The economic and geostrategic significance of the Black Sea region and the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine

Clara Weiss

The imperialist proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the outcome of a decades-long drive by the imperialist powers to bring the territories of the former Soviet Union under their direct control and represents a qualitatively new stage in the emergence of a new world struggle between the imperialist powers for the re-division of the resources of the globe.

In its recent analysis of the role of critical minerals in the geostrategic and economic objectives of the imperialist drive to subjugate Russia through war, the World Socialist Web Site noted:

“The breaking apart of Russia and its domination by American capital would be a strategic stepping stone in the efforts of the American ruling class to impose a “new American century” through the subordination of China and Eurasia more broadly to its aims. Resources play a role in this. Amid the enduring need for oil and natural gas, as well as the rapidly growing need for critical minerals, Russia is seen as a vital landmass with a vast array of riches.”

If the war against Russia is a “stepping stone” to the war against China, control over the Black Sea is seen as a stepping stone for the breakup of Russia. This article will review the critical significance of the Black Sea region, where this war is taking place, from a geostrategic and economic standpoint.

The geostrategic significance of the Black Sea region

Gaining direct access to the resources of the former Soviet Union, which had been closed off to imperialism for seven decades following the 1917 October Revolution, has been a major goal of the imperialist powers for decades. Within this context, the Black Sea region, which forms a nexus between Eastern and southeastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and the Middle East, is of strategic significance. 

The Black Sea forms a bridge between Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia [Photo by Google Maps]

For US imperialism, already in the midst of a protracted economic and political decline, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy appeared like a gift from heaven. Drunk with triumphalism, the US ruling class proclaimed 1991 the “unipolar moment.” In 1992, a strategy document of the Pentagon determined that US strategy “must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.”

In his book The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the most influential foreign policy advisers of Washington in the past half century, elaborated on the principal significance of what geostrategists call “Eurasia”—the landmass of Europe and Asia—for the desperate efforts by the US to preserve its global hegemony.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Within Eurasia, Brzezinski identified what he called the “Eurasian Balkans” as the region where the major conflicts over the control of all of Eurasia would take place. This region, Brzezinski wrote, stretched “from Crimea in the Black Sea directly eastward along the new southern frontiers of Russia, all the way to the Chinese province of Xinjiang, then down to the Indian Ocean and thence westward to the Red Sea, then northward to the eastern Mediterranean Sea and back to Crimea.”

Almost all of the 25 states in this region, he continued, are “ethnically as well as religiously heterogeneous and practically none of them [are] politically stable. … This huge region, torn by volatile hatreds and surrounded by competing powerful neighbors, is likely to be a major battlefield, both for wars among nation-states and, more likely, for protracted ethnic and religious violence.”

The "Eurasian Balkans", according to Zbigniew Brzezinski. Map from his book The Grand Chessboard. [Photo by Zbigniew Brzeziński ]

Brezinski’s book was not so much a “prediction” but rather an outline of the fundamental strategic objectives and considerations of US imperialism. Indeed, the region he termed the “Eurasian Balkans” has been turned upside down in the past decades through a combination of US bombing raids and invasions, and the systematic fueling of civil wars and ethnic strife.

Beginning with the US invasion of Iraq in 1991, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the second invasion of Iraq in 2003, it has also involved major interventions of imperialism through drone and other means of warfare in Pakistan and many other countries. Throughout the 1990s, the US and Germany also fueled ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, culminating in the savage NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999.

More recently, the geostrategically critical Xinjiang province of China, which borders Russia and Kazakhstan, has become a linchpin of US provocations against China and attempts to destabilize and break up the country. In Russia too, the fueling of separatist tendencies and regionalist and political conflicts within the ruling oligarchy with the ultimate aim of carving up the country has been a central component of US policy.

The western end of this “Eurasian Balkans,” the Black Sea region, has been the focal point of both NATO expansion and several coup operations by Washington. Until the Stalinist bureaucracies restored capitalism in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe in 1989-1991, the Black Sea region was largely outside the direct control of imperialism. Only one of the states neighboring the Black Sea, Turkey, was a NATO member.

This changed completely with the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, following three decades of the eastward expansion of NATO, all states bordering the Black Sea with the exception of Russia itself are either members of NATO (Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria) or have been largely integrated into the alliance in all but name, following massive interventions of US imperialism in their politics (Ukraine, Georgia.)

In addition to NATO’s expansion to the Black Sea and Baltic Sea, these operations included the 2003 and 2004-2005 “color revolutions”—US-sponsored coups that relied on mobilizing layers of the privileged middle class and sections of the oligarchy—that took place in Georgia and Ukraine, respectively.

In 2008, Georgia, with the support of Washington, provoked a war with Russia over the two break-away regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.

These operations culminated in the 2014 coup in Kiev, that was heavily backed by Germany and the US and was carried out by far-right militias such as the Right Sector and a section of the Ukrainian oligarchy, headed then by the “chocolate oligarch” Petro Poroshenko. 

Map showing the eastward expansion of NATO since 1949 [Photo by Patrickneil / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

These overt moves to encircle Russia have prompted fears in the Kremlin that the Black Sea is being turned into a “NATO lake.” Indeed, this has been an objective of Washington, in particular, fully aware of the military and economic consequences that full NATO control over the Black Sea would mean for Russia.

The military significance of the Black Sea region in the conflict with Russia

Ben Hodges, a retired US Army officer and former commanding general of the United States Army Europe, recently stated bluntly that the goal of the US in this proxy war consisted in “finally breaking the back of Russia’s ability to project power outside of Russia to threaten Georgia, to threaten Moldova, to threaten our Baltic allies.”

Undermining the Kremlin’s position in the Black Sea region is critical to achieving this goal.

Alton Buland, the director for European policy at the US Department of Defense, has described the Black Sea as “Russia’s geostrategic center of gravity” and its “gateway south, the gateway to the Middle East [and]…the gateway to Asia.”

It is through the Black Sea and via the Bosphorus straits that Russia has access to the Mediterranean. However, this access is highly tentative as the Bosphorus and Dardanelles are controlled by Turkey, a NATO member, with whom Russia has a very tense relationship. (Control over the Bosphorus was a key objective of the Russian Empire vis-a-vis the Ottoman Empire in World War I.)

The Bosporus straits (red) and the Dardanelles straits (yellow). [Photo by User:Ineriot / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

The proximity of the Black Sea states to Russia also means that large portions of European Russia, where the bulk of the country’s population resides, can be easily targeted by US sea- and land-based intermediate range missiles, stationed in Ukraine or any NATO member in that region such as Romania or Bulgaria.

In this context, Russia has made its position in the Black Sea a major military priority, especially over the past ten years. Of six military bases that Russia retained in the former Soviet Union after 1991, three were located in the Black Sea, including its Black Sea naval port on Crimea, the peninsula in the Black Sea that Russia annexed in 2014 following the Western-orchestrated coup in Kiev. In 2019, the US Naval War College observed that the annexation of Crimea enabled Russia to reestablish its “maritime dominance in the Black Sea.”

