Poaching In Europe’s Suburbs

Binoy Kampmark

“There has never been a case like this in a zoo in Europe, an assault of such violence, evidently for this stupid trafficking of rhinoceros horns.”

Thierry Duguet, head of Parc Zoologique de Thoiry

It was a matter of time. The war of poachers against those attempting to conserve species, and the animals themselves, took a gruesome turn this week.  At the Parc Zoologique de Thoiry outside Paris, a white southern white rhinoceros named Vince was shot three times, with one horn sawn by attackers keen to bring the predations of the ivory market to Europe. (The second horn was only partially sawn.)

The gruesome and bloody scene is worth noting on several levels. It brought the dynamically vicious struggle of an environmental war to Europe, and to zoos in particular. It was a statement on vulnerability (that of the security in place) and sheer daring – five members of the zoological staff resided on site, with the usual complement of surveillance cameras.

Whatever the problems in terms of conservation regarding these institutions (confined, caged animals generate their own set of moral debates), was a stark attack of profit and finance. Ivory fetches a good sum on the market, feeding a voracious demand based on quack medical assumptions.

Museums have also borne witness to such attacks.  The desperation and the skill of such individuals varies, but here, desire, one heavy with a monetary quest (Vince’s horn could fetch up to £35,000), is unquestioned.  Even specimens long petrified, gazing mutely at spectators for decades are potential targets of the ivory vultures.  The instinct here is endemic of that same breed of human who believes that plunder is sacred and conservation a disgrace.

The question, then, is security. Will the zoos become garrisoned redoubts of layered security, fashioned for the next modern conflict on conservation, securing funding, not merely for conservation but for actual paramilitary security?  The purse strings on that score will have to be loosened even as sacred rhinos are treated as golden geese.

Police in Britain, by way of example, are already speaking of urgent security checks to protect the 111 rhinos in the country.  The description by a spokesman for the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) supplies a reminder about the gloomy prospects ahead, more reminiscent of a future battle than a case of mere security: “These animals are kept in secure enclosures guarded by full-time security teams, who also conduct regular patrols across the zoo.”

Then comes the very idea that the rhinoceros horn trade be legalised in an attempt to make the industry less rapacious.  These might take the form of harvesting horns – the removal of the horn without hurting the rhino; or the sale of confiscated stockpiles.

These effects would be felt from parkland to zoos.  “The rationale,” claims South African conservationist economist Michael’t Sas-Rolfes, “is to bring the price down to a manageable level through constant legal supply.”

The income created from such a normalised market could then be used to re-invest in conservation efforts.  “It has become expensive to protect rhinos, and conservation organizations simply don’t have sufficient funds to invest in the level of field protection that is needed to sustain the number of rhinos we have.”

Critics feel that such sober, analytical assessments are misplaced to the point of miscalculation. Conservationists such as Dex Kotze argue that demand would be all too great, stripping supply.  Then comes the issue of where the proceeds would actually find their way.  “We are afraid,” noted Kotze in 2014, “that the money would be going to the wrong pockets.”

The shock of this recent incident has shaded previous cases where attackers have braved supposedly secure facilities to capture their sacred quarry, often dead ones. The ivory trade is one that took a man with a chainsaw to Paris’ Museum of Natural history in 2013 in an effort to remove the tusk of a 325-year old elephant skeleton that had belonged to King Louis XIV.

Police received calls about “a strange sawing sound at around 3am”. On arriving, they witnessed a desperate thief in his 20s fleeing over a wall labouring with the ungainly booty. The chainsaw had been abandoned near the elephant skeleton.  The thief, in turn, fractured his ankle in the botched attempt.

The poacher, as his own species, is highly innovative and flexible.  Money markets and demand tend to create their own sophisticated pedigree of criminal.  Traditional assumptions about a war on the plains, and in the environment where such animals gather, will have to be reconsidered.  Money may not have smell, but it certainly has traction.

The Pig Industry And The Usage Of Antibiotics In Denmark

Holger Oster Mortensen

WHO claims that as many as 20 million people will die within 20 – 25 years every year because of infections and resistant bacteria. Penicillin and different antibiotics simply will not work anymore. Medicins Sans Frontier claims, that 700, 000 people die every year because antibiotics is not working any more.

The problem seems to be worldwide. And we have to start to fight against it NOW.

In Denmark we have a very large production of pork. The small country with 5 million people, raise about 25 million pigs every year. No other country has as many pigs per capita in the world, and Denmark has the most intensive concentration of pigs in the world. Also 60 percent of our land is farmed. Another world record!

All these pigs are raised in pig farms or industrial ‘pig-factories’, and to keep the pigs healthy, the pig farmers use a lot of antibiotics. Also zinc and copper are used in animal feed. This will create antibiotic resistant bacteria. 10 years ago no pigs in Denmark would carry MRSACC398- staphylococcus. Today almost 90 percent of all pig farms have the dangerous and antibiotic resistant bacteria. Even the pig farms for breeding has it.  And the pig farmers seem to do nothing about it. Most workers in the pig farms carry this bacteria. Danish farmers use 120 tons antibiotics every year – 90 ton in the pig industry alone. In Danish hospitals and healthcare we use only 55 tons.

The Danish government decided to follow up on MRSA – according to the EU-authorities, EFSA, but so far Denmark does not bring out data about MRSA to EU. We did agree to participate in this MRSA-program led by EFSA, but did nothing ever since 2009.

In Norway and Sweden they did something to get rid of this pig-bacteria. In these two countries very few pigs has MRSACC398.

In Danish hospitals the doctors are very afraid that they and the patients may be infected by MRSA. It´s very difficult to fight these infections – and it is very expensive. A MRSA-patient cost double up. Every year 400 people die from staphylococcus – but so far very few from MRSACC398 (the pig-MRSA).

Denmark should be able to do a lot more to fight these antibiotic resistant bacteria. Alexander Fleming would be turning in his grave if he knew about penicillin usage  these days.

The Dance of Death

Chris Hedges

The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military “virtues” are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical proficiency to serve the poisonous engine of corporate capitalism. Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminant and brutal. And, presiding over the tawdry Grand Guignol is a deranged ringmaster tweeting absurdities from the White House.

