with those bases? Or why are these bases being created in Greece?”

As he threatens to veto US-backed plans for Finland and Sweden to join the NATO alliance against Russia, Erdoğan has repeatedly denounced NATO bases in Greece and stated that Turkey’s decision not to veto Greece’s return to NATO’s unified military command was a mistake. Last Thursday, he said: “What happened when [Greece] went back? For example, America has now established a base in Alexandroupoli,” a Greek city near the border with Turkey.

The visit of Mitsotakis to Washington undoubtedly placed significant military and strategic pressure on the Turkish government. Mitsotakis wrote on Twitter that his meeting with Biden “demonstrated how Greece/US relations are at an all-time high—in trade, investment, and defense.” He also said that “we will launch the process for the acquisition of a squadron of F-35 aircraft. And we do hope to be able to add this fantastic plane to the Greek air force before the end of this decade.”

Turkey was excluded from the F-35 program by the United States following its purchase of S-400 air defense systems from Russia after the NATO-backed 2016 coup failed.

The rising Greek-Turkish conflict and tensions inside NATO go hand-in-hand with a dangerous escalation in the Aegean Sea. Greece’s Kathimerini reported on “a large-scale Greek naval exercise, Storm 2022, which is currently underway and will be completed on May 27,” amid mutual allegations of airspace violations between Greece and Turkey. It wrote that Turkey sent a message with “two F-16s fighter jets that violated Greek airspace, reaching just two 2.5 nautical miles from the northern port city of Alexandroupoli.”

Turkey claimed Greece violated its airspace twice this week, and that it replied to those violations Friday “based on reciprocity and in accordance with” Turkish Air Force’s rules of engagement.

Kathimerini also criticized Turkey for having “resumed its practice of allowing boats packed with migrants to depart from its coast for the Greek islands in the eastern Aegean. … It was the first instance in some time that such a large number of migrants tried to enter Greek territorial waters from the Turkish coast.”

It is apparent, however, that the Aegean conflict is now bound up with the NATO war on Russia in Ukraine, and US plans for military escalation against Russia and China.

Erdoğan boasted of assisting NATO in the war against Russia in Ukraine. He said, “Even in the war in the north of the Black Sea, about which everyone likes to talk big, it is us who have given the most significant, concrete and beneficial support to Ukraine.” Turkish arms sales to Ukraine rose from $2 million in the first quarter of 2021 to $60 million in the first quarter of 2022. He added that his government “exerts the sincerest efforts to first reach a ceasefire and then to achieve lasting peace in the region by maintaining political and humanitarian relations with Russia.”

Ankara has closed the Dardanelles and Istanbul straits between the Aegean and Black Seas to both Russian and NATO warships since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The NATO-Russia war threatens workers internationally, and in particular in the Balkans and the Middle East, with a catastrophic nuclear war. Erdoğan’s statement Thursday that “the outbreak of a new world war will benefit neither the region nor the world” points to mounting concerns in the Turkish bourgeoisie over these dangers. Washington’s war aims against Russia in Ukraine—to first take back Crimea and the Donbas, carve up Russia, and install a neo-colonial regime—are similar to its policy against countries across the Middle East, including potentially Turkey itself.

The danger of a world war driven by the imperialist powers, led by Washington, cannot however be fought by bourgeois regimes like the Erdoğan government. Politically reactionary, tied to imperialism and fearful above all of the working class, it is both unwilling and unable to mobilize and unite mass opposition that exists internationally to imperialist war. That tasks falls to the working class.

While Erdoğan is threatening to veto Finnish and Swedish accession to NATO, he is only doing so in the context of horse-trading with the NATO imperialist powers to give him a green light for further attacks on the Kurdish people and military operations in the Middle East.

When Erdoğan announced that he would veto Sweden and Finland joining NATO on the grounds of their support for the Kurdish-nationalist People's Protection Units (YPG), he is targeting US policy. While Washington supports the YPG as a proxy force occupying the north of Syria against the Russian-backed government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Turkish bourgeoisie is determined to prevent the emergence of a YPG-led Kurdish state on its borders.

To this end, Erdoğan, who has repeatedly invaded Syria since 2016, occupying parts of the country, threatened a renewed Turkish invasion of Syria: “We are starting to take new steps soon regarding the remaining parts of the works which we have launched to create 30-kilometer-deep secure zones along our southern borders.”

