A Socialist viewpoint of the US administration's goals over the next four years...
“A decade of war is now ending,” President Barack Obama told Americans in his second inaugural address delivered little more than two weeks ago in Washington.
Speaking Saturday at the annual Munich Security Conference, Vice President Joseph Biden set the record straight: not only is this decade-long exercise in US militarism not ended, it is about to erupt in a whole number of new areas across the globe, threatening the lives of countless millions of people.
Both Washington and the powers of “Old Europe” appeared intoxicated with the prospects of using military power to offset economic decline and forcibly lay hold of geo-strategically vital territories, resources and markets.
In Munich, Biden’s speech set the bellicose tone for the security conference. Dispensing with rhetoric about the tide of war receding, the American vice president signaled that US imperialism is gearing up for battle in every corner of the planet.
Biden made a significant statement at the outset of his meandering address, linking the sweeping austerity measures that the Obama administration and Congress are preparing to implement with the explosive growth of militarism abroad. Referring to “difficult but critical steps” that the US administration is taking in the wake of “the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression,” the American vice president declared that the wave of cutbacks at home were necessary to ensure Washington’s ability to meet “our strategic obligations to the rest of the world.” In other words, the immense costs of US militarism will be placed directly on the backs of the American working class.
Biden delivered thinly veiled threats to both Russia and China, warning Moscow that Washington would respect no “sphere of influence” in the former Soviet republics, and declaring that Beijing had better not “engage in anything remotely approaching military competition with the United States.”
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