The graveyard of world empires—Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian—followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus. The ecosystem that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the hands of corrupt elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society.

The elites’ myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. President Trump’s decision to increase military spending by $54 billion and take the needed funds out of the flesh of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state resources.

“The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence.”

The complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are created by all civilizations ultimately doom them. The difference now, as Joseph Tainter points out in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” is that “collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their “greatness.” Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to modern civilization, namely technology, industrial violence and fossil fuels, are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the system, slavishly worshipping the old gods long after these gods begin to demand millions of sacrificial victims.

“Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create even more dangerous messes,” Ronald Wright writes in “A Short History of Progress.” “Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.”

The Trump appointees—Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Alex Acosta and others—do not advocate innovation or reform. They are Pavlovian dogs that salivate before piles of money. They are hard-wired to steal from the poor and loot federal budgets. Their single-minded obsession with personal enrichment drives them to dismantle any institution or abolish any law or regulation that gets in the way of their greed. Capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, is “a machine for demolishing limits.” There is no internal sense of proportion or scale. Once all external impediments are lifted, global capitalism ruthlessly commodifies human beings and the natural world to extract profit until exhaustion or collapse. And when the last moments of a civilization arrive, the degenerate edifices of power appear to crumble overnight.

Sigmund Freud wrote that societies, along with individuals, are driven by two primary instincts. One is the instinct for life, Eros, the quest to love, nurture, protect and preserve. The second is the death instinct. The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence. It seeks the dissolution of all living things, including our own beings. One of these two forces, Freud wrote, is always ascendant. Societies in decline enthusiastically embrace the death instinct, as Freud observed in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” written on the eve of the rise of European fascism and World War II.

“It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros,” Freud wrote. “But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.”

The lust for death, as Freud understood, is not, at first, morbid. It is exciting and seductive. I saw this in the wars I covered. A god-like power and adrenaline-driven fury, even euphoria, sweep over armed units and ethnic or religious groups given the license to destroy anything and anyone around them. Ernst Juenger captured this “monstrous desire for annihilation” in his World War I memoir, “Storm of Steel.”

A population alienated and beset by despair and hopelessness finds empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed it and thwarted its dreams. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical landscape. It turns against institutions, as well as ethnic and religious groups, that are scapegoated for its misery. It plunders diminishing natural resources with abandon. It is seduced by the fantastic promises of demagogues and the magical solutions characteristic of the Christian right or what anthropologists call “crisis cults.”

Norman Cohn, in “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements,” draws a link between that turbulent period and our own. Millennial movements are a peculiar, collective psychological response to profound societal despair. They recur throughout human history. We are not immune.

“These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earth-bound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it,” Cohen wrote. “But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all.”

These movements, Cohen wrote, offered “a coherent social myth which was capable of taking entire possession of those who believed in it. It explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of security—even while it drove them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain and often suicidal.

“So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context and in scale, is not irrelevant to the growth of totalitarian movements, with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their demon-scapegoats, in the present century.”

The severance of a society from reality, as ours has been severed from collective recognition of the severity of climate change and the fatal consequences of empire and deindustrialization, leaves it without the intellectual and institutional mechanisms to confront its impending mortality. It exists in a state of self-induced hypnosis and self-delusion. It seeks momentary euphoria and meaning in tawdry entertainment and acts of violence and destruction, including against people who are demonized and blamed for society’s demise. It hastens its self-immolation while holding up the supposed inevitability of a glorious national resurgence. Idiots and charlatans, the handmaidens of death, lure us into the abyss.

Huge anti-government swing in Western Australian election

Mike Head

At last Saturday’s state election, intense hostility toward the political establishment, at both state and federal levels, has produced the largest ever swing in Western Australia (WA) against a sitting government. The Liberal Party government suffered a near-16 percentage point swing—losing a third of its vote—reducing the Liberals to around 12 seats in the 59-seat lower house of state parliament.

The defeat for Premier Colin Barnett’s government was far worse than media polls predicted. Up to six government ministers have lost their seats. In some Perth suburban and regional electorates the swings were as high as 22 percent.

Far from being simply a WA issue, the political earthquake there indicates an intensification of the volatility that has ousted one government after another around the country over the past decade. The implosion of the mining boom has made the iron ore- and gas-rich state one of the sharpest expressions of the deep social discontent produced by the destruction of full-time jobs, the cutting of workers’ wages and conditions and the gutting of public services, compounded in WA by the collapse in house prices.

The immediate beneficiary of the rout was the Labor Party, which picked up a swing of around 9.7 percent to give it an overwhelming majority of at least 40 seats in the 59-seat chamber. However, as with previous elections, the outcome will only deepen the ongoing assault on the working class. The incoming Labor government will be a vicious pro-business administration, committed to slashing public spending to meet the demands of global financial markets and backed to the hilt by the trade unions, which will seek to systematically suppress workers’ opposition.

The WA vote has obvious national implications. It was the first electoral test for the political establishment since Prime Minister Turnbull’s Liberal-National Coalition government narrowly survived last July’s federal election, clinging to a mere one-seat majority. Six months on, the future of his unstable government seems more perilous than ever. If the WA result were reproduced in a federal election, Turnbull’s government would be swept from office, just on the vote in the state of WA alone.

In the last WA election in 2013, the Liberal Party won 47 percent of the primary vote, recording a swing of 8.8 percentage points. The Labor Party was decimated, largely due to hostility among ordinary working people toward former Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s then federal Labor government. Gillard was replaced three months later by Kevin Rudd, in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent a sweeping defeat at the 2013 federal election.

Turnbull tried to dismiss Saturday’s Liberal Party debacle as a product of “state issues.” In reality, the political disaffection generated by the social crisis in WA is mirrored throughout the country, where entire regions are in recession. Moreover, key federal decisions—particularly support for the slashing of penalty wage rates for low-paid workers and for swapping second preference votes with Senator Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigrant One Nation party—only inflamed widespread discontent.

Labor and the unions cynically seized upon the declarations of support by Turnbull and Barnett for the wage-cutting ruling by the Fair Work Commission (FWC). This was doubly hypocritical. The previous Gillard government, and its industrial relations minister, current Labor leader Bill Shorten, ordered the FWC review of penalty rates. For their part, the unions, led by Shorten and others, have already struck enterprise agreements with major retail, fast food and other employers to scrap penalty rates for hundreds of thousands of workers.