Erdoğan has demanded that Sweden and Finland stop supporting the YPG in Syria as well as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which his government bans as terrorist groups. He has discussed this in a flurry of meetings with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and Finnish President Sauli Niinistö.

On Monday, Erdoğan said: “We have said that these countries have to choose between providing practical and political support to terrorist organizations and expecting Turkey’s consent to their NATO membership, and they have to show this with explicit signs.”

However, US officials still predict that Erdoğan will capitulate to pressure to admit Sweden and Finland into NATO. On Tuesday, Deputy US Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said Washington is “confident that Finland and Sweden will be able to resolve those [concerns] with the Turks directly.”

In reality, there are growing signs that the NATO war on Russia threatens to provoke a regional conflagration across the Middle East. Ankara’s preparations for new attacks on the YPG militias come amid claims that Russia is reducing its military presence in Syria to reinforce its forces in Ukraine. There have been several reports that Iranian forces are deploying into Syria to replace Russian troops who are being drawn off to fight on the Ukrainian front.

Yesterday, in an article titled “How the Ukraine crisis could make the Syrian civil war worse,” the Washington Post wrote: “Some might view a reduced Russian role in support of Assad’s regime as a positive development. But our assessment is that these shifts could create significant risks of renewed fighting as well as escalate tensions between Israel and Iran.”

With new COVID-19 outbreak in Latin America, governments let virus rip

Eduardo Parati

After a brief period of decrease in new COVID-19 cases since the devastating wave of the Omicron variant, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil are again recording new outbreaks of the pandemic. Chile has recorded 18,060 and 26,780 new cases in the past two weeks, respectively, a 48 percent increase in one week. Although the number of ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients in Chile has not yet increased, the other waves of the pandemic have shown that hospitalizations and deaths follow case outbreaks with a delay of a few weeks.

In Argentina, cases increased by 92 percent in one week, and in the capital, Buenos Aires, by 128 percent. Four weeks ago, the country recorded 8,387 new cases, but that number rose to 33,989 last week, an increase of 305.2 percent. Between the first week of the month and last week, the number of patients hospitalized in moderate to severe condition in Buenos Aires increased 64.5 percent, from 237 to 390.

COVID-19 ICU patient in São Paulo, Brazil (Credit: Gustavo Basso)

In Brazil, the moving average of cases is registering an increase, driven by outbreaks in the southern region of the country. On May 19, it reached an average of 19,128 daily new cases, a 46.7 percent increase over the previous month. Given the large under-reporting of the infections in the country, it is difficult to know the real trajectory of the pandemic. However, data from hospitalizations, pharmacy tests, and school reports indicate that the virus is spreading much faster than the official figures show.

According to data from the Brazilian Association of Pharmacy and Drugstore Chains (Abrafarma), the number of positive tests increased 56 percent between the week of May 2-8 and the week of May 9-15. In the same period, the total number of tests performed increased from 89,236 to 121,272.

The number of hospitalizations in the state of São Paulo is growing, from 1,253 in the first week of this month to 1,666 last week, an increase of 33 percent. At the same time, the total number of patients in ICU beds has increased 11.2 percent since May 1, from 3,179 to 3,536 on May 20.

Last week, classes were suspended in at least four classrooms at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) after 17 medical students tested positive for COVID-19 in just seven days. In the ABC industrial region of São Paulo, several reports are coming in from parents about infection outbreaks in schools. The mother of a student at the vocational school ETEC Jorge Street told Repórter Diário: “As far as we know, there were 12 cases in his classroom. And also, in other classrooms of the mechatronics, electronics, and administration courses, there are teachers who are out sick.”

The response to the signs of a new wave of the pandemic by Latin American governments is essentially the same, from self-declared “left-wing” governments such as that of Gabriel Boric in Chile and Alberto Fernández in Argentina, to that of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

The surge of infections in Chile is occurring at the same time as COVID-19 testing has reached its lowest rate in more than a year and a half. Tests for entering the country have not been required since March, and, in April, land borders with Argentina, Bolivia and Peru were reopened. On April 14, the Chilean government removed mask mandates in open places, including mass gatherings such as concerts and soccer stadiums.

