U.S. Expands Its Military Presence

Nov 7, 2022

The U.S. government has been using the war in Ukraine as a pretext to expand its military presence in Europe. Since February, the U.S. government has sent an additional 20,000 troops into Europe. The U.S. now has over 100,000 troops stationed in Europe, which is close to the total number of troops that Russia used to invade Ukraine.

In June, the U.S. government announced plans to set up a permanent military base in Poland. The U.S. Army will add another brigade in Romania and increase the number of troops in the Baltic countries bordering Russia. The U.S. Air Force will deploy two squadrons of F-35 fighter planes in Britain and station more air defense units in Germany and Italy. The U.S. Navy will increase the number of destroyers stationed in Spain.

The U.S. government has also pushed the other countries in NATO to expand their military forces. Today U.S. troops are part of the 2 million troops that NATO countries have stationed in Europe, far outnumbering Russian military forces. Tens of thousands of these troops are stationed in eastern Europe, threatening Russia directly.

All of the recent military moves by the U.S. government are part of a strategy, outlined in a recent Pentagon document called the National Defense Strategy. It was about planning for possible future wars, mainly focused on Russia and China.

The U.S. government is already using Ukraine as a proxy to fight a war against Russia. Since Putin ordered a brutal invasion of Ukraine in response to years of increasingly tight NATO encirclement of Russia, the U.S. government has been supplying the Ukrainian government with massive military aid and training Ukrainian troops. The U.S. has been providing battlefield intelligence to Ukraine and has even helped to plan their military operations.

Today the U.S. government wages war against Russia, with Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, as well as the Russian population, paying the price. Tomorrow, many more millions of people around the world would pay the price of a bigger war, a world war, that the U.S. government is already planning for.

Over the last hundred years, U.S. capitalism has expanded to envelop the world, with only a few nations remaining not completely under control. This expansion has been accomplished with a great deal of military force, sometimes directly in wars, other times through proxies like Ukraine, and sometimes by the threat of war. Everywhere, this military-backed expansion of U.S. capitalism has been in the interests of the U.S. capitalist class, not the workers here who provide the troops, or the workers in other countries those troops are sent to repress.

Today the U.S. military is making preparations for the next major war, threatening Russia, China, Iran, and in the process, all of humanity. The next war will no more be in the interests of the population than the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. War after war has shown that, as long as the capitalist class remains in power, it will use whatever military force it can to expand the part of the world it can profit from—and consequences be damned.