Russia’s military base in Crimea is critical not only in the conflict with Ukraine. It is also the point from which the Kremlin controls its military operations in Syria, where a civil war and de facto proxy war between the US and Russia, which has been backing the Assad regime against the US-backed Islamist opposition, has been raging since 2011.

Cutting Russia off the Black Sea and thereby the Mediterranean would, therefore, significantly undermine its position in the Middle East as well as in North Africa where Russia still has significant economic and military interests, most notably in Libya, which has been thrown into a civil war by the 2011 NATO attack on the country.

Map of the Black Sea region [Photo by Norman Einstein / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

Well aware of the geostrategic and military significance of the Black Sea for Russia, NATO has staged multiple provocations there over the past years, including in the immediate run-up to the Russian invasion.

This included the massive Sea Breeze exercises in the Black Sea in 2021, involving a record 32 countries, 5,000 troops, 32 ships, and 40 aircraft. It also entailed several provocations, including by Britain, which sent a warship into waters claimed by Russia off Crimea in June 2021, prompting the Russian army to drop a bomb in the destroyer’s path. In both spring and the fall of 2021, the US also provocatively sent multiple warships into the Black Sea, well aware that the Kremlin considered this a “red line” in terms of its national security interests. As of February 2022, NATO had 18 warships stationed in the Black Sea.

Last month, Britain called for a NATO-led naval intervention in the Black Sea against Russia to “protect freighters carrying Ukrainian grain” under the cover of a “humanitarian mission” to avert a global hunger crisis. However, 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.

Although not bordering the Black Sea directly, Greece, as a NATO member, has in recent years become an increasingly central country in US-NATO plans for the Black Sea region. The Greek port city of Alexandroupoli in the northern Aegean Sea has been transformed into an important US base and staging point. Since Ankara's closure of the straits, the city has been used for military deliveries to Ukraine in the NATO war against Russia.

“Grain, oil seeds and mineral oils”: Pipelines and the economic resources of the Black Sea region

The Black Sea region has been a central theater of both world wars of the 20th century. German imperialism in particular has sought to bring the region, and most notably Ukraine, under its direct control. The German historian Christian Gerlach, noting the parallels between German war aims in both world wars, wrote that the Nazis’ occupation policies in the former Soviet Union—which resulted in at least 27 million dead—were focused on exploiting a few raw materials: “grain, oil seeds and mineral oils.” (Christian Gerlach: Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord. Deutsche Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Zürich 2001, p. 14)

The war policies of US and German imperialism today, which are fundamentally aimed at re-subjugating the entire region and transforming it into a colonial appendage of the imperialist powers, stand in that tradition. 

Agriculture

The food crisis triggered by the war has highlighted the central significance of the Black Sea region for the global grain market. Indeed, the region, and in particular Russia and Ukraine, are considered the “breadbasket” of not only Europe but much of Africa and the Middle East.

The top exports of Ukraine are all related to its agricultural industry. As of 2020, the list is led by oil seeds (accounting for 10.1 percent of exports, worth $5.32 billion), followed by corn (9.29 percent or $4.89 billion), and wheat (8.76 percent or $4.61 billion.) 

Russia was the world’s leading wheat exporter in 2021. The country also accounts for 2.3 percent of the world’s corn market. Together with Ukraine, Russia is also a leading producer and exporter of sunflower oil as well as barley. Romania too is a major agricultural producer. As of 2021, Romania was Europe’s largest corn and sunflower producers, and among the EU’s top five wheat and soybeans producers.

Control over these resources promises immense profits, especially at times of food crises when the agricultural giants can engage in massive speculation on corn prices. Already last year, the global food giant Cargill, one of the world’s largest companies and one of four companies that control over 70 percent of the global agricultural market, topped $5 billion in profits on $134 billion in revenue. The combined wealth of the Cargill family grew by an average $120 million a day during the pandemic, and it is set to grow significantly further amid record food prices.

Gas and oil

In addition to its own vast agricultural and raw material resources, the Black Sea region is critical for Russia’s oil exports, and for the transport of oil and gas reserves from the Caucasus and Central Asia.

An analysis by the Carnegie Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, observed in 2021, “The Black Sea is an important trade and transportation artery for Russia. Both Russia and Central Asian countries are highly dependent on the Russian port of Novorossiysk to export grain and oil by ship.”

Far from being an “imperialist” country, Russia, for all intents and purposes, is above all a raw material supplier of the world economy. Oil and gas, along with coal and other minerals, are the most important export commodities of Russia. Crude and refined petroleum together accounted for 37 percent (worth over $74.4 billion) of Russia’s exports, followed by petroleum gas (6 percent of exports and worth almost $20 billion), gold (5.67 percent and worth $18.7 billion), coal (4.4 percent or $14.5 billion), platinum (3.2 percent and worth $10.5 billion), and then wheat.

The Novorossiysk port on Russia’s Black Sea shore is the country’s single biggest port and its third most important hub for crude oil exports. In 2020, according to the EIA, 459,000 barrels of oil passed through the Novorossiysk port each day.

Given its extremely high reliance on oil and gas exports, cutting off Russia’s access to the Black Sea and Mediterranean would be the economic equivalent of “breaking the back” of the country.

The Black Sea is critical for access to the resources of Central Asia and the Caucasus as well.

Following the destruction of the Soviet Union, energy company executives flocked to the region to negotiate lucrative contracts with the former Stalinist bureaucrats-turned-oligarchs to obtain access to these resources. As the World Socialist Web Site noted in 1999, a central objective of the imperialist-instigated wars in the Balkans in the 1990s was access to the Caspian Sea, just east of the Black Sea, which was understood to be home to the world’s greatest untapped oil reserves, with between 17 and 33 billion barrels of oil, and 232 trillion cubic meters of gas.

Since the Caspian Sea is landlocked, the question of pipeline infrastructure became central to control over these resources. To this day, Russia’s pipelines, while no longer providing exclusive access to these resources, are central and they all run through the Black Sea. Thus, the Caspian pipeline, which is operated by a multinational consortium that includes both Russian state-owned companies and the American energy giant Chevron, transports oil from oil fields in Kazakhstan, as well as Russian fields in the Caspian region, to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk from where its oil is shipped throughout the world.

Over the past two decades, the US and the EU have pushed to put an end to various other pipeline projects that would have run through the Black Sea and bypassed Ukraine. At the same time, they have pursued rival projects, aimed at directly linking up the EU to gas and oil fields in the Caspian region and Central Asia.

Thus, with $4 billion, the US pushed the Baku -Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (also known as BTC pipeline), which delivered oil from Azerbaijan over Georgia to Turkey, bypassing Russia. The pipeline was an important consideration in US operations in Georgia, where Washington funded a coup in 2003 and encouraged a war with Russia in 2008.

These pipeline wars also entailed torpedoing rival Russian-backed projects. The biggest, apart from the Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines was the $50 billion South Stream pipeline project, which would have transported Russian gas from the Black Sea coast through Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary to Austria, via one route, and through Greece to Italy, via another. With an annual capacity of 63 billion cubic meters, the pipeline would have covered a tenth of Europe’s total gas demand at the time. The Kremlin was forced to call off the project in 2014, right after the coup in Ukraine.