Boric’s government is adopting a pandemic severity warning criterion based solely on the transmission of “new variants” among the population. In March, with the emergence of the BA.2 subvariant, experts said that this version of the virus has sufficient mutations from the original Omicron variant to give it a new Greek letter. However, admitting the severity of BA.2 would cause alarm in the population and force the government to halt its campaign for ending the remaining mitigation measures. Following the position that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” the criteria adopted by the Chilean government allows it to keep the economy open indefinitely during a next wave.

This indifferent and criminal policy in response to the pandemic is one component of the reactionary response of the Chilean pseudo-leftist government to intensifying workers’ struggles, with Boric having sent the Carabineros special forces to violently suppress a strike by oil refinery workers on May 9. The aim is to ensure that workers remain on production lines, in warehouses, and other workplaces generating profits for the capitalists even as the prices of basic products continue to rise, and the spread of the virus continues to hit thousands of people every day.

As of April 6, continuing the policy adopted during the January-February Omicron wave, Alberto Fernandez’s Peronist government in Argentina removed the mandatory wearing of masks in schools and workplaces in Buenos Aires province, where more than a third of the country’s population lives. The end of mandatory use was implemented a few days after the nationwide suspension of the obligation to report positive self-tests to the government and mandatory two-meter social distancing.

In response to the rapid increase in new cases in recent weeks, Argentine Health Minister Carla Vizzotti signaled over the weekend that the new outbreaks will not be met with any public health measures, which are already almost exclusively limited to vaccination. Vizzoti stated, “We begin today in Argentina the fourth wave of COVID-19, in a totally different situation,” adding that the increase in cases has not had a corresponding strain on the Argentine health system because of vaccines.

In late March, Vizzotti declared that “we are in the transition from pandemic to endemic,” almost at the same time as the Bolsonaro government declared the end of the health emergency in response to COVID-19 in Brazil, called ESPIN. The end of ESPIN was announced in April by Brazilian Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga, in the face of criticism from several public health and health professional associations. The decision officially went into effect on Sunday, as the number of hospitalizations accelerates.

Although Queiroga points out that the emergency purchase of vaccines and medicines will continue, experts are warning that the end of the decree could mean an even deeper cut in pandemic testing and surveillance systems. Fiocruz Foundation epidemiologist Ethel Maciel pointed out that deadlines for contracting services and personnel are put in limbo with the end of ESPIN. Maciel said: “Services will be discontinued. Professionals who are hired via decree will have their contracts terminated and this will be quite detrimental to the population.”

The policy of letting the virus spread through the population in the most populous countries in the region threatens to cause a new devastating wave of cases throughout Latin America and creates the conditions for a new collapse of its health care systems, as during previous waves.

In Colombia, which has not yet registered an increase in new cases, Health Minister Fernando Ruíz pointed on May 14 to the “clear probability of negative and highly contagious events in the coming days” and made reference to the serious increase in infections in the US. However, following the line of all governments in the region, Ruíz ruled out any response to the threat of new waves, saying that a “slight increase in [the] positivity [rate] is not worrisome.”

In Bolivia, the health minister of Luis Arce’s pseudo-left government stated, “In the last epidemiological surveillance report we detected the BA.2 variant of Omicron in the country.” The health ministry stated that an increase in cases had been recorded and that the population should prepare for a new wave. Last week, 718 new cases were reported, more than double the previous week with 331 cases.

In addition, the vaccination-only strategy adopted by governments in the region allows the virus to continue spreading and developing new, potentially more transmissible, and virulent variants.

Earlier this month, the first cases of the XQ subvariant of COVID-19 were confirmed, a combination of the BA.1.1 and BA.2. In March, cases emerged of the so-called “Deltacron,” a recombinant version of the Delta and Omicron variants. The emergence of new, more transmissible and aggressive variants points to the risk of versions with greater vaccine escape, transmissibility, and virulence than previous versions. A study by American experts and researchers published this month showed that the Omicron variant was as aggressive as previous strains. The work exposes the false narrative that was propagated in the corporate media and by governments over months that Omicron was “mild.”

At the same time, the indifferent and criminal response of governments to public health issues is being exposed by their attitude toward monkeypox cases on several continents. The WHO has held emergency meetings in response to the disease, which has possibly been spreading for some time without being detected. On May 22, the first case of monkeypox was reported in Buenos Aires.

A global response to the new outbreaks of COVID-19 is needed, using all necessary public health measures, including distribution of high-quality masks, universal vaccination, travel control, temporary lockdowns, testing, and contact tracing, which will eliminate the virus in increasingly large regions of the world.

