"War is the continuation of politics by other means." - Carl von Clausewitz, 1873

This has been true ever since the rise of exploiting ruling classes. The whole premise of their being is military force. They first used it to claim as their private property society's means of production and to enslave and exploit the masses of producers.

Ever since then the exploiters have lived by war. Their unrelenting need to expand their wealth and military power, or be conquered, eliminated or displaced by more powerful rivals, drives them to an unending string of wars.

But history is also punctuated by the rulers' wars against the oppressed masses whenever they dared to rise up.  And the oppressed masses inevitably rise up, leading to war against their oppressors.

In modern history, the capitalist rulers' fight for profits and empire has scourged humanity with two world wars. But, the working class in Russia made a revolution during the first world war, and the Chinese masses made another shortly after the second.

War in the Age of Nuclear Weapons?

Many in the world believe that war among the major imperialists is not possible anymore because of nuclear weapons. This view has characterized the thinking of many US military and civilian strategists. However, leading US imperialists seem to be struggling to debunk this idea.

Stratfor, an influential US rulers' think tank, recently published an article saying that "since the end of the Cold War, there has been an assumption that conventional warfare" among peers (US, Russia, China, Germany, etc.) "seemed obsolete."

But, it warns that "believing that any type of warfare has become obsolete is likely to be in error. Ukraine drove this lesson home."  Recent events "point to some realities," specifically that "future crises might well lead to conventional war, nuclear weapons notwithstanding.

"Ukraine reminds us that peer-to-peer conflict is not inconceivable, and that a strategy and defense policy built on that assumption has little basis in reality."

Some other US strategists seem to be arguing similarly. On April 4, the Brookings Institution, another influential US imperialist think tank, held an event based on a new book by Bruce Jones, a senior fellow at Brookings.

Jones's position is that "only American military power, and the willingness to use force if necessary can deter… serious threats" to the US in the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

All the other speakers endorsed his position. They worried that the US rulers seem unwilling to use military power and that "a very large number of Americans [don't] understand why it has to be used at all."

The Brookings event held President Obama responsible for persuading the US public, but complained that "he hasn't really gone to the American people and said, this is why it [Ukraine] matters and put it in the historical context" of similar events that led to two world wars.

Chinese and Russian Imperialists Modernizing Their Military

Stratfor states that the US will face peer-to-peer or even global conflicts in Eurasia. Putin understands this. Unlike Obama, he recently spent four hours on Russian public radio and television explaining the importance of Crimea and fielding questions about Russia's struggles against the west. He said that by 2020, 70% of Russia's army will be modernized.

Chinese rulers have also gotten the message. Recently they stated: "The evolution of the Ukrainian situation shows us clearly that in the international political arena, principles are decided by power." (Global Times, 3/3/14) They are also modernizing their army and building a blue-water navy.

We Workers Also Need to Prepare

We should never forget that our communist politics require an armed communist revolution, nuclear weapons or not. The US rulers have not won the soldiers, workers, students and the masses in general to fight and die for their profits and empire. This gives us a tremendous opportunity to mobilize them for communism. To win the world we need and deserve, we must wage an unrelenting class war on a worldwide scale to bury all capitalists-imperialists forever.