The major Russian gas pipelines to Europe. The Kremlin could never complete the South Stream through the Black Sea because of opposition from the EU. [Photo by Samuel Bailey / CC BY 4.0]

These pipeline wars have three principal objectives:

First, the imperialist powers are trying to gain direct control over the vast resources of the former Soviet Union, preventing Russia but also China, which has substantially increased its economic involvement in the region, from controlling them.

Second, they aim at undermining the Russian economy, which is heavily reliant on such oil and gas exports, and, by extension, the Putin regime.

And third, they are aimed at providing a geostrategic advantage to the imperialist powers, most notably the US, in the competition of oil and gas companies over market shares.

Through the exploitation of shale gas, the US, once the world’s biggest net gas importer, has become a major exporter of gas, and is now directly competing with Russia for the European market. In January 2022, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, US exports of liquified natural gas (LNG) to Europe for the first time exceeded Russia’s gas pipeline deliveries. In response to the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Germany canceled almost immediately the Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2, while the White House announced an increase of its LNG shipments to Europe from 22 billion cubic meters to 37 billion cubic meters.

The world's five countries with the largest annual net imports of natural gas. Because of the "shale gas revolution", US sharply cut back on its imports starting in 2008 and has since become a major exporter of LNG. [Photo by Plazak / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

Already, US shale companies experienced a several-fold jump in their profits for the first quarter of this year: The profits of Pioneer Natural Resources increased more than fivefold, and those of Continental Resources more than tripled.

The conflict with China in the Black Sea region

While Russia has been the primary target of the imperialist intervention in the Black Sea region, over the past decades rivalry with China has also become a central consideration of both the US and the EU in the Black Sea region.

For China, the region is the easiest and quickest connection between East Asia and Europe. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), initially conceived of as a $40-billion infrastructure project, is planned to run through the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, including through Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Georgia and Turkey. Over the past years, the BRI has made very slow progress. Nevertheless, China has developed significant economic ties with many countries in the region, most notably Ukraine, which joined the BRI in 2017.

In 2019, China became Ukraine’s most important trading partner, relegating Russia to No. 2. Ukraine has also become China’s second largest corn supplier and largest supplier of weapons. In early 2021, President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that he hoped his country would become “a bridge to Europe for Chinese business.”

However, the growing role of China in Ukraine has been a major  thorn in the side of the US in particular, and Washington has intervened heavily to undermine the growing economic cooperation between Ukraine and China. Thus, in spring 2021, as the US backed Kiev’s provocations against Russia in the Black Sea, the Ukrainian government canceled a multibillion-dollar deal that would have allowed China to take over the Ukrainian company Motor Sich, one of the world’s largest engine manufacturers for airplanes and helicopters, at the last minute due to massive pressure from Washington and at considerable cost for the Ukrainian government.

But the EU, too, sees the growing influence of China in the region as a challenge to its economic and strategic interests, which the European imperialist powers seek to increasingly assert independently from Washington.

A recent analysis by the EU-based Global Security think tank noted:

“The US is involved in the [Black Sea] region to counter the geopolitical and energy interests of Russia as well as to limit the increasing influence of China, its BRI, and Chinese Digital Silk Road, through development aid, lethal military aid, and supporting the Three Seas Initiative (3SI) and the Clean Network. Competing with Russian energy interests (Nord Stream 2 particularly), the US is also trying to find a market for its energy export.

“The EU wants to create a third space between China and the US so that it can act independently. It has acted relatively autonomously and through multifarious policies, initiatives, and partnerships to actualize its European Strategic Autonomy.”

Conclusion

As in the past two world wars, the Black Sea region has emerged as a principal battle ground between various capitalist states, with the imperialist powers determined to undermine both Russian and Chinese influence, while competing between themselves for dominance in the region.

One expression of these rivaling efforts has been the resurrection of the so-called “Intermarium” (meaning “between the seas”), an alliance of Eastern European states stretching from the Baltic over the Black Sea to the Adriatic Sea. Under Trump, Washington pivoted toward explicitly supporting this alliance which has long been spearheaded by the Polish government of the far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS).

Originally developed by the inter-war Polish dictator Józef Piłsudski, who built up Poland as a bulwark of imperialism in the region, the Intermarium was principally directed against the USSR and the influence of the Russian Revolution on the masses of Eastern Europe. It established alliances with right-wing anticommunist forces throughout the region and exiles from the former Soviet Union, aiming to mobilize nationalist forces within the Soviet Union to destabilize it from within and prepare the path for a restoration of capitalism.

Piłsudski's post-World War I Intermarium concept ranging from the Baltic sea in the north to the Mediterranean and Black Seas in the south. In light-green: eastern parts of Ukrainian and Belarusian lands incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1922. [Photo by GalaxMaps / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

Today, the alliance has been revived as the so-called Three Seas Initiative under the umbrella of the EU and NATO. Just as in the inter-war period, the Intermarium principally relies on support from the major imperialist powers and on far-right nationalist forces. In Eastern Europe, it is endorsed by far-right forces such as the ruling Polish Law and Justice (PiS) party, and the neofascist Azov Battalion in Ukraine.

While this alliance today is primarily directed against Russian and Chinese influence, on the part of both Washington and Warsaw, it is also intended to undermine the substantial position of German imperialism in Eastern Europe. Berlin, the dominant imperialist power in the EU, is notably not a member of the alliance. Fearing to be pushed out, however, the German government has recently attempted to establish better relations with the Three Seas Initiative, despite clear resistance from Poland.

Whatever these shifting alliances, the crisis of world capitalism is driving the imperialist powers toward a new global conflagration. The imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, a de facto confrontation between the world’s biggest nuclear powers, would be just the opening chapter in such a conflict. But the international working class will have its word to say.

Turkey’s Assault on Syrian Kurds: a Secondary Crises of the Ukraine War?

Patrick Cockburn

Photograph Source: Combined Joint Task Force – Public Domain

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is producing secondary crises. Some are well publicised, such as the threat to world food supplies because the war has prevented Ukraine exporting millions of tons of grain from its Black Sea ports. The exodus of Ukrainian refugees crammed onto trains as they sought refuge in other countries was shown on every television screen in the world.

But some of the worst consequences of the war outside Ukraine remain beneath the media radar, notably Turkey’s announcement in the last few weeks that it is planning an offensive to seize Kurdish-controlled enclaves in northern Syria. Going by previous Turkish incursions over the last five years this attack will mean the ethnic cleansing of Kurds left with no choice but to flee to other parts of Syria.

Displacement, destruction, death

“We are facing displacement, destruction, death and the end of our existence in Syria,” said Shivan Ahmad, a 39-year-old Syrian Kurdish teacher of the Kurdish language, as he and his family wait for the Turkish assault. His fears are not exaggerated since Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims to be acting against “terrorists”, though in practice this means the step-by-step expulsion of the two million Syrian Kurds from their cities, towns and villages and into the few pockets of territory they still hold.