Grim 2022 Drought Outlook for Western US

Imtiaz Rangwala

Mesquite Flat Dunes, Death Valley National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Much of the western U.S. has been in the grip of an unrelenting drought since early 2020. The dryness has coincided with record-breaking wildfires, intense and long-lasting heat waves, low stream flows and dwindling water supplies in reservoirs that millions of people across the region rely on.

Heading into summer, the outlook is pretty grim. The National Weather Service’s latest seasonal outlook, issued May 19, 2022, described drought persisting across most of the West and parts of the Great Plains.

One driver of the Western drought has been persistent La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific since the summer of 2020. During La Niña, cooler tropical Pacific waters help nudge the jet stream northward. That tends to bring fewer storms to the southern tier of the U.S. and produce pronounced drought impacts in the Southwest.

The other and perhaps more important part of the story is the hotter and thirstier atmosphere, caused by a rapidly warming climate.

As a climate scientist, I’ve watched how climate change is making drought conditions increasingly worse – particularly in the western and central U.S. The last two years have been more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 Celsius) warmer than normal in these regions. Large swaths of the Southwest have been even hotter, with temperatures more than 3 F (1.7 C) higher. Studies suggest the Southwest’s ongoing 20-year drought is the most severe in at least 1,200 years, based on how dry the soils are.

A hotter atmosphere sucks more moisture from the soil

A thirstier atmosphere tends to extract more water out of the land. It exacerbates evaporative stress on the land, particularly when a region is experiencing below-normal precipitation. High evaporative stress can rapidly deplete soil moisture and lead to hotter temperatures, as the evaporative cooling effect is diminished. All this creates hydroclimatic stress for plants, causing restricted growth, drying and even death.

As a consequence of a warming climate, the U.S. Southwest has seen an 8% increase in this evaporative demand since the 1980s. This trend is generally happening across other parts of the country.

The thirstier atmosphere is turning what would otherwise be near-normal or moderately dry conditions into droughts that are more severe or extreme. As the climate heats up further, the increasing atmospheric thirst will continue to intensify drought stress, with consequences for water availability, long-lasting and intense heat stress, and large-scale ecosystem transformation.

Climate models project ominous prospects of a more arid climate and more severe droughts in the Southwest and southern Great Plains in the coming decades.

In addition to direct impacts of increasing temperatures on future droughts, these regions are also expected to see fewer storms and more days without precipitation. Climate models consistently project a poleward shift in the midlatitude storm tracks during this century as the planet heats up, which is expected to result in fewer storms in the southern tier of the country.

Expect flash droughts even in wetter areas

The changing nature of droughts is a concern even in parts of the U.S. that are expected to have a net increase in annual precipitation during the 21st century. In a hotter future, because of the high evaporative demand on the land, prolonged periods with weeks to months of below normal precipitation in these areas can lead to significant drought, even if the overall trend is for more precipitation.

Large parts of the northern Plains, for example, have seen precipitation increase by 10% or more in the last three decades. However, the region is not immune to severe drought conditions in a hotter climate.

At the tail end of what was the wettest decade on record in the region, the northern Plains experienced an intense flash drought in the summer of 2017 that resulted in agricultural losses in excess of $2.6 billion and wildfires across millions of acres. Record evaporative demand contributed to the severity of the flash drought, in addition to a severe short-term precipitation deficit. A flash drought is a drought that intensifies rapidly over a period of a few weeks and often catches forecasters by surprise. The likelihood of flash droughts that can cause severe impacts to agriculture and ecosystems and promote large wildfires is expected to increase with a warmer and thirstier atmosphere.

Flash droughts are also emerging as a growing concern in the Northeast. In 2020, much of New England experienced an extreme hydrologic drought, with low stream flows and groundwater levels and widespread crop losses between May and September. Aided by very warm and dry atmospheric conditions, the drought developed very rapidly over that period from what had been above-normal wet conditions.

As humanity enters a hotter future, prolonged periods of weeks to months of below-normal precipitation are going to be of a greater concern almost everywhere.

Heading into unfamiliar territory

Other forms of droughts are also emerging.

Atmospheric heating is causing snow droughts as more precipitation falls as rain rather than snow and snow melts earlier. Shorter snow seasons and longer growing seasons because of warmer temperatures are changing the timing of ecological responses.