The vote-swapping deal with One Nation backfired on both participants. It alienated sections of the Liberals’ electoral and business base concerned that the rise of right-wing populists like Hanson could fracture the political system. The WA Liberal Party’s decision to preference One Nation above the rural-based Nationals, who are part of the federal Coalition, also fuelled rifts in Turnbull’s government. Yesterday, Turnbull and Finance Minister Matthias Cormann, who was centrally involved in the One Nation deal, continued to defend it, against criticism by Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, the Nationals leader.

At the same time, Hanson’s effort to prop up the Barnett government tore to shreds her “anti-establishment” credentials. Hanson had already demonstrated her support for the corporate, financial and political establishment’s austerity offensive by backing 90 percent of the Turnbull government’s legislation since last July. She underscored her backing for big business by endorsing push for the penalty rate cut.

Hanson’s One Nation polled 4.7 percent last Saturday, far less than the 13 percent forecast by media polls at the start of the election campaign. The vote demonstrated that her electoral appeal rests largely on voters seeking to lodge a protest against the two-party pro-business consensus of Labor and the Liberals. Nevertheless, Hanson’s efforts to divert seething alienation in nationalist and xenophobic directions had some success in the most economically and socially devastated areas. In those seats where One Nation fielded candidates, it secured around 8 percent of the vote, ranging up to around 12 percent in Mandurah, on Perth’s southern outskirts and Kalgoorlie, a mining region.

Despite the record anti-government swing, the Greens, with 8.6 percent of the vote, failed to increase their 2013 result, when they lost a third of their support. Having propped up Gillard’s minority government from 2010 to 2013, the Greens are widely regarded as part of the ruling establishment. Yesterday, they declared their intention to work closely with the state Labor government and help push its measures through the upper house, where they may retain their two seats. Greens WA campaign manager Andrew Beaton said the party intended to play a “constructive” role.

Labor garnered votes by opposing the Liberals’ plan to privatise Western Power, the state’s electricity grid, which would axe thousands of jobs and send household bills soaring. But the record shows that Labor governments have been in the forefront of privatisations, ever since the Hawke-Keating federal government sold off the Commonwealth Bank during the 1990s.

Headed by former naval officer Mark McGowan, the Labor government has pledged to the corporate elite to eliminate the annual $3 billion state budget deficit by cutting social spending and public sector jobs. Working hand-in-glove with the unions, McGowan peddled a pro-business, nationalist and protectionist line, paralleling the anti-foreigner rhetoric of One Nation.

“As premier, I will deliver more local jobs, always putting WA jobs first,” he declared. WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Deidre Willmott said employers looked forward to working with the government on “local content” legislation to ensure that WA companies were awarded government and military contracts.

On election eve, McGowan reassured the Australian Financial Review: “I’m very business friendly.” Media magnate Kerry Stokes’ West Australian newspaper called for a Labor victory, citing the disarray in the Liberal-National alliance and Labor’s commitment to “local jobs.”

Trade union bureaucrats likewise hailed Labor’s win. At least half of McGowan’s 20 shadow ministers are former union bosses. The unions’ readiness to suppress workers’ resistance to Labor’s pro-business program was demonstrated by the recent 13-year agreement struck by the Maritime Union of Australia to stifle industrial action on offshore gas projects in return for a commitment to preference “Australian” workers for jobs.

Labor is also committed to US-led militarism. In his election night victory speech, McGowan paid tribute to his long-time mentor, former Labor Party federal leader and Australian ambassador to Washington, Kim Beazley, who is one of the most vehement defenders of Australian imperialism’s strategic and military alliance with the US.

Threat of war increases in the western Balkans

Markus Salzmann

The political and social crisis in the Balkans is exacerbating conflicts between the successor states of Yugoslavia, heightening the threat of another war in the region.

The entire region has been in a state of acute crisis ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which was fuelled by the United States and Germany. Hardly any country in the region has a stable government. Corruption and crime are endemic and the largest part of the population lives in catastrophic conditions.

Journalist Norbert Mappes-Niediek, a Balkan specialist, remarked recently on broadcaster Deutsche Welle: “Europe is the powder keg. But the Balkans are the fuse. The conflicts are what is most dangerous. They cannot be isolated. And precisely in the present situation, in which the world has become so unstable and there is no longer any predominant power, it is all the more easy for the conflicting parties in the Balkans to seek allies among the greater powers. This is a situation like 1914. This, most of all, should give grounds for fear.”

According to the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research (HIIK), 18 conflicts can be observed currently in the region.

Dusan Reljic, head of the Brussels office of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said on broadcaster Deutschlandradio Kultur: “Relations between the Yugoslav successor states in the Balkans have not been as bad for over two decades. In the Balkans—in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo—leading politicians are thinking about how to redraw the borders again, and even talk of the danger of a new war.” According to Reljic, nationalism in the Balkans does not have “a life of its own,” but is an expression of social and economic conditions.

Florian Bieber from the Centre for East European Studies at the University of Graz said, “The idea of a liberal democratic consensus no longer exists.” The crisis of democracy in southeast Europe was visible to everyone.

Kosovo is one of the clearest examples. Formerly part of Yugoslavia, and independent since 2008, Kosovo is an economic and social disaster area. Basically, Kosovo produces little. Over 90 percent of all necessary goods are imported. For years, the amount of cash coming into the country from Kosovans working abroad is higher than that generated in Kosovo itself. Unemployment stands at nearly 50 percent; among young people it is over 70 percent.

The perspective for joining the EU, as promised by Brussels a few years ago, lies in the distant future. Last spring, a half-hearted Association Agreement was negotiated, which is totally unrealistic in view of the conditions necessary for its fulfilment.

A precondition is that Kosovo makes measurable progress in the fight against corruption and organized crime. Since the government, big business and the security forces are deeply involved in these activities, every attempt has been doomed to failure. At the same time, there are influential forces, such as the strongest opposition party in Pristina, urging the union of Kosovo with Albania. The political situation in Kosovo is extremely acute. Last year, there were violent clashes between the government and opposition in parliament. Head of state Hashim Thaci is seeking to channel internal conflicts through an aggressive stance towards Serbia. Last Tuesday, he submitted a bill to increase the size of the army to 5,000 and 2,500 reservists.

