By CAIO BUGIATO*
Are we close to World War III?
1.
What are the reasons and when did the two major confrontations in current international politics begin? What is the relationship between them? A person who gets his information from the Western press, whether through newspapers, radio, television and the internet/social media, could answer that the war in Eastern Europe began with the Russian state's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He would also answer that the war in the Middle East began with the Hamas terrorist attack on the State of Israel in October 2023.
Furthermore, if one were to attempt to establish a connection between the two conflicts, one could answer that there is no connection, except that the aggressors – the Russian state and Hamas – are both barbaric, violent institutions devoid of the rationality typical of the West (not necessarily in these words). Thus, the aim of this brief article is to provide an alternative answer to the questions raised above.
The US state and ruling class were the main creators of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after the end of the Second World War. Together with the European states and ruling classes (the junior partners), they formed what Nicos Poulantzas called the imperialist chain, whose military arm is NATO itself. The objective of this organization was clear from its inception: the destruction of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
More than a military alliance, NATO has established itself as a long-lasting international political-military organization that accompanies the expansion of Western capitalism and promotes its bourgeois principles. NATO has expanded enormously, from 12 to 32 countries since its creation, always towards the borders of Russia, which would be the main state to be incorporated/neutralized. The Organization does not tolerate autonomous development projects of national capitalism, governments not aligned with the West, independent foreign policies and alternative projects to the current neoliberal capitalism.
After a strategic victory against the USSR, which led to its end in the 1990s, and a lack of definition of who would then be its enemy (terrorism was chosen for a time), the imperialist chain and NATO began to face non-aligned states and governments (contending states) in the 90st century, such as Libya, Syria, Iran, Russia and China. They came up against the government of Vladimir Putin, his autonomous capitalist project and his bold foreign policy towards Eurasia. The Putin government's interpretation is that the expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe and the possible subordinate incorporation of Russia into the imperialist chain would lead the Russians to misfortunes similar to the domination that the US and Europeans exercise in peripheral states (and had the experience of the Yeltsin government in the XNUMXs to prove this).
The different types of foreign interventions, regime change, colorful coups, etc., set off the Russian alert. In 2022, the Putin government responded with a military operation to annex territory in Ukraine, the country where one of the colorful coups took place, which was moving into NATO's orbit and which was harassing the Russian population on its territory. From an immediate and territorial point of view, Russia is the aggressor in this war. From a historical and political point of view, the imperialist chain and NATO are the reasons for this war.
2.
The relationship between the imperialist chain and the current war in the Middle East is similar. The State of Israel was conceived by the Zionist political-ideological movement, founded by Theodor Herzl at the end of the 19th century, whose foundations are based on supremacist, racist and colonialist concepts. At the same time, the migration of Jews from the Middle East to the West – a long process marked by anti-Semitism – found places in Western Europe and later in the United States where they partly formed the ruling class.
In England, the Zionists received assistance from imperialism to establish themselves in Palestine and begin a violent process of colonization during the British Mandate in Palestine between the First and Second World Wars. British imperialism was the vector for the establishment of a colonizing political unit in the Middle East, which gave rise to the State of Israel. Faced with conflicts between colonizers and resistance in the region, the British passed the problem on to the United Nations, which, under pressure from the Zionists and the United States, created the State of Israel by decree in 1948, after the Holocaust.
From then on, the imperialist chain led by the US state and ruling class was the great sponsor of Israeli colonialism. The Zionists' militancy as the ruling class in the US is carried out by Jewish organizations that pressure state institutions to finance Israel: this state has received the most US military aid in history. At the UN, the US and Israel have always voted together in favor of sanctions that destroy national economies; they even voted not to condemn the apartheid in South Africa.
On the other side of the world, Israel fulfilled the role of neutralizing and disrupting the nationalist projects of the Arab states and pan-Arabism, which were not aligned with Washington, and of preventing these countries from getting closer to the USSR, in addition to interfering in favor of the West in strategic routes and natural resources in the region. The armed forces, diplomacy and intelligence of the State of Israel were sponsored by the imperialist chain in its expansionist endeavor in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, the Six-Day War of 1967, the Yom kippur in 1973, among others, and now in the genocide in Gaza and the colonial annexation in Syria.
From an immediate perspective, the current war in the Middle East began with the aggression of the Palestinian resistance, Hamas, in October 2023. From a historical, territorial and political perspective, the war that has been going on for decades is perpetrated by the colonizing state of Israel.
By now it should be clear – and it has been obvious to many analysts for some time – that the engine of wars is the US-led imperialist chain; its relationship with the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East has been outlined above. In more concrete and current facts, the US (along with the Europeans) is the largest provider of military and economic aid to the Ukrainian state, and President Joe Biden recently authorized the Ukrainian armed forces to use US long-range weapons to strike deep into Russian territory.