Land is greening up earlier and causing an earlier loss of water from the land surface through evapotranspiration – the loss of water from plants and soil. This could result in drier soils in the latter half of the growing season. As a result, parts of the central and western U.S. could see both increased greening and drying in the future that are seasonally separated across the growing season.

With a rapidly changing climate, we are entering unfamiliar territory. The world will need new ways to better anticipate future droughts that could transform natural and human systems.

UK plans naval intervention against Russia in the Black Sea

Thomas Scripps

Britain is again putting itself at the forefront of NATO’s escalation of the war with Russia over Ukraine. On Monday the Times reported, “Britain is in discussion with allies about sending warships to the Black Sea to protect freighters carrying Ukrainian grain.”

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has discussed the plans with Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis. He explained that participating countries “could provide ships or planes that would be stationed in the Black Sea and provide maritime passage for the grain ships to leave Odesa’s port and reach the Bosphorus in Turkey”.

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, right, is greeted by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg prior to a meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, January 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Olivier Matthys, Pool)

Landsbergis said of Britain’s response to this proposal, “From my perspective the British government is interested in assisting Ukraine in any way it can.”

A diplomatic source confirmed that Truss is in favour once the practicalities are agreed, including “demining the harbour and providing Ukraine with longer-range weapons to defend the harbour from Russian attack,” according to the Guardian.

These plans are already in motion. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin announced Monday that Washington would be supplying Ukraine with Harpoon anti-ship missiles, via a deal with Denmark. The Daily Mail reports that “a handful” of countries are willing to do the same, according to US officials and congressional sources.

Earlier this month, former senior NATO commander Admiral James Stavridis wrote for Bloomberg on May 6,“It’s worth considering an escort system for Ukrainian (and other national) merchant ships that want to go in and out of Odesa … The vast Black Sea is mostly international waters. Nato warships are free to travel nearly wherever they want, including into Ukraine’s territorial waters and its 200-mile exclusive economic zone. Conceding those waters to Russia makes no sense. Instead, look for them to become the next major front in the Ukraine war.”

The Lithuanian foreign minister claimed, “This would be a non-military humanitarian mission and is not comparable with a no-fly zone… We would need a coalition of the willing—countries with significant naval power to protect the shipping lanes, and countries that are affected by this”.

The “coalition of the willing” is the formulation used to describe the imperialist-led alliance which carried out the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. A NATO-led naval intervention would be a deliberate military provocation, designed to create a pretext for a direct clash with Russian forces, carried out under the cover of a “humanitarian mission” to avert a global hunger crisis over which the imperialist powers do not lose a wink of sleep.

Strategic analysts have been more honest about what is involved. Sidharth Kaushal of the Royal United Services Institute military think tank told the Financial Times, “To maintain a functional convoy system, you’d have to have a huge western fleet stationed in the Mediterranean to rotate through the Black Sea” and risk “escalatory confrontation with Russian warships”.

On May 17, NATO began a “vigilance activity”, Neptune Shield, involving 19 nations and centred on the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group in the Mediterranean. The strike group includes the Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, the USS San Jacinto cruiser, five US destroyers and a Norwegian frigate.

The eastern Mediterranean is a permanent home to NATO’s Standing Maritime Group 2, composed of 14 ships including 10 frigates and the UK’s HMS Diamond destroyer.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba bellicosely announced the war plans being discussed behind the scenes, saying of the Russian presence in the Black Sea that there was “a military solution to this: defeat Russia.” He continued, “If we receive even more military support, we’ll be able to throw them back… defeat the Black Sea fleet and unblock the passage for vessels.”

A defence advisor explained to the FT the aggressive operations being considered, noting, “Russia’s diesel-powered submarines also have to resurface regularly, which makes them vulnerable to attack” and adding, “Destroying the Kerch Strait Bridge that Russia uses to supply Crimea could also leave Putin’s forces struggling with the same kinds of logistical problems it has faced elsewhere.”

The incendiary character of the plans being discussed is prompting nervous responses. Kaushal asks, “How many countries would want to risk their ships going cheek by jowl with the Russian navy?” The Daily Mail cites a US official who “said no nation had wanted to be the first or only nation to send Harpoons, fearing reprisals from Russia if a ship is sunk with a Harpoon from their stockpile.” The Daily Telegraph quotes foreign office sources saying, “current discussions don’t go ‘as far as using warships’ to help unblock the war-torn country’s ports.”