This produced such violent reactions in Serbia that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was obliged to intervene. He urged Thaci to establish “direct contact” with Serbia. Kosovo is a de facto protectorate of the Western powers, in which KFOR soldiers are stationed.

Serbia is also witnessing growing nationalism as the social crisis in the country deepens. Serbia has been negotiating accession to the EU since 2014, and has already implemented some of the “reforms” demanded by Brussels. However, given the general crisis of the EU, most member states are increasingly distancing themselves from an actual accession. Brussels has noted Moscow’s influence on Serbia with concern. While Belgrade receives $10 million in aid a year from Moscow, it gets over $190 million from the EU.

The United States and almost all EU member states favour a rapid recognition of Kosovo by the United Nations, but Moscow has used its veto in the Security Council to stop the country joining the UN.

Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic has even threatened to personally march into Kosovo at the head of the army, because the Albanian majority there is allegedly planning war against the Serb minority.

In Serbia too, the collapse of the economy is the reason for the rise of aggressive nationalism. In this context, the SWP warns against leaving six western Balkan countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia) to their economic fate. “Calculations by the World Bank say that even if these countries had six percent growth a year, they would only reach the EU average in 2035—provided that the EU countries had no growth.”

Bosnia, which declared independence 25 years ago, is now commonly referred to as “failed state.” As in Kosovo, poverty, crime and corruption are all pervasive. A country with 3.5 million inhabitants has 150 ministers and 600 parliamentarians who are consciously stoking up conflicts between three ethnic groups.

Bosnia applied for EU membership in February 2016, but its prospects are considered poor. Some 600 EUFOR soldiers are still stationed in the country to prevent outbreaks of social or ethnic tensions.

Macedonia is on the verge of civil war. The political elites have been fighting amongst themselves for months. “In normal times,” the Economist recently wrote, “the world tends to ignore Macedonia and its 2m people, a quarter of them ethnic Albanian. But the world is not ignoring Macedonia now. Western politicians are rushing to Skopje, Russia is issuing warnings and Serbian newspapers proclaim that war is coming. ‘Geopolitical relevance is returning to the Balkans,’ laments Veton Latifi, an analyst.”

In February, followers of former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski protested; although the right-wing politician had won the parliamentary elections in December, he has not been able to form a government majority.

Last week, President Gjorge Ivanov refused to give the social democrats a mandate to form a government, although they can form a majority in parliament along with three Albanian parties. He could not agree with this coalition, Ivanov said. It pursues a programme that was devised abroad and endangered the country’s unity, he said. In this way, he is stoking up nationalistic sentiment against the Albanian minority in the country.

The extreme tensions in Macedonia and neighbouring Albania, and the possible interference of Russia, means European and American representatives are reacting nervously. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, and representatives of NATO and the US State Department urged Ivanov to reverse his decision.

Dutch government bans Turkish ministers from speaking in Netherlands

Alex Lantier 

After local German authorities banned Turkish officials from speaking in Germany last week, the Dutch government provoked a major diplomatic incident with Turkey this weekend, provocatively blocking two Turkish ministers from speaking events in the Netherlands.

This attack on democratic rights is part of a reactionary anti-Muslim campaign by Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government in the run-up to the March 15 elections, attempting to stem the electoral rise of far-right candidate Geert Wilders by appealing to anti-immigrant and far-right sentiment. It came only after Wilders accused Rutte of being “too weak” to stop rallies by Turks in the Netherlands.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and Family Minister Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya were denied entry to the Netherlands, whose officials mounted a growing war of words with Turkey. The two ministers were due to speak at meetings to ask Turks living in the Netherlands to vote “yes” in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s constitutional referendum, scheduled for April 16, on transferring full powers to the Turkish presidency. People of Turkish origin in Europe, including 1.4 million in Germany and several hundred thousand in the Netherlands, are eligible to vote in the referendum.

Cavusoglu was to attend a pro-Yes rally in Rotterdam Saturday, but the venue owner cancelled the rally, citing safety concerns. When Cavusoglu said that he would come anyway and threatened the Netherlands with economic sanctions if he was refused entry, the Dutch cabinet blocked his flight from landing, citing the risk of clashes between supporters and opponents of Erdoğan in the Turkish immigrant community. “We are of the opinion that Dutch public spaces are not the place for political campaigns of other countries,” Rutte declared.

Erdoğan denounced the Dutch government’s decision in a statement to a crowd of supporters in Istanbul, declaring: “They are very nervous and cowardly. They are Nazi remnants, they are fascists.” He added that Turkey would now block Dutch diplomatic planes from landing in Turkey.

Only a few hours later, Kaya travelled into the Netherlands from Germany by automobile to speak at the Turkish consulate in Rotterdam, which, according to international law, is Turkey’s sovereign territory. In an extraordinary action, armed Dutch police were dispatched to detain Kaya and expel her from the Netherlands back to Germany.

Kaya issued a statement declaring, “The whole world must take action against this fascist practice! Such treatment against a woman minister cannot be accepted.” She added that the Netherlands were “violating all international laws, conventions, and human rights by not letting me enter.”

Wilders proclaimed that the humiliation of the Turkish ministers was a victory for his neo-fascist Party for Freedom (PVV). “Great! Thanks to heavy PVV pressure a few days before the Dutch elections, our government did not allow the Turkish minister to land here!!” he wrote on Twitter. “I say to all Turks in the Netherlands that agree with Erdoğan: go to Turkey and never come back.”

Wilders also posted a video denouncing Turkey and Muslims and insisting that Turkey would never be allowed to join the European Union (EU). “You are no Europeans and you will never be. An Islamic state like Turkey does not belong to Europe,” Wilders said. “We do not want more but less Islam. So Turkey, stay away from us. You are not welcome here.”

Erdoğan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin responded by writing on Twitter, “Shame on the Dutch government for succumbing to anti-Islam racists and fascists, and damaging long-standing Turkey-NL [Netherlands] relations.”