The Ukraine war has enabled Turkey to speed up this process of eliminating Kurdish majority areas south of the Turkish border because both the United States and Russia are vying for Turkish support. The US wants to prevent Turkey getting closer to Russia, with whom it has been in loose alliance since 2016, and to withdraw its objections to Sweden and Finland joining Nato.

Though the Syrian Kurds provided the ground troops for the successful American-led campaign against Islamic State (IS) in Syria, losing 11,000 fighters in hard-fought battles, Washington is unlikely to save its former allies from the Turkish attack. Russia, which has in the past acted both for and against the Kurds at different times, needs to conciliate Turkey and has reduced its forces on the ground who previously monitored ceasefire arrangements.

A very bloody event

The Turkish-led offensive is likely to be a very bloody event, just as savage as the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine which has rightly attracted international outrage. “Erdogan wants to create a security belt 30 km south of the Turkish border,” says Prof Fabrice Balanche, an expert on northern Syria at the Washington Institute and Lyon 2 University in an interview with Le Figaro. “In the northeast [of Syria], this means the elimination of the Kurdish population, and not just the YPG [Kurdish] militia, replacing them with Arab populations…Actually, Erdogan wants to build an Arab and Islamist belt in northern Syria, from the Mediterranean to the Tigris.”

Turkey draws on Arab mercenaries from parts of Syria under its control to occupy and ethnically cleanse Kurdish majority districts. “Erdogan’s regime has thus reinstated the body of bashi-bazouks of the Ottoman era, known for their indiscipline and their taste for looting,” says Balanche. These pro-Turkish fighters and their families have in the past been the primary recipients of land and buildings stolen from Kurds.

Turkey has made clear that its first onslaught will fall on Tel Rifaat and Manbij in north west Syria. The latter is a bustling little city of more than 300,000 people west of the Euphrates and east of Aleppo. When I visited it four years ago, it was clearly vulnerable to Turkish-led assault launched from what were at that time somnolent trenches a short distance to the north. But it was under vague but visible American protection and I saw a convoy of American armoured vehicles displaying a large stars-and-stripes flag racing down the road on the outskirts of the city.

But the Americans no longer need the Syrian Kurds since IS was defeated and they do need Turkey because of its deft balancing act between Washington and Moscow. Turkey’s geographical position on the Black Sea gives it great military and political leverage that other powers cannot ignore.

Few places where a Syrian Kurd is truly safe

Ordinary people in places like Manbij can see the calamity heading towards them and are seeking safety wherever they can find it, though there are few places where a Syrian Kurd is truly safe. One resident in Manbij says that “in the last two weeks many families have left for Aleppo, and some whose men are wanted by [President Bashar al-Assad’s] regime” have fled eastwards to the Kurdish cities of Qamishli and Hassakeh, although these are already full of refugees.

The fate of the Syrian Kurds and the destruction by Turkey of their statelet, which grew out of the uprising against Assad in 2011, is one of the great tragedies of our era. None of it happened in secret and there are plenty of pictures available, backed up by testimony given to human rights organisations, giving proof of atrocities just as gross as anything committed by Russians against Ukrainian villagers.

Some may make the ridiculous argument that saying other armies can behave as badly as the Russian army lets the Russians off the hook. On the contrary, pretending that the Russian military has a monopoly of criminal brutality devalues accusations against them and demotes denunciations to partisan propaganda.

This bias is justified by the absurd claim that even mentioning atrocities in Yemen, Kashmir, Palestine or Turkey in the same breath as murders and destruction in Ukraine is to indulge in “what about-ism”. In reality, the use of the latter phrase always exposes the hypocrite and the propagandist who divide the world into hostile black hats and friendly white hats.

But that is what governments and their cheerleaders invariably do in times of conflict. In the original Cold War against the Soviet Union, Apartheid South Africa and General Franco’s fascist Spain were co-opted as supporters of the “free world” and the most grisly pariahs were rehabilitated as suitable allies.

Now the same thing is happening again with the outbreak of the Ukraine war and it is not only Erdogan who is being cultivated as a valued ally. President Biden, who had once described Saudi Arabia as “a pariah” and refused to phone Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is now having his own calls rejected by Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader.

Not so long ago, Biden had released a report written by the US Office of National Intelligence that said, “We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey, to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.” But now the dismemberment of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 is forgotten, as Biden plans a visit to the kingdom and tries to persuade bin Salman to pump more oil.

The pariahs of yesterday are the allies of today but the misery of Kurdish refugees driven from their homes forever in the near future will not differ much from that of desperate Ukrainians in flight from Russian shells in the Donbas.

The End of Laissez-Faire: Russia’s Attempt at Reshaping the World Economy

Ramzy Baroud

Laissez Faire

Starting on May 31, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov embarked on a tour to Gulf Cooperation Council countries, where he visited Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, among others. Lavrov’s main objective of these visits is to strengthen ties between Russia and GCC nations amid a global race for geopolitical dominance.

The Middle East, especially the Gulf region, is vital for the current global economic order and is equally critical for any future reshaping of that order. If Moscow is to succeed in redefining the role of Arab economies vis-à-vis the global economy, it would most likely succeed in ensuring that a multipolar economic world takes form.

The geopolitical reordering of the world cannot simply be achieved through war or challenging the West’s political influence in its various global domains. The economic component is possibly the most significant of the ongoing tug of war between Russia and its western detractors.

Prior to the Russia-Ukraine war, any conversation on the need to challenge or redefine globalization was confined largely to academic circles. The war made that theoretical conversation a tangible, urgent one. The US, European, western support for Kyiv has little to do with Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence and everything to do with the real anxiety that a Russian success will demolish or, at least, seriously damage, the current version of economic globalization as envisaged by the US and its allies.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the world was no longer a contested space between two military superpowers – NATO vs Warsaw Pact – and two massive economic camps – US vs USSR. We often speak about the American invasion of Panama (1989) and war in Iraq (1990), to demarcate the uncontested American ascendency in global affairs. What we often omit is that the military and geopolitical component of this war was accompanied by an economic one.

As Panama and Iraq were meant to demonstrate US military dominance, the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994-5, was meant to illustrate Washington’s economic outlook in this new world order.

Though unprecedented in their scale and ferocity, the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 seemed like a desperate attempt at reversing the alarming trend in the world’s economic affairs. Though successful in demonstrating the power of civil society at work, the protests have failed to produce any real, lasting outcomes. In the US/Western-centered definition of globalization, smaller countries had little bargaining power.

While rich countries successfully negotiated many privileges for their own industries, much of the Global South was left with no other option but to play by the West’s rules. The Americans spoke of free trade and open markets while maintaining a protectionist agenda over what they perceived to be key industries. Globalization was branded as a success story for freedom and democracy while, in essence, it was a cheap reproduction of the 18th-century ‘laissez-faire’ France’s economic doctrine.

It is easy to criticize poor countries for failing to challenge US/Western dominance. In fact, they tried, and the result was economic sanctions, regime change and war. The only silver lining is that this predatory form of capitalism encouraged small countries in the Global South to formulate their own economic blocks, so they may negotiate with greater leverage. However, even that was not enough to influence, let alone dismantle, the skewed global paradigm.

