Amid the campaigning underway for the May 3 federal election, the entire Australian political and media establishment has nothing to say about revelations in the New York Times (NYT) that the US and NATO are directly and intimately involved in waging war against Russia in Ukraine.
Labor, the Coalition and the Greens all support the criminal US-led war and knowingly propagate the lies used to justify it.
The NYT article of March 31, headlined, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” lifted the lid on the US and NATO involvement, not only in arming Ukraine and training its troops in the war against Russia, but in planning and conducting operations at every level.
The World Socialist Web Site, which has systematically exposed US deceit about the war in Ukraine, explained that the NYT article was “an admission that the United States waged, and is waging, an undeclared, unauthorized and illegal war against Russia. It makes clear that American officers, some deployed inside Ukraine, have been selecting targets for attack and authorizing individual strikes, making them, for all intents and purposes, combatants.”
As the NYT article stated: “Each morning, U.S. and Ukrainian military officers set targeting priorities—Russian units, pieces of equipment or infrastructure. American and coalition intelligence officers searched satellite imagery, radio emissions and intercepted communications to find Russian positions. Task Force Dragon then gave the Ukrainians the coordinates so they could shoot at them.”
Moreover, despite repeated US declarations to the contrary, an undisclosed number of active-duty US troops were deployed inside Ukraine. “Time and again, the Biden administration authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited. American military advisers were dispatched to Kyiv and later allowed to travel closer to the fighting,” the Times reported. And the British military “had placed small teams of officers in the country after the invasion.”
In other words, from the outset, the conflict in the Ukraine was not a war of self-defence or a proxy war. Having deliberately provoked the Russian invasion in 2022, the US and its allies have been and are waging an imperialist war with the aim of subjugating Russia and seizing its vast natural resources in preparation for war against China—regarded as the chief threat to American global hegemony.
In publishing the article, the New York Times did not bother to explain the obvious contradiction between what it revealed and the newspaper’s role as a conduit for Washington’s shameless propaganda. The corporate media in the US and internationally, including in Australia, has maintained a universal guilty silence on the NYT revelations.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his senior cabinet ministers were undoubtedly fully briefed about the extent of US military involvement as the Labor government provided military trainers and more than $1.5 billion in aid, mostly offensive weaponry.
Likewise, Opposition leader Peter Dutton, who was defence minister in the Liberal-National Coalition government when the Ukraine war erupted in February 2022, was and is no doubt also well aware of the US war planning.
The silence on the NYT article extends to the Greens who have given their full-throated support to the US-led war in Ukraine, along with the coterie of pseudo-left groups, such as Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance, which have backed the fascistic Ukrainian regime and the war against Russia.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is the only party in the Australian election campaign that is warning that the war in Ukraine, along with US-backed Israeli genocide in the Middle East and advanced US preparations for war against China, are all part of a rapid and dangerous descent into world war.
While there was nothing progressive about the 2022 Russian invasion carried out in the interests of Russian capitalism and its oligarchs, it was not “unprovoked.” It followed decades of NATO encroachment into Eastern Europe and a US-backed 2014 coup in Ukraine that ousted the democratically elected, Russian-aligned government of Viktor Yanukovych.
The NYT article also brings into sharper focus the escalating US-led war drive against China. The criminal modus operandi of US imperialism in Asia is remarkably similar to the prelude to its war in Europe. Taiwan is being cast in the role of Ukraine and very deliberate efforts are being made by the US to goad China into invading the island.
Just as the US-NATO tore up its promise in the 1990s not to extend NATO into Eastern Europe, so Washington has all but dispensed with the One China policy that has formed the basis for US-China relations since 1979. The One China policy acknowledges that Beijing is the legitimate government of all China including Taiwan. Increasingly Washington has been treating Taiwan as an independent country, knowing full well that China has repeatedly warned it would react forcefully to any formal declaration of independence.
Washington has been boosting contact between US and Taiwanese officials and the frequency of US warships provocatively passing through the narrow Taiwan Strait between the island and the Chinese mainland. According to the Council on Foreign Relations in the US, after Saudi Arabia, Israel and Japan, Taiwan has been the fourth largest purchaser of American arms between 1950 and 2022, much of it in recent years. The weaponry is increasingly offensive in character.
Drawing on lessons from the Ukraine war, the Pentagon has also been pressing Taiwan to adopt a “porcupine” strategy to turn the island into the potential scene of a military quagmire for the Chinese military, which would debilitate it and weaken the Chinese regime. In February 2022, Newsweek reported that US special forces were already permanently deployed on the ground in Taiwan as “trainers,” including significantly on Kinmen, a group of fortified Taiwanese-controlled islands just a few kilometres from the Chinese mainland.
Taiwan is just one focus of a massive US military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific that has taken place over more than a decade. Military alliances have been strengthened and extended, US military bases in Japan, South Korea and Guam have been restructured and hardened against attack, and joint war games throughout the region have intensified.
Just as Labor and the Coalition have backed the US-led wars in Europe and the Middle East to the hilt, so successive governments have transformed northern Australia into a giant platform for a US war against China, while completing the integration of the Australian military into the US war machine. Both are committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on nuclear submarines under the AUKUS pact, as well as long range missiles and other weaponry.
Amid the immense economic crisis of US capitalism, Trump has already signalled that the prime target in his economic war on the world is China. In the 1930s, trade war led to a world war in which millions were killed. A global conflict today between the major powers armed with nuclear weapons will lead to an immeasurably greater catastrophe for humanity.
Those who still hope that calmer heads will prevail should consider the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives that have been squandered in pursuit of US imperialism’s war aims in Europe. Or the tens of thousands of Palestinians—men, women and children; aid workers, doctors, journalists and countless unarmed civilians—slaughtered by Israeli forces, armed and supported by the US and its allies, including Australia.
The wars underway and the plunge towards a global conflict can only be halted by the international working class united on a socialist program to abolish the root cause of war—capitalism and its reactionary division of the world into rival nation states. The SEP and its sister parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International fight for that revolutionary perspective. Support our election campaign! Vote for our candidates! Join and build our party!
Authorised by Cheryl Crisp for the Socialist Equality Party, Level 1/457-459 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, NSW, 2010, Australia.