Clashes broke out as Turkish inhabitants of Rotterdam protested the expulsion of the two ministers, and protesters outside the Dutch consulate in Istanbul pelted the building with stones and eggs.

Cavusoglu spoke from a meeting in Metz, France to demand an apology and warn the Netherlands that Turkey would retaliate. Erdoğan made similar warnings on Sunday. “If you can sacrifice Turkish-Dutch relations for an election on Wednesday, you will pay the price,” he said. “I thought Nazism was dead, but I was wrong. Nazism is still widespread in the West. The West has shown its true face.”

The crisis in Turkey-EU relations is set to escalate. Turkish officials raised the possibility of economic sanctions against the Netherlands and said that the Dutch ambassador to Turkey, who is on leave, should not return to Ankara “for some time.” Venues in Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden and Austria are now also reportedly cancelling Turkish officials’ meetings.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen has ruled out a planned visit by Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim to Denmark, due to “the current Turkish attack on Holland.”

On Sunday morning, in a tacit acknowledgment of the provocative character of his government’s actions, Rutte said that he wanted to “de-escalate” tensions with Turkey. However, he angrily dismissed as “bizarre” any suggestion that he would offer Erdoğan an apology, declaring: “This is a man who yesterday made us out for fascists and a country of Nazis. I’m going to de-escalate, but not by offering apologies. Are you nuts?”

European governments’ blocking of Turkish officials’ travel and speaking plans is an outrageous attack on free speech, appealing to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment. Erdoğan’s referendum to set up a so-called “executive presidency” is undoubtedly a reactionary bid to set up a presidential dictatorship in Turkey. However, this is a matter for the Turkish people to decide—not Dutch, Danish, or other EU officials.

The political significance of Rutte’s intervention is unmistakable. He has increasingly run on the basis of anti-Muslim rhetoric, inciting the same reactionary prejudices as Wilders to divide the working class and shift the political atmosphere far to the right, amid elections marked by deep popular disaffection with his policies of austerity and war.

In January, with Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) trailing Wilders’ PVV, Rutte issued an extraordinary public letter demanding that immigrants totally integrate into Dutch society or leave the Netherlands. Those who “refuse to adapt, and criticise our values [should] behave normally, or go away,” Rutte said. “If you so fundamentally reject this country, then I’d prefer it if you leave.”

Such remarks reflect the broad shift far to the right in all shades of European bourgeois politics, as the Netherlands and France go into critical elections dominated by the rising electoral weight of neo-fascists like Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France.

In Germany, Left Party leader Sahra Wagenknecht issued a statement aligning herself with Rutte’s reactionary attack on the Turkish government. She declared, “Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel are in a position to stop Erdoğan’s propaganda tour for dictatorship and the death penalty, at least on German soil, as the governments of Austria and the Netherlands have decided for their countries.”

Trump hails Australia’s draconian immigration regime

Max Newman

In his speech to a joint session of Congress last month, US president Donald Trump praised the “merit-based immigration system” utilised by “nations around the world, like Canada, Australia and many others.” Trump declared the basic principle to be “those seeking to enter a country ought to be able to support themselves financially.”

Trump reiterated his enthusiasm the following day. “The merit-based system is the way to go. Canada, Australia!” he tweeted. He lauded a recent book, Green Card Warrior, by Nick Adams, who insists that the US admits too many immigrants indiscriminately, instead of stocking the country with foreigners who offer skills American businesses need and who are willing to “assimilate.”

The “Australian model” praised by Trump combines cruelty and inhumanity toward refugees, with a “points-based” immigration program that deliberately discriminates in favour of wealthy applicants and those whose labour power can be most readily exploited by Australian-based employers.

Australia indefinitely imprisons all men, women and children who flee to Australia by boat. They are kept in “offshore detention” facilities in conditions so horrendous that medical professionals have said it amounts to torture.

At the same time, across the entire immigration system, “skills” tests are applied to select the most immediately “employable” applicants, at the expense of the “family reunion” stream, in which people wait for years, even decades, to sponsor close relatives, including parents.

Draconian health tests are also applied to bar entry to applicants, mostly working class or poor, who have any illness in their family or are otherwise deemed likely to be a “burden” on taxpayers. A “good character” test bars those whose views are considered contrary to “Australian values”—essentially acceptance of the corporate profit system and its predatory foreign policy of heavy involvement in US-led wars.

On the other end of the social scale, wealthy people are highly favoured. In fact, “high net worth individuals” can literally buy visas by promising to invest large sums in Australian businesses or real estate projects. Since the last Labor government launched the Significant Investor Visa program in November 2012, more than 1,300 multi-millionaires have bought fast-track residential visas by agreeing to invest at least $5 million each.

The overall political thrust of this falsely labelled “merit-based” system serves to vilify, as law-breakers, desperate or impoverished people fleeing from wars waged by the US and its allies, including Australia, or from countries long-oppressed by the major capitalist powers. This is underpinned by constant campaigns to scapegoat asylum seekers and whip up anti-chauvinism and racism to divide the working class.

Only a few hours after Trump’s speech, Australian media outlets erupted in a frenzy, with articles triumphantly declaring that Trump was adopting Australia as an immigration model. According to one report, a senior Trump policy advisor, Stephen Miller, held 12 months of private talks with Australian diplomats on the issue.

The overblown media response is partly bound up with concerns in the media and political establishment that the Trump administration will renege on the reactionary refugee-swap deal that Prime Minister Turnbull’s government struck with the Obama administration last year. Trump reportedly branded the agreement “the worst deal ever” in an infamous phone conversation with Turnbull, which Trump ended abruptly.

Last month, the Trump administration said it would honour the deal, but emphasised that the agreement was based on “extreme vetting” of refugees, with the US under no obligation to take anyone at all.

The swap agreement would remove to the US some of the 2,200 refugees locked in Australia’s refugee prison camps on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. This aspect of the deal was announced last November, some weeks after Turnbull offered to take an undisclosed number of refugees similarly languishing in detention camps run by the US in Costa Rica.

On both sides of the Pacific, some of the world’s most vulnerable people would face permanent separation from their family members already living in either Australia or the US. The Turnbull government, backed by the Labor Party opposition, declared that those removed from Australia’s camps would never be permitted to enter Australia.