Large economies, like China, were allowed to benefit from globalization as long as their massive growth served the interests of the global economy, namely the West. Things began changing, however, when China’s political and geopolitical outreach started to match its economic influence. Former US Republican President Donald Trump dedicated much rhetoric and eventually declared economic war on the so-called ‘China threat’. The current Democratic administration of Joe Biden is hardly different. Though busy countering Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, Washington remains dedicated to its anti-Chinese rhetoric.

The Marrakesh Agreement in 1994, the treaty upon which the WTO was established, was reached to replace the geopolitically defunct General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades of 1948. Note how each one of these global economic treaties resulted from their unique global geopolitical orders, the latter following World War II and the former following the collapse of the socialist camp. Though Russia and its allies are now mostly focused on claiming some kind of victory in Ukraine, their ultimate goal is to sow the seed for a different economic balance, with the hope that it will ultimately force a renegotiation of today’s globalization, therefore the West’s economic hegemony.

Russia is clearly invested in a new global economic system, but without isolating itself in the process. On the other hand, the West is torn. It wants to drop on Russia the Iron Curtain of the past, but without hurting its own economies in the process. This equation is simply unsolvable, at least for the next few years.

In a speech at the Eurasian Economic Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that trying to isolate Russia is “impossible, utterly unrealistic in the modern world”. His words accentuate Russia’s full awareness of the West’s objectives, and Lavrov’s busy itinerary, especially in the Global South, is Moscow’s own way of animating an alternative global economic system in which Russia is not isolated. The outcome of all of these efforts will not only redefine the world from a geopolitical perspective, but will redefine the very concept of globalization for generations to come.

Social Democrats and ex-Stalinists lead Finland and Sweden into NATO

Jordan Shilton

Finland and Sweden’s application for membership of the NATO military alliance was carried out in close collaboration with the major imperialist powers, who view the integration of the Scandinavian countries as crucial to the opening of a second front in their war to subjugate Russia.

Contrary to the claim that Helsinki and Stockholm went from “neutral to NATO” overnight in response to Russia’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine, their membership in the Western military alliance, like the war itself, was prepared in a behind-the-scenes conspiracy over many years. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine served merely as a pretext to trigger plans for NATO expansion drafted long before February 24, 2022.

US Marines work alongside members of the Swedish mechanized infantry during BALTOPS 22. (Credit: US Marines/Twitter)

The formalities surrounding Helsinki and Stockholm’s NATO membership remain to be finalized, with Turkey refusing to provide the unanimous consent required to start the membership procedure due to concerns over the two countries’ support for Kurdish nationalist groups. However, since Helsinki and Stockholm filed their formal applications in mid-May, US imperialism has moved to create “facts on the ground” to make the Scandinavian countries de facto alliance members. General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Stockholm this month with a US battleship to coincide with Sweden’s hosting of the BaltOps 22 military exercise, a NATO provocation against Russia in the Baltic Sea involving 45 maritime units, 75 aircraft, and 7,000 military personnel that began June 5 and runs to June 17. Last week, Finland announced the initiation of plans to construct barriers along its 1,300-kilometre border with Russia, citing the threat of “hybrid warfare” from Russia sending migrants into the country.

The most significant political role in turning Finland and Sweden into frontline states in NATO’s war with Russia has been played by the Social Democrats and pseudo-left parties, who owed much of their substantial support throughout the 20th century to their professed opposition to militarism and war. They have emerged as the leading warmongers and are playing a critical role in suppressing the significant popular scepticism that remains among the population to NATO.

Prime Minister of Finland Sanna Marin talks at the Finnish Parliament in Helsinki, Finland, Monday, May 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner) [AP Photo]

Both the Finnish and Swedish governments are currently led by Social Democratic parties. Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin and Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson are the leaders of their countries’ Social Democrat parties. Marin heads a five-party coalition that includes the Green League and ex-Stalinist Left Alliance, while Andersson governs in a minority administration tolerated in parliament by Sweden’s Greens and ex-Stalinist Left Party.

From opponents of militarism to NATO war hawks

Sweden’s Social Democrats went further than other social democratic parties in Western Europe in granting concessions to the working class during the 1950s and 1960s. These gains, including relatively generous wage increases and extensive social services, were part of a policy supported by Sweden’s ruling elite that sought to regulate the class struggle through a system of national collective bargaining and union/corporate co-management. It was made possible by Sweden’s neutrality during World War II, which left much of its key industrial and manufacturing sectors intact while its European competitors lay in ruins.

More fundamentally, Sweden’s economic development depended upon the temporary stabilisation of world capitalism in the post-war era made possible by the betrayal of the revolutionary working-class struggles that erupted after the war by the Stalinist bureaucracy and the ability of the United States, the preeminent imperialist power, to underwrite the revival of the capitalist system.

The Social Democrats were associated in popular consciousness with free health care and education, generous social welfare support, and free childcare, which created a society—the Folkhemmet (People’s Home)—that stood in stark contrast to the grinding poverty experienced by masses of Swedish workers just two generations earlier at the beginning of the 20th century. The Social Democrats also owed their popularity to a strong stand, at least in public, against military violence and repression, whether employed by American imperialism or the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.

Minister Olof Palme (second from left) participates in the torchlight procession together with North Vietnam's Moscow Ambassador Nguyen Tho Chan (third left) (Credit: Creative Commons/Scanpix)

In 1968, Education Minister Olof Palme, who would become Swedish Prime Minister one year later, joined a demonstration against the Vietnam war in Stockholm with North Vietnam’s ambassador to Moscow. In a famous speech, Palme declared, “Democracy is an exacting system of government. It demands respect for others. One cannot foist a system of government upon a nation from the outside. The people must have the right to decide over their own destiny. It therefore presupposes the national right of self-determination. Democracy demands justice. One cannot win a people by filling the pockets of those who are already rich while the poor are driven into ever deeper distress. One cannot meet the demand for social justice by violence and military power.”

Washington responded by recalling its ambassador from Stockholm for consultations. Later in 1968, Palme condemned the deployment of Soviet troops to Czechoslovakia by the Stalinist bureaucracy to crush the Prague Spring.

In another speech broadcast on national radio in December 1972, shortly after the Social Democrat government officially recognised North Vietnam, Palme compared the US bombing of Hanoi to the crimes of Hitler’s Nazis. “(T)he bombings are an atrocity,” he declared. “And of this we have many examples in modern history. They are generally connected with a single name: Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, Treblinka… Now another name is added to the row: Hanoi, Christmas 1972.”

Palme and the Social Democrats’ opposition to US imperialist aggression was not of a principled character. The Social Democrats pursued a policy of military “non-alignment,” which Swedish ruling circles broadly supported. Maintaining Stockholm’s distance from both Cold War blocs enabled Sweden to serve as a key conduit for intelligence gathering operations against the Soviet Union by the imperialist powers, with whom Sweden struck an intelligence sharing agreement as early as 1954. It enabled Swedish businesses and diplomats to establish contacts with developing countries and national liberation movements deemed a “communist” threat by US imperialism and its allies. Sweden thus assumed a disproportionate role on the global stage given the relatively small size of the country, which became known as a “humanitarian superpower.”

