On April 19, India’s capitalist rulers, quietly urged on by U.S. President Obama, successfully tested a long-range ballistic missile that can carry a nuclear warhead. The New York Times, the U.S. rulers’ leading mouthpiece, immediately boasted that the missile was “capable of reaching Beijing and Shanghai.” This account fostered the growing possibility of a third world war, probably nuclear.

An intensifying arms race embroils India, China and the U.S. It stems from growing competition among imperialists for global market share amid limited resources, especially energy. Capitalists, organized as nation states, need to threaten their rival exploiters with the deadliest military force possible. They must also have allies ready for the inevitable day when their jockeying for profit sources — like oil from the Middle East — explodes into global armed conflict.

At present, China’s and U.S. bosses are on a military collision course. In population, China outnumbers the U.S. four to one. So U.S. rulers must count heavily on troops from India (pop. 1.2 billion) to stem Chinese advances. In 2005, Admiral Michael Mullen proposed a multinational, U.S.-led “Thousand Ship Navy,” with a large component fleet from India to police China’s oil trade. Last year, however, “Indian Defence Minister A.K. Antony ruled out India joining such a group unless it is under a U.N. mandate” (Defense News, 5/25/11).  

World’s Workers Would Be Main Victims of Nuclear War

The fact that the next world war will kill tens of millions of workers never enters into the equation for these imperialist rulers. They only consider how their overwhelming stock of weaponry, both conventional and atomic, will give them the upper hand in their drive to exploit the greatest possible number of the world’s workers.

India’s recent rocket test reveals U.S. rulers’ desperation to enlist India’s billion-plus workers as “coalition” cannon (or nuclear-bomb) fodder in a coming war.  As the Times (4/19/12)  explained, “The Obama administration... is now cultivating alliances with Asian nations and redirecting its strategic and military focus toward Asia to manage China’s new military clout.” 

Most of Obama’s current crop of foreign policy advisers hails from the Rockefeller-funded Center for a New American Security (see CHALLENGE, 4/25). This think tank endorses an anti-China “India Initiative” because the economic, political, and military rise of India “is reshaping world politics and promises to make India both a true global power and one of the most important bilateral partners for the United States.”

After the launch, U.S. stooge and NATO head Ander Fogh Rasmussen said that the trans-Atlantic alliance did not perceive India as a threat. The Nation, a Pakistani newspaper, pointed to Indian efforts to catch up to China: “Only recently, India ordered 126 fighter jets from the French firm Dassault, one of the biggest arms deals in the recent past. Furthermore, New Delhi has purchased nuclear submarines from Russia and is seeking to modernize its tank fleet. In 2011, the country was the world’s biggest purchaser of arms” (4/21/12).

For now, China and the U.S. both profit from the arrangement by which the U.S. buys Chinese goods while China buys U.S. Treasury bonds. But this harmonious dynamic can’t last much longer. Ultimately, these two powers may very well settle their economic rivalry in imperialist war although other imperialist powers like Russia can become involved. China’s burgeoning industry will soon require tens of millions of barrels of oil per day, more than its sole oil-rich Middle East ally, Iran, can supply. China won’t forever endure being a mere buyer of Saudi crude, which is controlled by Exxon Mobil. Nor will it indefinitely tolerate the U.S.-paid mercenaries guarding Chinese wells in Iraq.

Beijing’s bosses, already building naval bases in Pakistan and Burma, are taking further steps to counter U.S. dominance of Indian Ocean oil routes from the Middle East. Three Chinese warships are patrolling the Red Sea against “pirates.” With blue-water aircraft carriers and submarines already in shipyards, “China’s defence spending could overtake America’s after 2035” (The Economist, 4/7/12).

Repercussions Likely from Al Qaeda and Russia

Zbigniew Brzezinski envisions the Indian navy and army helping to “encircle” rising China (see his 2012 book, “Strategic Vision”). As National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski was the architect of the Carter Doctrine. It stipulated that control of Middle East oil supplies was in the strategic interest of the U.S. and had to be protected at all costs, by military means if necessary. This policy has been adopted by all subsequent U.S. presidents.

But Brzezinski offers three cautions against “a formal U.S.-India alliance.” First, a treaty might entangle the U.S. in a land war even less winnable than Korea and Vietnam: “It would increase the likelihood of U.S. involvement in potentially prolonged and bitter Asian conflicts.” Second, “It would increase Moscow’s temptations to take advantage of a distracted America drawn into wider Asian conflicts to assert Russian imperialist interests more firmly in Central Asia and central Europe.” Third, it might heighten “the appeal of anti-American terrorism among Muslims.”This includes Pakistan, India’s arch enemy. 

Asian Nuke Threats are U.S. Bosses’ Best Hope to Maintain Profits

U.S. bosses prefer nuclear weapons — their own, India’s or NATO’s — as an end run around costly ground wars that favor their enemies in Asia. Their defeats in Korea and Vietnam have made them cherish their genocidal 1945 atomic slaughter at Hiroshima and Nagasaki all the more. These atomic bomb strikes against civilian populations served U.S. rulers well. They were a powerful warning to Stalin’s Soviet Union — then without nuclear weapons — that it would face similar destruction if it challenged U.S. post-World War II global supremacy.

By any sane estimate, conventional U.S. forces, however technologically superior, would fail miserably in assaulting China’s mainland. That’s why Obama keeps his thumb (and those of his Indian allies) on the nuclear trigger to check China’s advances, uncaring that its use would kill millions of workers.

But the one factor that all imperialist bosses tend to ignore is the potential strength of international working-class solidarity. After all, the ruling class and their henchmen constitute barely three percent of the world’s population. The world’s working class, when organized and led by a revolutionary communist party, the Progressive Labor Party, represents the exploited billions whose interests run exactly counter to their exploiters. The same workers compose the imperialist armies that can be won to turn the guns on their oppressors. Without their rank-and-file soldiers, the bosses are powerless.

This is the internationalism that we celebrate on May Day. And this is the force that can destroy the racist system of capitalism and usher in a new world run by and for the working class. Crucial to this goal is the building of the communist PLP. Join us and march on May Day!