Last year, the Turnbull government denied that the agreement was a “swap” but Immigration and Border Protection Minister Dutton last month publicly linked the two deals for the first time. He said Australia would not take anyone from Costa Rica “until we had assurances that people are going off Nauru and Manus Island.” Asked whether the arrangements could be called a “people swap,” Dutton replied: “I don’t have any problem with that characterisation if people want to put that.”

The Obama administration set up the Costa Rica camps last July, ostensibly as a humanitarian response to the large numbers of asylum seekers fleeing Central America to escape gang-related violence. In reality, the camps are designed to halt the influx, and prevent access to the US, by herding refugees into camps to be “heavily vetted.” More than 100,000 Central American asylum seekers had arrived in the US during 2015, a fivefold increase from just a few years earlier.

Obama’s administration negotiated “protection transfer agreements,” limited to 200 individuals over six months, which require pre-screening by US State Department officials in their countries of origin. Refugees are then forced into the Costa Rica camps to await removal to the US or another country, such as Australia.

The Turnbull government last year attempted to obfuscate the link between the two agreements struck with Australia, in order to present the swap deal as a humanitarian arrangement. In reality, the arrangement only serves to reinforce the inhuman detention regime, while assisting the US government to adopt similar measures.

Over the past two years, current and former Australian detention staff have courageously defied bipartisan secrecy laws to publicly reveal the abuses of basic rights and other horrors in the Nauru and Manus camps, contributing to public outcries and demands for the camps to be shut.

In response, the Labor Party and the Greens, who are directly responsible for reopening the camps by the Greens-backed Labor minority government in 2012, have feigned sympathy for the imprisoned victims. They have presented the US swap deal as a step toward closing down the camps. Regardless of how many detainees are ultimately shifted to the US, however, the facilities will remain in place, ready to imprison new refugees fleeing for their lives.

Republicans push plan to gut Medicaid and slash taxes for the wealthy

Kate Randall 

Top Trump administration officials appeared on the political talk shows Sunday morning to promote the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the House Republican bill for the repeal and replacement of Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare.

The Republican proposal builds on the core features of Obamacare, designed to boost the profits of the private insurers and slash health care costs for the government and big business.

The ACHA seeks to strengthen the grip of the for-profit health care delivery system in America while making sweeping cuts to Medicaid, the insurance program for the poor jointly funded by the federal government and the states. It also slashes financial assistance to low-income people seeking to purchase health coverage and cuts taxes for the wealthy and big business by an estimated $600 billion.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is expected to release its numbers on the Republican plan today. The Brookings Institution on Thursday predicted that the CBO’s analysis will likely find that at least 15 million people stand to lose coverage under the AHCA by the end of the 10-year scoring window.

In a prerecorded interview aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tom Price attempted to evade moderator Chuck Todd’s question: “Can you say for certain that once this bill is passed nobody, nobody will be worse off financially when it comes to paying for health care?”

Price answered by pointing to the high premiums under Obamacare and the fact that patients are forgoing health care as a result of high deductibles and out-of-pocket costs. The HHS secretary, a rabid opponent of Medicaid, Medicare and government “intrusion” into health care, knows full well the Republican plan will make the situation for millions of working people, as bad as it is under Obamacare, even worse.

Todd pointed to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) estimate that the $4,000 tax credit that a 60-year-old in Fayette County, West Virginia would get under the AHCA “is almost $8,000 less than they would get under Obamacare.” Price brushed this off, defending the Republican plan’s tax credits, which would provide from $2,000 to $4,000 to those making up to $75,000, based purely on age and not income, with older people receiving the most.

A KFF analysis has found that for virtually every age group of individuals with incomes of $20,000-$40,000 and families making $40,000-$75,000, tax credits would be substantially lower under the ACHA than the subsidies provided under Obamacare.

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney appeared on ABC’s “This Week” program. Host George Stephanopoulos raised that independent analysts had projected that there will be about “$370 billion less in federal funding for Medicaid over the next 10 years” under the AHCA. He asked how this squared with Trump’s promises during his presidential bid that there would be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

The OMB director defended the Medicaid funding cuts, saying, “The Medicaid system as it exists today is a one-size fits-all system. We fixed that. You can provide better services for less if we get the federal government out of the way.”

In addition to the massive cuts to Medicaid, the AHCA would implement the de facto end of the program as an entitlement by 2020. Federal funding based on need would be replaced with a per capita cap, forcing states to cut benefits and deny coverage to qualified beneficiaries.

The plan would also eliminate the enhanced matching federal funds for Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, which has enrolled about 10 million people. Taken together, these cutbacks will result in denial of benefits and care to millions of poor, disabled and elderly people and to pregnant women. Some 74 million people are currently covered by Medicaid.

Republican opponents of the bill are pushing for the funding changes to Medicaid to be pushed forward to as early as next year. Mulvaney said he was willing to consider this and other amendments to the plan.

He said, “I think Congressman Morgan Griffith from Virginia had some really good ideas regarding things like changing the expansion date or perhaps putting work requirements in on Medicaid—those are great ideas that would improve the bill. If the House sees fit to make the bill better, they’d certainly have the support of the White House.”

A number of Republican governors are already pushing to impose a work requirement for Medicaid for low-income adults without disabilities.

Last year, under Obama, hundreds of thousands of so-called ABAWDs (able-bodied adults without dependents) were cut off of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, due to the return in many areas of a three-month limit on benefits for unemployed adults aged 18-49 who are not disabled or raising minor children.

If a work requirement is implemented for Medicaid, recipients who cannot prove their disability, or are unable to find work, could summarily be denied benefits. Many of these individuals, the poorest of the poor, would be the same people who have lost their SNAP benefits.

Stephanopoulos raised new figures showing that the AHCA “will provide about $157 billion in tax cuts to people of incomes over $1 million in the next 10 years, yet older Americans, middle-income Americans, are going to be paying more for their insurance.”

The budget director was indifferent, saying, “Look, we promised to repeal the taxes for Obamacare. That’s what the bill does.” He pointed to features of the AHCA that would allow people at every income level to put away unlimited funds tax-free in health savings accounts (HSAs). He also claimed that “lower premiums that come from competition” would ease the burden on ordinary Americans.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that these unlimited HSAs would result in $19 billion in tax savings—almost exclusively for the wealthy. For workers and their families who are struggling to pay for basic necessities such as food, housing and utilities, the concept of squirreling away “surplus” money to pay for health care is an absurdity.

