Capitalist wars of aggression threaten nuclear use. Only the alt can solve.

Nuclear weapons early on became entwined with the pursuit of US imperial policy and remain there. US presidents have routinely expressed moral abhorrence of nuclear weapons privately. Eisenhower told a naval aide that “overkill … frighten[ed] the devil out of me”; Kennedy muttered to Dean Rusk, “and we call ourselves the human race” after a particularly nightmarish briefing; and Reagan even agreed with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 that, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” However, they never publicly renounced the “all-out” option or stopped planning for it. None said “A nuclear war must never be threatened, or prepared for.” Such preparation continued because nuclear weapons became central to imperialism from the mid-twentieth century onwards. That they “continuously benefitted our military-industrial-congressional complex” (Ellsberg Citation2017, 271, 324), not to mention a declining US economy ever more reliant on it, also helped.

Since US imperial policy predated the Cold War and survived it, the world did not march toward liberal capitalist prosperity under benign US “hegemony” with a peace dividend in its bank account after the Cold War. Rather, it entered an increasingly tense space bounded by growing pluripolarity thanks to US economic decline and rapid growth in China and some developing countries and increasing US military aggression in response. Beginning by bombing retreating soldiers and civilians in violation of international law and the Soviet-brokered peace in the Gulf war (Hudson Citation2018, 158–159; citing the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf), the US went on to wage a string of illegal wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and hybrid wars against other countries that sought autonomous forms of development unsuited to the interests of US and Western corporations. Today, this aggression has culminated in the New Cold Wars against Russia and China and has set off a new nuclear arms race even as declining US capacities become clear in Afghanistan and are about to become clear once again in the hybrid war against Russia over Ukraine.

It is, therefore, difficult to overstate the dangers of the current situation. In the original Cold War, the US and the USSR were comparatively stable and prosperous countries. Today US economic decline appears unstoppable and its drive to compensate for it militarily can only be more and more volatile and unstable, as the ignominious drawdown from Afghanistan and impending debacle over Ukraine show. In recent years, the US has also lost its historic technological lead as Russian and Chinese military modernisation programmes develop hypersonic missiles, some capable of delivering bombs at 27 times the speed of sound and evading US anti-ballistic missile systems (The Economist Citation2020; The Guardian Citation2019). On the other hand, China, though considerably less prosperous (per capita US GDP remains over 5 times higher than China’s), is vastly more stable. It is also on the rise, increasingly influential over more and more US victims and even allies and determined to ensure its own defence and aid allies amid ever-louder US sabre-rattling. This only unsettles the US more. The pandemic and the war over Ukraine have only exacerbated this divergence, with the US’s shambolic and economically destructive responses and deepening economic and political disarray contrasting ever more sharply with China’s competence, resumption of economic growth and adherence to international norms making it a far superior model and partner to other countries (Desai Citation2020b). For the first time in the history of capitalism, a non-capitalist country will be the leading state in the world, powering its growth and increasingly providing leadership (Desai Citation2020a, Citation2020b, Citation2020c).

The economically declining US is losing influence in strategically important zones such as the Middle East, the South China Sea, South Asia, the Korean Peninsula and even Central and Latin America. It is also eroding the relative post-war unity of the core capitalist powers and reducing US and Western capacity for domination. With Iran and Russia, for instance, Continental Western European countries wish to take a more cooperative stance than the US. Japan and South Korea as well as the European Union (EU) have recently concluded important trade and investment treaties with China much to US chagrin. Moreover, while other core capitalist powers are increasingly acting independently to subordinate certain parts of the Third World—such as Canada in Latin America and France in Africa—their options are narrower as productive power spreads and they face rival powers. Finally, with China’s superior economic performance increasing its attractiveness as a model and partner for other countries and continuing US economic decline forcing the US to operate with ever fewer economic carrots and ever more military and financial sticks, more and more countries will be able and willing to defy the US and its corporations. The dangers of not accepting the peaceful co-existence of pluripolarity can only grow.

The threat of nuclear weapons will only fade, and a true dawn of nuclear arms control and elimination will only lighten the horizon, if one or both of two possibilities are realised. Either transformation in US politics leads the US to forsake, or the diminution of its power on the world stage forces it to relinquish, its obsession for exercising an impossible domination over the ever more pluripolar world and for keeping it capitalist against the currents of history. In effect, the real question is whether the US, and the West, are willing to accept with equanimity, if not enthusiasm, the co-existence of different socio-economic systems, that is, the world’s growing pluripolarity. Will the ongoing turmoil in US politics, of which Trump and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were both equal and opposite symptoms, issue in a political force capable of giving up that drive for world primacy based on a more realistic assessment of US interests and capabilities, not to mention a commitment to popular rather than corporate well-being? Will the acceleration of US relative decline amid the pandemic administer a dose of geopolitical economic reality to US leaders? Can secondary capitalist powers, such as Germany and Japan, ally with those that have acquired nuclear weapons defensively, chiefly China, and NNWSs, to demand that the weapon states adopt serious disarmament measures—above all the US but also Israel? Equally importantly, can a popular movement for disarmament arise with a sophisticated understanding of the real drivers of the nuclear arms race, those rooted in capitalist imperialism and the US drive for domination? These are the questions we are left with.