The Social Democrats’ public criticisms of American imperialist violence secured them substantial popular support. Palme remained prime minister until 1976, concluding more than four decades of continuous Social Democrat rule. His assassination in murky circumstances in February 1986, by which time he had been prime minister again for over four years, expressed growing social and political tensions tearing Swedish society apart as the post-war era of capitalist stability gave way to mounting crises.

Finnish Social Democracy and Stalinism in the post-war era

Although the domination of social democracy in Finland was less pronounced, the Social Democrats were the largest party throughout most of the post-war era. They generally polled around 25 percent of the vote and played an important role in developing Helsinki’s neutral foreign policy during the Cold War.

Signing of the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance between the Soviet Union and Finland in Moscow on April 6, 1948. Signed by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (seated), followed by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (standing, behind Molotov). To the left of Stalin are the Prime Minister of Finland Mauno Pekkala, to the right of Stalin are Foreign Ministers Carl Enckell and Reinhold Svento, Minister of the Interior Yrjö Leino and MPs Urho Kekkonen, Onni Peltonen and J. O. Söderhjelm. (Credit: Creative Commons/Unknown source/Unknown author)

The Stalinist Communist Party of Finland (SKP) also played a prominent role in official politics. One of the largest Stalinist parties west of the Iron Curtain, the SKP entered the government after the end of World War II to stabilise Finnish capitalism. It was intimately involved in the negotiations of the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union in 1948 guaranteeing the continuation of a market economy in Finland and stipulated Helsinki’s neutral status in world affairs. The treaty obligated Helsinki to pay reparations to the Soviet Union for its participation on the side of the Nazis in the war of extermination against the USSR and required Finland to resist any attack by “Germany and its allies,” a formulation widely interpreted to mean the Western powers, on the Soviet Union carried out via Finnish territory. SKP member Mauno Pekkala attended the treaty signing ceremony in Moscow in April 1948 as Finland’s prime minister.

The Finnish People’s Democratic League (SKDL), an electoral alliance dominated by the Stalinists, remained outside the government from 1948 to 1966 polling around 20 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, it participated in several Social Democrat-led governments. In 1990, with Gorbachev’s programme of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union in full swing, the SKDL transformed itself into the Left Alliance, which now holds two ministerial posts in Marin’s pro-NATO government.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union

The Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union and restoration of capitalism in Russia and throughout Eastern Europe fundamentally changed the political and geostrategic framework on which Finnish and Swedish “neutrality” rested. Almost immediately after the end of the USSR, both Scandinavian countries took steps to subordinate their foreign policies more directly to American and European imperialism. Finland renegotiated its 1948 treaty with Russia in 1992 to allow it more freedom to participate in Western alliances. Three years later, Finland and Sweden joined the European Union.

Social Democrats were prominent in deepening Sweden and Finland’s relationships with the major imperialist powers, beginning with their joining of NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PFP) in 1994. The PFP served as a mechanism to integrate 13 countries from the former Soviet sphere of influence into NATO and strengthen cooperation with Ukraine.

US Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen (left), Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari (2nd from left), and Russian Minister of Defense Marshal Igor Sergeyev (2nd from right), are joined by an interpreter (right) as they meet for further talks at the Presidential Place in Helsinki, Finland, on June 17, 1999. The participants are discussing the details of Russia's participation in the peacekeeping efforts in Kosovo. (Credit: Creative Commons/Helene C. Stikkel)

Maartti Ahtisaari, Finland’s president from 1994 to 2000, emerged as one of the most outspoken Social Democrats in favour of NATO membership. Ahtisaari, the lead European Union negotiator seeking Serbia’s surrender in June 1999 during NATO’s ongoing savage bombardment of Belgrade, commented in 2014, “Finland should have been in all of those international organisations to which Western democracies belong long ago. That includes NATO.”

Swedish forces in Afghanistan (Credit: Creative Commons/ Brindefalk from Karlskrona, Sweden)

Under the Social Democrat-led government of Göran Persson, Sweden formally abandoned its foreign policy neutrality in early 2002. This coincided with the dispatch of Swedish troops to support NATO occupation forces in Kosovo and Afghanistan. Swedish warplanes would subsequently join NATO’s savage bombardment of Libya, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands and plunged the country into a civil war that continues to this day.

The Western-backed Maidan coup of 2014, spearheaded by fascist forces that led to the overthrow of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev, was seized on in Scandinavia to legitimise a major military build-up. Citing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, a response to the establishment of a pro-Western regime in Kiev that persecuted Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Sweden initiated a massive increase in defence spending. Finland and Sweden both became “enhanced opportunity partners” through NATO’s Partnership Interoperability Initiative, launched at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales allowing partners to join exercises and adopt NATO standards. Ukraine was another “enhanced opportunity partner.”

UK Challenger 2 tank in action during Exercise Arrow, a Joint Expeditionary Force exercise held in Finland in May 2022 (Credit: Defence Equipment & Support/Twitter)

The Social Democrat-led government of Stefan Löfven, whose parliamentary majority depended on support from the Greens and Left Party, signed a Nordic defence agreement with Finland, and NATO members Denmark, Norway, and Iceland in 2015. In 2017, Helsinki and Stockholm joined the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), a British-led alliance of Baltic and Nordic NATO members aimed explicitly at confronting Russia.

The US-NATO war with Russia and the rush to join NATO

This history makes clear the absurdity of media reports claiming that Finland and Sweden performed a U-turn in their foreign policy following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Stockholm and Helsinki’s plans to join NATO were long in the works and merely awaited a pretext to be implemented.

Finland and Sweden were intimately involved in the series of NATO provocations that led up to Putin’s invasions. Their militaries participated in NATO-led exercises with Ukraine in the Black Sea and in the Baltic region. In December 2021, the same month that the Biden administration rejected Russia’s appeal for negotiations over security guarantees, Finland finalised a deal with Washington to purchase 64 F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin. The deal, which equates to a country the size of Germany purchasing over 900 fighter jets, was the largest military purchase in Finnish history.

Immediately following Russia’s invasion, Sweden and Finland rapidly swung into all-out war mode. The Social Democrats gained near unanimous support in the Swedish parliament on February 28 to send weaponry and military equipment to Ukraine, the first time Sweden had officially sent weapons to a country at war since the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939.

A Finnish Maxim M-32 machine gun nest during the Winter War (Credit: Creative Commons/unknown author)

The decision saw the ex-Stalinist Left Party fully embracing the war fever. At a meeting of the party leadership on February 27, the party initially took a decision to oppose supplying weapons to Ukraine. But after five deputies broke ranks in parliament the following day and backed the weapons transfer, a second leadership meeting on March 1 reversed the Left Party’s position from two days earlier opposing the supply of weapons to Ukraine.