But the trajectory of the NATO-Russia conflict is towards such confrontations. Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, writes in the New Statesman, “The view up to now has been that this would be an unduly provocative move, subject to the same misgivings that led Nato to reject calls for a ‘no-fly zone’ above Ukraine.” But the Russian naval operation is an “aspect of this war… now coming into focus—where pressure could build for a Nato operation.” If the war “drags on, this is an issue that will not go away… The major naval powers need to be thinking ahead.”

A NATO offensive in the Black Sea has been long in the making, with the UK playing a prominent role.

In June 2021, NATO carried out its largest ever operation in the region, Sea Breeze, involving 32 countries, 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft and 18 special operations. The exercise was hosted jointly by the US and Ukrainian navies and directly targeted Russia, with NATO’s statement announcing the operation reading, “NATO supports Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, extending to its territorial waters. NATO does not and will not recognize Russia's illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea and denounces its temporary occupation.”

Just days before Sea Breeze 2021 began, British destroyer HMS Defender engaged in a major provocation by entering waters off Crimea claimed by Russia. The Russian armed forces fired warning shots and dropped a bomb in the path of the warship, later threatening that if something similar happened again they could bomb “on target”.

The Type 45 destroyer HMS Defender leaves the naval base in Portsmouth harbour for exercises in Scotland, prior to deployment to the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Indo-Pacific region as part of the UK's Carrier Strike Group 21. May 1, 2021 (WSWS Media)

Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed the UK ship was acting in coordination with a US reconnaissance aircraft, “trying to uncover the actions of our Armed Forces to stop a provocation.”

The region has clearly been extensively prepared as a theatre for combat with Russia. American media reported that the US was critically involved in the Ukrainian strike that sunk the Russian flagship the Moskva on April 14.

That these moves are now being made under the banner of alleviating a world hunger crisis is grotesque hypocrisy. This was underscored by former UK Foreign Secretary/Conservative Party leader William Hague in an opinion piece for the Times Tuesday, “Putin’s next move? A truce to split the West”.

Hague urges NATO powers not to accept any Russian proposals for peace talks, explicitly deriding calls to do so to avert a further catastrophic escalation of either the war or global price rises.

“Ideally for you,” Hague writes of Putin, “western commentators will say, ‘Hurray, we always knew he wanted an off-ramp’, and, ‘All wars end in agreement’ and discuss how the cost-of-living crisis could be helped by your very generous offer to desist from the war you started.” This is unacceptable to Hague. What matters is not peace or hunger but pursuing NATO’s war aims.

US aligns with European Union against the UK on Northern Ireland Protocol

Chris Marsden

The Biden administration has come out strongly against Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government in the deepening row between the UK and European Union over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The protocol governs post-Brexit trade. It was ostensibly designed to prevent the return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, a European Union (EU) member state. However, it did so by effectively creating an EU border in the Irish Sea, which is anathema to the north’s unionist parties and, especially on account of its substantial bureaucratic obstacles to trade, to the majority of the UK Conservative Party.

Vehicles at the port of Larne, Northern Ireland, Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2021. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison)

The Irish nationalist Sinn Féin for the first time secured the most votes of any party in the May 5 Northern Ireland Assembly elections, while the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) suffered heavy losses. The DUP responded by continuing to block the power sharing executive from meeting, by refusing to support the election of a new speaker. The Johnson government has used this to threaten a unilateral rewriting of the protocol, including by targeting the role of the European Court of Justice in overseeing disputes and restoring Westminster’s power to decide VAT sales tax rates. Last week Foreign Secretary Liz Truss proposed a bill to these ends, without releasing its contents, that could be adopted as early as next month.

This has raised genuine fears among many workers that the constitutional arrangements that ended the civil war in Northern Ireland, embodied in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, could unravel—bringing a return to sectarian conflict led above all by the hardline Unionists.

For British imperialism, the Tory/Unionist response not only threatens trade war with the EU but open conflict with the Biden administration. The US, which presided over the 1998 agreements, holds a dominant position in the Republic’s economy which it uses as a staging ground for accessing the Single European Market and as a tax shelter for its major corporations. But the threat to US operations in Europe is now meeting up with concern that the UK is endangering the coalition Washington has assembled to pursue military hostilities against Russia.

