From the earliest days of my Presidency, I have argued that our world is at an inflection point. How we respond to the tremendous challenges and the unprecedented opportunities we face today will determine the direction of our world and impact the security and prosperity of the American people for generations to come.
—Joe Biden, October 12, 2022

Biden has not just been arguing this. He and the core of the U.S. capitalist-imperialist ruling class he heads have been making aggressive, multidimensional preparations to position and prepare the U.S. and its imperialist allies to wage and win a struggle for global dominance with their imperialist rivals, particularly China and Russia. Biden calls this inter-imperialist contention “a contest for the future of our world.”

The preparations have economic, political, technical, and military dimensions. They include molding public opinion, both among the “politically literate and attuned” section of people, and among broad sections of the population, to support the U.S. effort.

Sharpening Contention

Over this year, among other things:

• The U.S. has armed Ukraine with over $19 billion (and climbing) worth of modern military equipment, using the Ukrainians to wage a proxy war against the U.S.'s Russian rivals;
• Biden broke his 2020 campaign pledge and signed off on a “National Defense Strategy” that includes keeping the option open for U.S. “first use” of nuclear weapons;
• Democrats and Republicans alike approved providing $53 billion for the U.S.-based research, development, and production of the microchips vital to all computer systems, including those used in virtually all the U.S. arsenal of high-tech weaponry—a move designed to secure a strategic necessity of the U.S. military by building plants to manufacture chips in Arizona, Texas, and Ohio.

Warnings of “Nuclear Armageddon” Coupled with Dangerous Provocations

Biden has openly spoken of the possibility of a nuclear “Armageddon”—an “end of the world” scenario—developing out of the war in Ukraine. This past week, Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO (the U.S.-led military coalition) warned that the war in Ukraine could at any moment “become a full-fledged war that spreads into a major war between NATO and Russia.”

In August, leading Democrat Nancy Pelosi made a highly provocative trip to the island of Taiwan, which the Chinese government has long considered part of China. Pelosi wrote that her visit was an “unequivocal statement that America stands with Taiwan, our democratic partner....” (In other words, she was strongly implying that the U.S. stands against China and its long-standing claims of sovereignty over the strategically crucial island of Taiwan.) In the wake of her trip, air, naval, and cyber military operations by both the U.S. and China reached their highest level in 35 years. ¹  And Biden has repeated no less than three times in recent months that the U.S. would militarily stand with Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion—a new and much more aggressive position for the U.S.

Creating Public Opinion—for Imperialist War

The U.S. capitalist-imperialist ruling class, and their various ideological representatives in the government and media, have been conditioning people to expect and be ready for a war unlike any other in human history, a war with nuclear weapons that could be fought in part on U.S. soil, and to shape how people look at and think about developments and conflicts like those mentioned above. Most of all, they need to get people to see U.S. imperialism’s interests as their interests.

In recent months, articles and op-eds have appeared in publications aimed at intellectuals and middle-class people generally, such as The Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. From different angles, they present a dire situation, in urgent need of correction if America is to prevail. An Atlantic article, “How to Stop the Next World War—A strategy to restore America’s military deterrence” by the former CEO of Alphabet (parent company of Google) and a former U.S. deputy secretary of defense states, “[T]he likelihood of war between the world’s great powers—and the devastation such a war could wreak—will increase significantly this decade. The best way to deter such a war is for the U.S. military to restore its technological superiority over potential adversaries. … Our window of opportunity is quickly closing.”  

And for those people who don’t subscribe to The Atlantic or the New Yorker—there’s always the possibility they’ll watch a football or basketball game on TV. Disgusting, flag-waving messages about “supporting the troops” make it into almost every “commercial break” during these sporting events. People who actually attend football games are often subjected to a flyover of fighter jets, and a gigantic U.S. flag spreads out over the entire field while the national anthem plays. Many include an “honor guard” from some branch of the military marching out while everyone in the stadium or arena is supposed to stand and applaud them.

All of this is aimed at preparing people to “support the troops,” no matter what they are called upon to do, and back the imperialists in committing unspeakable crimes against humanity—not in the distant future but in the here and now.

Prepare the Ground, Prepare the People, Prepare the Vanguard—for REVOLUTION!

This shit is very real, and people need to face up to it. What’s underway is not a battle between “democracy and autocracy” as Biden, Pelosi, Stoltenberg, and countless media hacks claim. It is an acute expression of imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and its allies against both Russian and Chinese imperialism, that shows every sign it could escalate into all-out war in the period ahead.

An all-consuming clash between these rivals could quickly involve the use of nuclear weapons, and endanger the lives of hundreds of millions, even billions, of human beings. It would literally threaten all life on this planet. That’s not just because they are crazy, bloodthirsty, utterly ruthless people who don’t give a damn about you or anyone else (although they are all that).

It’s because they concentrate and represent a system—capitalism-imperialism—whose “bottom line” compulsion is expand or die. And right now, they can only maintain and expand their empires by defeating and subduing their imperialist rivals. Beneath the words about “defending democracy” this will be a fight over which imperialist power gets the lion’s share of grinding, murderous exploitation of the workers and peasants of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

As Bob Avakian said in his Interviews on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show:

We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to dominate the world and to determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible.