[D66] Is the WSWS exaggerating the threat of war?

[A.O.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/17/libe-o17.html

A reply to French daily Libération
Is the WSWS exaggerating the threat of war?
By Alex Lantier
17 October 2018

On Monday, the French daily Libération published an article in its
“CheckNews” section claiming that the World Socialist Web Site is
exaggerating US preparations for “total war.” Replying to a question
from a reader, journalist Pauline Moullot writes: “Indeed, many web
sites have re-posted this article from the World Socialist Web Site
titled ‘Pentagon report points to US preparations for total war.’ The
article mixes up several correct reports in order to arrive at a
misleading title.”

Libération admits that the WSWS correctly reports the military threats
and incidents between US forces and their Russian and Chinese
counterparts. It notes that Chinese warships nearly collided with US
Navy vessels in the South China Sea, an event Le Monde called
“dangerous.” It notes that US Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison
threatened to “take out” Russian missiles in Europe and produced what
the Washington Post called a “diplomatic incident.”

Nonetheless, Libération insists that the WSWS is overestimating the war
danger and, in particular, the significance of the Pentagon report upon
which it based its article.

It writes, “Does the Pentagon report actually foresee ‘total war’? In
fact, the report cited in the article deals with the US defense industry.”

Since what is occurring is trade war between America and China,
Libération concludes, the WSWS article is an exaggeration; everyone can
go to sleep easy. “So it is true that the United States are particularly
targeting China,” it writes, “but the report being cited deals with the
US defense industry’s strategy and China’s weight in this industry. It
backs up the US case for trade war against China, but it is not a
warning sign of ‘total war.’”

In fact, the WSWS analysis of the war danger is correct. The primary
concern of the Pentagon report is ensuring the capacity of the United
States military to “surge” its activities under conditions in which the
countries on which it is economically dependent “may cut off US access.”
To most people (but apparently not to the Libération editorial board) a
“surge” in military activity is referred to as a war. To sustain such a
“surge,” the report advocates radical changes in the American economy,
the educational system, and government spending priorities.

That is, the report advocates changes to the totality of American
society with the aim of fighting war. If Libération does not see this as
preparation for “total war,” this is only a confirmation of the old
adage that “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.”

The Pentagon report, titled “Assessing and Strengthening the
Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of
the United States,” calls for the United States to “retool” for “great
power competition.” It cites last year’s US National Security Strategy,
which denounces “revisionist powers” like China and Russia as the
“central challenge” to the United States.

Preparing for military confrontation and conflict with other major
nuclear-armed powers, the US National Security Strategy insists,
requires “the seamless integration of multiple elements of national
power—diplomacy, information, economics, finance, intelligence, law
enforcement and military.”

That is to say, the national security strategy of the United States must
be to prepare the integration of all elements of American society into
plans for total war.

This, as the WSWS article explains, is what the recent Pentagon report
concretely proposes. It calls not only for economic policies to build “a
vibrant domestic manufacturing sector, a solid defense industrial base,
and resilient supply chains,” but broad changes to US research and
academic facilities, including measures targeting Chinese students. It
warns that with one quarter of “STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering
and Mathematics] graduates in the US being Chinese nationals … American
universities are major enablers of China’s economic and military rise.”

The adoption of total war plans in the United States has pushed other
major powers, both allied to and targeted by Washington, to prepare
similar measures. Last year, as Sweden reintroduced the draft, after
Germany announced the re-militarization of its foreign policy, and as
the final touches on the US National Security Strategy were being made,
Moscow announced its own plans for the total mobilization of Russia’s
economy for war.

Amid a wave of Russian military exercises aiming to counterbalance
growing US and NATO troop deployments on Russia’s borders in Eastern
Europe, President Vladimir Putin declared: “The ability of our economy
to increase military production and services at a given time is one of
the most important aspects of military security. To this end, all
strategic and simply large-scale enterprise should be ready, regardless
of ownership.”

What these events show is that escalating US-NATO neo-colonial wars over
the last quarter century are reaching a new, dangerous stage. The
conflicts between the major capitalist powers—which underlay US
imperialism’s attempts to militarily dominate Eurasia starting in the
1990s via wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Syria, Ukraine and
beyond—are erupting to the surface. A new global capitalist breakdown is
being set in motion. As in 1914 or 1939, Washington, Moscow and the
other major capitals are preparing for all-out war against each other.

Libération, it seems, would contest this analysis. Yet what was the
analysis in 2015—as Washington threatened to arm Ukrainian militias
fighting in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine against Russia, and Russia
threatened to retaliate militarily—of the man whose election as French
president Libération hailed as a triumph?

As he jumped onto a plane taking him from Paris to Minsk, in a desperate
attempt to negotiate what became the Minsk peace treaty on Ukraine,
French President François Hollande said: “We have gone in the space of a
few months from having differences, to conflict, to war ... We are in a
state of war, and a war that could be total.”

Naturally, Hollande returned from Minsk and continued to stoke French
imperialism’s neo-colonial wars in Syria and Mali, receiving
Libération’s backing on this basis.

Libération’s criticisms of the WSWS for fighting to alert workers
internationally to the war danger and mobilize them in struggle against
imperialist war are shot through with bad faith. Like the rest of the
official media in France and beyond, it is aware that the WSWS is widely
read and followed, including by its own readers. Like other
pro-imperialist publications and organizations that emerged out of the
post-1968 petty-bourgeois student movement, such as the Pabloite New
Anticapitalist Party (NPA), it has up until now maintained a hostile
silence on the WSWS.

The career of the author of Libération’s “fact-check” of the WSWS,
Pauline Moullot, faithfully reflects the rightward evolution of the
petty-bourgeois layers who influence the editorial line and outlook of
Libération. The Maoist youth who founded the paper in 1973, under the
protection of Jean-Paul Sartre, during the anti-Vietnam war movement,
have come a long way. Moullot writes also for Slate and World Policy
Journal, a publication linked to France’s imperialist foreign policy
magazine Politique internationale.

This layer of what is called the “foreign policy community” has
prospered over decades, as bloody wars have claimed millions of
lives—providing commentary that justified and prettied up various acts
of imperialist plunder. Their salaries, their stock portfolios and their
broader social privileges became bound up with the profits derived from
war and the marketing of war to the public. They have a financial
interest in not telling the truth about the implications of plans for
total war, despite rising concern among masses of people.

This is why Libération contests, in the face of all evidence, the fact
that total war is being prepared, and willfully chooses not to connect
the dots lying in plain sight in front of its nose.