Left Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar speaking in Parliament on July 7, 2021 (Creative Commons/ Frankie Fouganthin-Eget arbete)

Left Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar all but declared her support for NATO membership in a nationalist outburst later in March. “My position is that we are more safe in Sweden if we are outside of any military alliance,” she stated. “But it is important that we have broad agreement. That we do this together as one people and one nation. I don’t often agree with Carl Bildt [a former conservative prime minister and long-standing advocate of NATO membership], but on this question I do. There’s the left-wing and there’s the right-wing, but the Swedish military is all Swedes together.”

The Finnish pseudo-left behaved in an equally venal manner. Having claimed in June 2019 during talks on joining the Social Democrat-led government that it would do so on condition that Finland would not join NATO during the government’s term in office, the Left Alliance embraced Finland’s NATO application. Notwithstanding the Left Alliance’s formal opposition to NATO, party leader Li Andersson declared in early May that if the government in which she occupies the position of education minister filed an application to join NATO, she would not see this as a reason to resign her post. “The Left Alliance used to be quite unanimous on this issue, but there are now two distinct camps within the party and many are unsure of their position,” Andersson declared following a meeting of the party leadership on May 7.

Andersson received the backing of a joint meeting of the party council and parliamentary group, which voted by 52 votes to 10 to remain in the government if a NATO membership application was filed. The Left Alliance’s “opposition” to NATO was on paper only. Andersson made this explicit on May 12, declaring her support for a NATO application.

Three days later, an overwhelming vote in favour of NATO membership took place at the Social Democrats’ national council, with 53 out of the 60 members present voting to join the alliance. Speaking to parliament May 17, Prime Minister Marin declared, “Our security environment has fundamentally changed.”

The transformation of Finland and Sweden into frontline garrison states in the US-NATO war with Russia by the very political forces who claimed for decades that it was possible to remain outside of great power rivalries and reform capitalism into a more peaceful and “fair” society is a political lesson for working people internationally. The deepening crisis of world capitalism, expressed in the danger of world war, the growth of social inequality, and a deadly pandemic that has killed millions, leaves no part of the world untouched. Political fantasies based on national parochialism and piecemeal reforms, which “progressives” around the world justified with reference to the “Swedish model,” have been proven bankrupt.

Germany prepares for World War III with the passage of 100 billion euro “Bundeswehr Special Fund”

Gregor Link & Johannes Stern

The “Bundeswehr Special Fund” of more than 100 billion euros has now been agreed to by both chambers of parliament, providing a massive boost to Germany’s rearmament drive.

With this decision, the ruling class has set into motion the biggest rearmaments spiral since the fall of the Nazi regime. The political, historical and social implications are enormous. In the words of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party, SPD), Germany—already ranked fifth among countries with the highest military budgets—will in future have “by far the largest conventional army in Europe.”

After hospitals, schools and nurseries were brought to the brink of collapse and billions were cut from education and social services amid the still-raging COVID-19 pandemic, an additional 100 billion euros will be made available overnight for the armed forces. The war budget is thus expected to rise annually to more than 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product.

The scale of the rearmament is gigantic. Reaching the so-called 2 percent target means that defence spending will rise from just under 50 billion euros to more than 70 billion this year alone. This represents an increase of more than 40 percent. To put the “special fund” in perspective, 100 billion euros is five times this year’s total federal budget for education and research.

The sum would be enough to support every family in Germany with €5,000 per child and at the same time pay out €360,000 in compensation for pain and suffering to the relatives of all those who officially died from coronavirus. Alternatively, the amount could be used over five years to double the number of nurses and pay their most senior colleagues a bonus of €1,400. A single billion would be enough to install air filters against the coronavirus in all classrooms.

But instead, the money is going to the military. The Defence Ministry’s plans—in addition to cyber capabilities and space systems—call for €41 billion for the air force, €19 billion for the navy and €16 billion for the army, to be spent on nuclear bombers, warships and tanks. The war materiel is intended to enable the military to once again conduct “very large” and “highly intensive” military operations, according to the “Bundeswehr Concept“ issued back in 2018.

In domestic terms, too, the rearmament offensive is a declaration of war on the population. By enshrining the special fund in the constitution and maintaining the so-called “debt brake,” the ruling class is creating conditions to squeeze every cent of the war budget out of the working class. At the same time, any criticism of rearmament is to be made illegal.

In a resolution in 2014, when then President Joachim Gauck and government representatives announced Germany’s return to an aggressive foreign and great power policy at the Munich Security Conference, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei warned of the far-reaching consequences of this development:

The propaganda of the postwar era—that Germany had learnt from the terrible crimes of the Nazis, had “arrived at the West,” had embraced a peaceful foreign policy and had developed into a stable democracy—is exposed as lies. German imperialism is once again showing its real colours as it has emerged historically, with all of its aggressiveness at home and abroad.

The rearmament of the Bundeswehr that has now been decided is without precedent in the history of postwar Germany. It has unmistakable parallels to Hitler’s “rearmament” of the 1930s, when the ruling class installed a fascist dictatorship and rearmed the country within a very short time, preparing it for World War II. The strategy documents of the military and the war speeches of leading politicians leave no doubt that the government is once again pursuing the old “great power” goals.

Then, as now, German imperialism aspired to bring Europe under its domination and to emerge as a leading military world power. “Germany’s destiny: to lead Europe in order to lead the world” was the title of a post on an official Foreign Ministry website back in 2014. Now these plans are being put into action, with all their consequences.

Media warmongers and foreign policy strategists are already calling for German and European nuclear weapons to “contain” Russia and to be able to fight out future “conflicts of interest with the leading Western power,” the United States. A commentary in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warns that “the hundred billion euros should only be a start” in meeting Germany’s “security responsibility in Europe.”

German troops in Lithuania (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)

This rearmament is aimed directly against Russia. Eighty-one years after the German war of extermination against the Soviet Union, which claimed the lives of almost 30 million people, German combat troops are again marching into Eastern Europe. At the same time, Germany is arming the Ukrainian army to the teeth, which is riddled with far-right forces, and pursuing its declared goal of defeating Russia.

Contrary to official propaganda, the so-called “turn of the times” is not a reaction to the Russian attack on Ukraine. The ruling class is using Russia’s reactionary invasion, which was systematically provoked by NATO, to put its own rearmament and war plans into action. As in the First and Second World Wars, this is not about “human rights” and “democracy” but about the conquest of spheres of influence and resources. At the same time, war policy serves to deflect explosive class tensions outward.

Unlike the bourgeois politicians who revel in and profit from militarism, war and dictatorship are deeply hated among workers in Germany and Europe. Official policy under these conditions takes the form of outright conspiracy.

The return of German militarism, which enormously fuels the danger of a third world war, is also being pushed forward above all by the nominally left-wing parties in the Bundestag. The SPD, with Scholz, leads the federal government and thus also the offensive against Russia. The Greens, who in 1998-99 together with the SPD already organized the war of aggression against Yugoslavia, in violation of international law, are among the most aggressive agitators and warmongers.

The Left Party and the trade unions also have both feet in the camp of German imperialism. In the Bundestag, the Left Party voted against the special fund because its votes did not matter since all the other parties supported the fund. Politically, however, it agrees with the war course. Leading party representatives support sanctions against Russia and arms deliveries to Ukraine and even demand the reintroduction of compulsory military service.