The Republicans’ AHCA is making its way through various House Committees, and Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, hopes to bring it before the full House before the end of March. The Democrats are opposing the legislation, making the defense of Obamacare their main domestic agenda, second only to their anti-Russian campaign against Trump.

However, the differences between the Democrats and Republicans on health care are essentially a conflict between two right-wing factions within the ruling elite. Both parties uphold the principle of private ownership and the subordination of the health care system to the capitalist private market. Obamacare has paved the way for an even more ferocious attack on health care for the working class by Trump and the Republicans.

UN officials warn of worst famine crisis since World War II

Patrick Martin 

More than 20 million people face imminent starvation in four countries, United Nations officials warned over the weekend, the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II. All four countries—Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, and Nigeria—are wracked by civil wars in which the US government is implicated in funding and arming one of the contending sides.

UN emergency relief coordinator Stephen O’Brien gave a report to the UN Security Council Friday detailing the conditions in the four countries, and the UN issued published further materials on the crisis Saturday, seeking to raise $4.4 billion in contributions for emergency relief before the end of March. So far, according to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, only $90 million has been pledged, barely two percent of the total needed.

As outlined by UN officials, the populations most immediately at risk number 7.3 million in Yemen, 2.9 million in Somalia, 5 million in South Sudan, and 5.1 million in Nigeria, for a total of 20.3 million. The number of children suffering symptoms of acute malnutrition is estimated at 462,000 in Yemen, 185,000 in Somalia, 270,000 in South Sudan, and 450,000 in Nigeria, for a total of nearly 1.4 million.

While adverse weather conditions, particularly drought, are a contributing factor in the humanitarian disasters, the primary cause is civil war, in which each side is using food supplies as a weapon, deliberately starving the population of the “enemy.”

US-backed forces are guilty of such war crimes in all four countries, and it is American imperialism, the principal backer of the Saudi intervention in Yemen and the government forces in Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria, which is principally responsible for the danger of famine and the growing danger of a colossal humanitarian disaster.

The worst-hit country is Yemen, where US-armed and directed military units from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf monarchies are at war with Houthi rebels who overthrew the US-installed president two years ago. Some 19 million people, two-thirds of the country’s population, are in need of humanitarian assistance.

The Saudi forces, which fight alongside Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, control the country’s major ports, including Aden and Hodeida, and are backed by US Navy units in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in imposing a blockade on the region controlled by the Houthis in the west and north of the country.

US forces operations range throughout the country, with drone missile strikes and occasional raids, like the disastrous attack on a village at the end of January in which at least 30 Yemeni civilians were killed, many of them small children, and one US Special Forces soldier was shot to death.

In Somalia, the protracted civil war between the US-backed government in Mogadishu and Al Shabab militias, who control most of the country’s south, has laid waste to a country which already suffered a devastating famine in 2011, and has been ravaged by civil war for most the past quarter-century.

At least half the country’s population, more than six million people, is in need of humanitarian aid, according to UN estimates. Drought conditions have killed off much of the country’s animal population. In Somalia, too, US military units continue to operate, carrying out Special Forces raids and drone missile strikes. There is also an extensive spillover of Somali refugees into neighboring Kenya, where another 2.7 million people are in need of humanitarian aid.

The civil war in South Sudan is a conflict between rival tribal factions of a US-backed regime that was created through Washington’s intervention into a long-running civil war in Sudan. After a US-brokered treaty and a referendum approving separation, South Sudan was established as a newly independent state in 2011.

Tribal conflicts within the new state have been exacerbated by drought, extreme poverty, and the struggle to control the country’s oil reserves, its one significant natural resource, which is largely exported through neighboring Sudan to China. The country is landlocked, making transport of emergency food supplies more difficult.

The crisis in South Sudan was said to be the most acute of the four countries where famine alerts were being sounded, with some 40 percent of the population facing starvation. Last month, UN officials declared a full-scale famine alert for 100,000 people in South Sudan. A cholera epidemic has also been reported.

The famine crisis in Nigeria is likewise the byproduct of warfare, this time between the Islamic fundamentalist group Boko Haram and the government of Nigeria, which has military support from the US and Britain. The focal point of this conflict has been the Lake Chad region, where Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger share borders. This is the most densely populated and fertile of the four areas threatened with famine.

A recent offensive by Nigerian government forces pushed backed Boko Haram and uncovered the extent of the suffering among the local population in the region, where food supplies were cut off as part of the US-backed military campaign.

US military forces range throughout the Sahel region, the vast area on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert which encompasses much of western Africa. The armed forces of French and German imperialism are also active in former French colonies like Mali and Burkina Faso, as well as further south, in the Central African Republic.

According to the UN reports, the humanitarian disaster in Yemen has accelerated in recent months. The number of Yemenis in immediate danger of starvation jumped from four million to seven million in the past month. One child dies every 10 minutes in Yemen from a preventable disease.

When the UN humanitarian chief’s mission was in Yemen last week, it was able to secure safe passage for the first truckload of humanitarian supplies to the besieged city of Taiz, the country’s third largest, which has been blockaded for the past seven months.

The debate on O’Brien’s report to the UN Security Council featured one hypocritical statement after another by imperialist powers like the US, Britain, France, Japan and Italy, as well as by China and Russia, all bemoaning the suffering, but all concealing the real cause of the deepening crisis.

Typical were the remarks of the US representative, Michele Sison, who declared, “Every member of the Security Council should be outraged that the world was confronting famine in the year 2017. Famine is a man-made problem with a man-made solution.”

She called on the parties engaged in fighting in the four countries to “prioritize access to civilians” and “not obstruct aid”—although that is exactly what the US-backed forces are doing, particularly in Yemen, and to a lesser extent in the other three countries.

The UN report does not cover other humanitarian crises also classified by the World Food Program as “level three,” the most serious, including Iraq, Syria, Central African Republic and the Philippines (the first three due to civil war, the last due to the impact of several Pacific typhoons). Nor does it cover the devastating civil conflict in Libya or Afghanistan, ravaged by nearly 40 years of continuous warfare.

