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EDITORIAL
Call It What It Is:
Preparation for War

Aug 9, 2025

The U.S. military budget is just over one trillion dollars for the current year. That trillion dollars is more than all the military spending of the next 12 countries put together. Who is the enemy? All 12 of those countries?

Of course, the class that controls this country and its politicians pretend that the money is being spent on “defense.”

"Defense"? Was this country invaded? No, but in every year since the end of World War II, U.S. troops have invaded other countries. Here are only some well-known wars: Korea, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia. There are many more.

Why so many people killed all over the world? Why so many U.S. troops ground up on battlefields far from their home?

Those wars were carried out to impose a world order dominated by U.S. imperialism.

Since the end of World War II, the U.S. banking system has benefitted from a dollar imposed on the rest of the world. American corporations dominated the world’s economic networks. They invested in far-flung mines, plantations and factories. They sucked up material wealth from labor performed for low wages under deadly conditions around the world.

None of this happened just because some god ordained it. This world order was prepared for by World War II. It was kept in place ever since by never-ending U.S. military force.

The U.S. military has bases all over the world—army, navy and air force bases in 170 different countries. No other country has even a dozen bases in other countries. The U.S. has naval task forces, floating bases in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Pacific Ocean, in the Indian Ocean, in the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, not to mention the Arctic Ocean.

All those U.S. bases are part of an interlocking system that imposes control over most of the world for the benefit of greater profit to U.S. corporations.

None of that is new.

But today, something is different. Today, the world is sitting on the brink of a global war, that is, a war that will envelope the whole world in the fighting before it’s over.

We can already see the outlines of that war in the tariffs and trade wars the U.S. has been trying to impose on the rest of the world.

Tariffs and trade wars—these are capitalism’s answer to crisis. Ever since the collapse of the world’s monetary system in 1971, the capitalist world has been living through one financial crisis after another, even in the U.S. The result is a vicious competition between all the world’s corporations, backed up by governments of all the countries—a competition in which each of them tries to gobble up wealth someone else controls.

So today it is tariffs and trade wars, which will drive down the standard of living of workers everywhere. Tomorrow it will be a shooting war. It’s how earlier global wars started.

But no one should believe that the war being prepared for in front of our eyes will be just like previous ones. As horrifying as World War II was, the next one will be infinitely worse. The technology of war has become more deadly. And it has shrunk the world. No longer are there spaces, surrounded by oceans, behind which civilians might escape the worst effects of war. Gaza is the picture of everyone’s future.

The answer to war—like the answer to all the other problems we face—rests on the capacity of the working class to use its position in the heart of the economy to upend the situation. The working class potentially has a power not only to defend its own standard of living. It could tear up the system that causes all the problems, war included. And workers, who produce everything, could go on to organize a collective, decent life for all people.