In a recent statement, the Verdi trade union—which has imposed pay freezes and real-wage cuts on nurses, educators and teachers—called for “sustainable improvement of the Bundeswehr” and an “improvement in the cybersecurity” of the armed forces. The German Federation of Trade Unions (DGB) also recently demanded a “substantial contribution” from Germany to the military strength of NATO and the EU.

Spain deports whistle-blower Mohamed Benhalima to Algeria to face execution

Alice Summers

A death sentence against Algerian whistle blower and activist Mohamed Benhalima was announced by an Algerian military court, only two months after Spain’s PSOE (Socialist Party)-Podemos government denied his asylum application and deported him. Benhalima was made aware that the death penalty had been handed down against him on May 8, although his lawyers report that the sentence was imposed in absentia, while Benhalima was still in Spain.

Benhalima, a former officer, fled Algeria for Spain in 2019, after learning that his name was on a list compiled by the Algerian authorities of servicemen wanted for their involvement with the Hirak movement. He had taken part in mass anti-government protests triggered in February 2019 by former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement of his fifth presidential candidacy. While the demonstrations forced Bouteflika out of office in April of that year, the military regime he headed remains in power.

Algerian whistleblower Mohamed Benhalima smiling Algerian whistleblower Mohamed Benhalima at the foreign internment camp in Valencia, Spain (Adrián Vives)

In Spain, Benhalima built a reputation on social media as an opponent of the Algerian military regime. He amassed more than 345,000 followers on his Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pages, where he posted videos exposing and denouncing corruption in the Algerian armed forces.

Benhalima’s deportation is a damning indictment of Spain’s nominally “progressive” PSOE-Podemos government. It is a blatant violation of international law, which forbids deporting individuals to a country where they risk suffering torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The PSOE and Podemos are sending an unmistakable signal that they will act brutally to avert any challenge from below to the existing social order.

According to Amnesty International, Benhalima entered Spain on September 1, 2019 on a Schengen Zone visa, applying for political asylum in February 2020. He was given a temporary residence permit, which he later renewed, making it valid until November 2021. However, in August 2021, he received summons to a police station in Bilbao, Spain. Fearing deportation back to Algeria, Benhalima fled to France, but was later arrested and sent back to Spain.

On March 14, 2022, Benhalima was detained by Spanish authorities. They filed an expulsion order against him for allegedly infringing Article 54.1.a of Spain’s immigration law, claiming that he participated in “activities contrary to public security or which may be harmful for Spanish relationships with foreign states.”

This was based on flimsy allegations that Benhalima is tied to the Algerian Islamist opposition group Rachad, which Algiers listed as a terrorist organisation last year. UN Special Procedures human rights experts stated in December 2021 that the definition of “terrorism” in the Algerian Penal Code was too imprecise and undermined human rights.

An Algerian court had already sentenced Benhalima in absentia in January and March 2021 to 20 years in prison, for charges of alleged “participation in a terrorist group” and “publishing fake news undermining national unity,” among other accusations.

Four days after Benhalima’s arrest in Spain, he applied for asylum a second time, while detained in an internment camp in Valencia. At 17:35 on March 24, he was then told his second application had been unsuccessful; just three minutes later he was notified of his expulsion. Two hours after that, Spanish authorities forced Benhalima aboard a plane back to Algeria, where he was detained on arrival.

Benhalima appeared in a clip on Ennahar TV on March 27, in which he appears to “confess” to having conspired against the state and says he had not been ill-treated in custody. Just two days before his deportation from Spain, Benhalima had warned that he would likely be forced to make a false confession if detained by the Algerian regime, most likely be because he had been “subjected to severe torture at the hands of intelligence services.”

On March 21, 2022, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had written to the Spanish government calling for Benhalima’s case not to be expedited, arguing that the risk of torture was credible, and that the Algerian regime’s criminalisation of political opposition is well known.

In March, while detained in Valencia, Benhalima had told Spanish media outlet Levante EMV: “If I return to Algeria, they’re going to violate my human rights. Prison and torture are waiting for me. First, I will have a trial for having revealed corruption in my country … Then I fear that they will torture me in a military prison, that I’ll suffer sexual violence, or even that they’ll kill me and then say that I caught coronavirus.”

Benhalima is the second Algerian whistle blower to be deported from Spain and then imprisoned in Algeria in under a year. Last August, former border patrol officer Mohamed Abdellah—who sought asylum in Spain after exposing alleged corruption, bribery, fraud, and cross-border arms and petrol smuggling by high-ranking officers of the Algerian Gendarmerie—was forcibly returned to Algeria by the PSOE-Podemos government.

On his arrival in Algeria, Abdellah was handed to the intelligence service and taken to the Antar barracks in Algiers, notorious as an interrogation and torture site. As of January this year, Abdellah was being held in isolation at the Blida military prison, awaiting trial for undermining state security and the reputation of the army. Since then, there has been little information on his whereabouts.

The PSOE-Podemos government’s decision to deport Benhalima has been widely acknowledged in the bourgeois media as a goodwill gesture to the Algerian dictatorship. Algerian–Spanish relations have been tense since PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez recognised Morocco’s claim to the Western Sahara in mid-March.

The Western Sahara is a sparsely inhabited former Spanish colonial possession on Morocco’s south-western border, with considerable mineral and phosphate deposits, which Rabat has long sought to bring under its administration as an “autonomous region.”

After Spain ended its long-standing stance of neutrality in this dispute, Algeria, which has backed the pro–Sahrawi independence Polisario Front, withdrew its ambassador from Madrid. Just five days later, the PSOE and Podemos expelled Benhalima from Spain, in an apparent attempt to curry favour with Algeria, which provided more than 40 percent of Spain’s natural gas imports in 2021. This comes as the European Union and NATO campaign for an energy embargo against Russia, the EU’s major oil and gas supplier, amid the war in Ukraine.

The treatment of Benhalima and Abdellah gives the lie to claims by the PSOE-Podemos government, as part of the NATO alliance, to be defending “democracy” and “human rights” in Ukraine against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Spanish government has no problem violating the rights of asylum seekers and tacitly condoning the arbitrary detention, torture and murder of political prisoners.

The PSOE and Podemos already have the blood of thousands of refugees on their hands. By blocking off “legal” routes to enter Spain, they forced desperate migrants to make perilous boat journeys across the Mediterranean to mainland Spain or the Atlantic to the Canary Islands, leading to thousands of deaths at sea. Taking its cue from the far-right Vox party, it built prison camps on the Canary Islands, separated children from their parents, and summarily deported thousands of asylum seekers without even examining their cases.

By deporting Benhalima, the PSOE and Podemos aim to terrorize workers and youth in Algeria opposed to the regime. They aim not only to block renewed eruptions of class struggle threatening the existing regime in Algeria, which is complicit in their anti-refugee policies. After Podemos and the PSOE have deployed tens of thousands of heavily armed police against strikes by metal workers and truckers over the last year in Spain itself, it is apparent that the target of this escalation of police-state terror is the entire working class.