Nor does it review the worldwide total of people in acute need of food assistance, estimated at 70 million in 45 countries, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. This figure is up 40 percent since 2015, as a result of escalating civil wars, drought and other climate-driven events, and rising food prices.

The World Food Program experienced a shortfall in contributions of nearly one-third in 2016, receiving only $5.9 billion from donors towards a total outlay of $8.6 billion, forcing the agency to cut rations for refugees in Kenya and Uganda. Total unfunded humanitarian aid appeals came to $10.7 billion in 2016, larger than the combined total of such appeals in 2012.

While these sums are gargantuan in terms of the need, they are a drop in the bucket compared to the resources squandered by the major powers on war and militarism. The total deficit in humanitarian aid amounts to less than three days’ worth of global military spending. The $4.4 billion in aid sought for the famine crisis is half of what the US Pentagon spends in a typical week.

Is the US preparing for war against North Korea?

Peter Symonds

A dangerous confrontation is rapidly emerging on the Korean Peninsula between the United States and North Korea, with the potential to plunge North East Asia and the rest of the world into a catastrophic conflict between nuclear-armed powers.

Amid a barrage of commentary in the American and international media inflating the threat posed by the Pyongyang regime, the Trump administration is actively considering “all options” to disarm and subordinate North Korea.

The immediate pretext is North Korea’s test-firing of four medium-range ballistic missiles last week, following the launch in February of a new intermediate-range missile. However, the drumbeat of US military threats has been preceded by months of high-level discussions in American foreign policy and military circles over action to prevent North Korea building an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of hitting the continental United States.

President Barack Obama, who, according to the New York Times, was considering the most extreme measures against Pyongyang, urged then-President-elect Donald Trump to make North Korea his highest security priority. Since taking office, the Trump administration has been conducting a top-level review of US strategy toward Pyongyang, considering every option, including, as a White House official told the Wall Street Journal, those “well outside the mainstream” such as “regime-change” and military strikes on North Korean nuclear facilities and military assets.

A worried New York Times editorial last week, headlined “Rising Tensions with North Korea,” underscored the dangers of war breaking out in North East Asia. “How Mr. Trump intends to handle this brewing crisis is unclear, but he has shown an inclination to respond aggressively,” the newspaper wrote. “On Monday, the White House denounced the missile tests and warned of ‘very dire consequences.’”

The editorial pointed out that the Obama administration had been engaged in cyber and electronic warfare against the North Korean missile systems, then continued: “Other options include some kind of military action, presumably against missile launch sites, and continuing to press China to cut off support. The Trump administration has also discussed reintroducing nuclear weapons into South Korea, an extremely dangerous idea.”

The Chinese government is acutely concerned at the prospect of war on its doorstep involving its ally, North Korea. In unusually blunt language, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, warned that the United States and North Korea were like “accelerating trains coming toward each other with neither side willing to give way.” The Trump administration flatly rejected China’s proposal for a “dual suspension”—of North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs and massive US war games underway in South Korea—as the basis for renewed negotiations.

By ruling out talks, the White House is setting course for confrontation, not only with North Korea, but also with China. By preparing for military action against North Korea, the US is also menacing China, which it has identified as the most immediate challenge to American global hegemony.

The Trump administration has already threatened trade war measures against China and military action against Chinese islets in the South China Sea. The US deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-ballistic-missile battery in South Korea, which began last week, is part of a network of integrated anti-missile systems designed to facilitate nuclear war with China or Russia.

A pre-emptive US attack on North Korea would be an act of war with incalculable consequences. While no match for the military power of US imperialism and its allies, North Korea has a huge army, estimated at more than a million soldiers, and a large array of conventional missiles and artillery, much of it entrenched along the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone and able to strike the densely populated South Korean capital of Seoul.

In the event of war, the scale of devastation would be immense just on the Korean Peninsula alone, even without the use of nuclear weapons. In 1994, the Clinton administration was on the brink of attacking North Korea’s nuclear facilities but pulled back at the last minute after the Pentagon gave a sober assessment of the likely outcome—300,000 to 500,000 South Korean and American military casualties.

A war now is unlikely to be conventional or limited to the Korean Peninsula. The Pentagon has been actively planning for a far broader conflict. In December 2015, US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford said any conflict with North Korea would inevitably be “trans-regional, multi-domain and multifunctional”—in other words, a world war involving other powers and the use of all weapons, including nuclear bombs.

The immediate danger of war is compounded by the acute political, economic and social crises of all the governments involved, as epitomised by last Friday’s impeachment and removal of South Korean President Park Geun-hye. Faced with an early election and the prospect of defeat, the ruling right-wing Liberty Korea Party has a definite incentive to whip up war tensions with North Korea to divert attention from the political crisis at home.

Moreover, the current US-South Korean military exercises, involving more than 320,000 military personnel backed by the most sophisticated US air and naval power, provide an ideal opportunity for striking North Korea. As of last year, the annual drills, which amount to a rehearsal for war with Pyongyang, have been conducted on the basis of aggressive new operational plans, which include pre-emptive strikes on North Korean military sites and “decapitation raids” to assassinate the country’s leadership.

The response of both the Chinese and North Korean governments to US threats is utterly reactionary: on the one hand looking for a deal with Washington, on the other, engaging in an arms race that only heightens the danger of war. Neither regime has anything to do with socialism or represents the interests of the working class. Their whipping up of nationalism acts as a barrier to the development of unity among workers in Asia and the US in opposition to imperialist war.

The most destabilising factor in this extremely tense situation is the United States, where the political establishment and state apparatus are embroiled in factional warfare over foreign policy and hacking allegations. There is a real danger that the Trump administration will turn to war with North Korea in an attempt to project internal social and political tensions outward against the common “enemy.”

The prospect of a catastrophic war stems not from particular individuals or parties. It is being driven by the deepening crisis of international capitalism and the insoluble contradiction between world economy and the division of the globe into rival nation states. The same crisis of the profit system, however, creates the objective conditions and political necessity for the working class to fight for its own revolutionary solution—a unified anti-war movement of the international working class based on a socialist perspective to put an end to capitalism before it plunges humanity into barbarism.