A delegation of US politicians this weekend began a tour of Europe and the UK, which continued Monday in Dublin and now moves on to Belfast. It is led by Richard E. Neal, the Democrat chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. On Friday Congressman Brendan Boyle announced that a statement had been agreed with members of the European Parliament declaring that “renegotiating the protocol is not an option.” Speaking from west County Kerry in Ireland Sunday, Neal told RTÉ, “President Biden, Speaker Pelosi and I have made our position known that nothing can jeopardise the Good Friday Agreement.”

He referred to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s tweets Thursday repeating the warning by Biden that there would be no chance of Congress supporting a US/UK free trade pact if the Good Friday Agreement is undermined. She wrote, “As I have stated in my conversations with the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and Members of the House of Commons, if the United Kingdom chooses to undermine the Good Friday Accords, the Congress cannot and will not support a bilateral free trade agreement with the United Kingdom.”

In some ways more damaging still for Johnson, who has positioned himself as the number-one military ally of the US, Derek Chollet, the senior adviser to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, told the BBC that “a big fight between the UK and the EU” was “the last thing” Washington wanted. Speaking after meetings in Downing Street Friday, he said Russian President Vladimir Putin would “use any opportunity he can to show that our alliance is fraying… We want to see this issue resolved and we want to see the temperature lowered and no unilateral acts.”

It is a measure of the crisis gripping the Johnson government that the threats from the US met with an overtly hostile response. After what were described as “frank” talks with the US delegation at her country retreat of Chevening on Saturday, Truss tweeted that the UK is “defending the Good Friday Agreement” and warned that she would not let the “situation drag on”.

Liz Truss (fifth from left) meeting members of the US delegation in London (Credit:Liz Truss/Twitter)

Former Brexit minister Lord Frost, who negotiated the protocol, told BBC Radio 4 that Pelosi’s intervention was “ignorant” because “It is the protocol itself that’s undermining [the Good Friday Agreement] and people who can’t see that really shouldn’t be commenting on the situation in Northern Ireland.”

In the Daily Telegraph, Conor Burns, a Northern Ireland minister and Johnson’s special Brexit envoy to the US, said, “We seek an ambitious [free trade agreement] with the US. But there can be no connection between that and doing the right thing for Northern Ireland. None.'

One reason for the UK’s intransigent pose is that many Tories have already given up on any prospect of a US trade deal, despite this being placed at the centre of the argument for a post-Brexit economic policy that would compensate for lost European trade. The New York Times commented that “it is no longer clear how much leverage” Pelosi’s threat has in the UK. “The White House has signaled that striking a deal with Britain is not high on its list of priorities, anyway.”

Such is the international isolation and emphasised weakness of British imperialism post-Brexit that the Tories are extraordinarily reliant on the Unionists, with all the dangers this entails. On Friday, DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson warned, “You cannot have power-sharing without consensus in Northern Ireland”, describing Pelosi’s “contributions” as “entirely unhelpful” and repeating “a mantra that frankly is hopelessly out of date.” DUP Economy Minister Gordon Lyons described Neal as a supporter of Irish unification who had worked closely with Friends of Sinn Féin. Traditional Unionist Voice party representative Stephen Cooper denounced “the interference of foreign figures” and said that the Stormont parties should treat the “belligerent meddling” of Irish premier Micheál Martin “with the contempt it deserves”.

This right-wing political block is facing off against an emerging alliance led by the US and encompassing the European imperialist powers, the Republic of Ireland, Sinn Féin and the pro-EU Alliance Party in the north, as well as Britain’s Labour Party and the Scottish National Party (SNP).

Underscoring the prospect of the break-up of the UK, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon met with Sinn Féin’s deputy leader Michelle O'Neill Saturday at her official Edinburgh residence. Sturgeon linked separatism to Brexit, telling the media that Scotland and Northern Ireland “both voted against Brexit,” bringing “to the fore” a “system of government that’s been at play in the UK for some time now” that is “not serving all of our interests.”

The struggle over the protocol has become the focus of extraordinary inter-imperialist and national tensions, in which the essential concerns of the working class find no genuine expression. For workers the only outcome of such conflicts in ruling circles, whatever democratic rhetoric is utilised, will be an escalation of already crushing levels of austerity as all sides seek competitive advantage at their expense while the availability of essential goods is jeopardised and prices go through the roof. Meanwhile all sides will continue with the war drive against Russia, even as they employ sectarianism and nationalism to and divide and politically demobilise the working class.