The US has sent part of its naval war squadron to the coast of Israel to support the Zionists. And as we write, US armed forces are attacking Yemen, a country where armed groups that oppose Israeli colonialism are based. Perhaps Syria is the junction of the two fronts explained here: a contending state – with Russian support – on one side occupied by the imperialist chain, on the other swallowed up by Israeli colonialism, in its Greater Israel project.
3.
Given this situation, another question that arises is: are we close to the Third World War? Let's look at this in quantitative terms:
Table – Comparison between the wars
| Warring States in WWII | States in current confrontations | |
| 1 | Germany (Axis) | Albania (NATO) |
| 2 | Italy (Axis) | Germany (NATO) |
| 3 | Japan (Axis) | Belgium (NATO) |
| 4 | Bulgaria (Axis support) | Bulgaria (NATO) |
| 5 | Hungary (support for the Axis) | Canada (NATO) |
| 6 | Romania (Axis support) | Croatia (NATO) |
| 7 | Slovakia (support for the Axis) | Denmark (NATO) |
| 8 | United Kingdom (Allies) | Slovakia (NATO) |
| 9 | Canada (Allies) | Slovenia (NATO) |
| 10 | Australia (Allies) | Spain (NATO) |
| 11 | New Zealand (Allies) | United States (NATO) |
| 12 | South Africa (Allies) | Estonia (NATO) |
| 13 | Brazil (Allies) | Finland (NATO) |
| 14 | USA (Allies) | France (NATO) |
| 15 | USSR (Allies) | Greece (NATO) |
| 16 | Argentina (support to the Allies) | Hungary (NATO) |
| 17 | Bolivia (support to the Allies) | Iceland (NATO) |
| 18 | Chile (support to the Allies) | Italy (NATO) |
| 19 | Colombia (support to the Allies) | Latvia (NATO) |
| 20 | Costa Rica (support to the Allies) | Lithuania (NATO) |
| 21 | Cuba (support for the Allies) | Luxembourg (NATO) |
| 22 | Dominican Republic (support to the Allies) | North Macedonia (NATO) |
| 23 | Ecuador (support to the Allies) | Montenegro (NATO) |
| 24 | Egypt (support to the Allies) | Norway (NATO) |
| 25 | El Salvador (support to the Allies) | Netherlands (NATO) |
| 26 | Guatemala (support to the Allies) | Poland (NATO) |
| 27 | Haiti (support to the Allies) | Portugal (NATO) |
| 28 | Honduras (support to the Allies) | United Kingdom (NATO) |
| 29 | Iraq (support to the Allies) | Romania (NATO) |
| 30 | Lebanon (support to the Allies) | Sweden (NATO) |
| 31 | Liberia (support to the Allies) | Czechia (NATO) |
| 32 | Mexico (support to the Allies) | Türkiye (NATO) |
| 33 | Mongolia (support to the Allies) | Ucrania |
| 34 | Nicaragua (support to the Allies) | Russia |
| 35 | Panama (support to the Allies) | Israel |
| 36 | Paraguay (support to the Allies) | Gaza |
| 37 | Peru (support to the Allies) | Lebanon |
| 38 | Saudi Arabia (support to Allies) | Síria |
| 39 | Türkiye (support to the Allies) | Yemen |
| 40 | Uruguay (support to the Allies) | Iran |
| 41 | Venezuela (support to the Allies) | |
| 42 | China (at war with Japan since 1931) |
In the left column are the Axis states and supporters and the Allied states and supporters, the protagonists of the Second World War. These are states that formally/diplomatically declared war. We excluded from this column the occupied or annexed states, as they were subjected to belligerent states. In total, there are 42 states. In the right column are the NATO states – the group of countries responsible for the war in Eastern Europe –, Ukraine and Russia – direct belligerents –, the colonialist state of Israel and the countries attacked by it. In total, there are 40 states. All of this without counting the uprisings in the African Sahel and the tensions involving China.
In qualitative terms, let us think like Friedrich Engels, one of the greatest scholars of war. Engels relates the mode of production to a state's capacity for war. That is, the development of productive forces is related to the way of fighting on the battlefield. Thus, he explains that states with smaller populations and armed forces, but with a higher development of productive forces, were superior and victorious on the battlefield.
This partly explains the military triumphs of England and France around the world in the 40th century, in relation to the Tsarist army, for example. In this sense, today's wars go beyond platoons of soldiers stationed in trenches and/or in conflict on the battlefield. The confrontation also involves informational, electronic, and cybernetic resources; hacker attacks, drones, and artificial intelligence. These are wars that mix the traditional with the invisible, between XNUMX countries on two continents, which have escalated day by day. [I]
* Caio Bugiato is a professor of Political Science and International Relations at UFRRJ and in the Postgraduate Program in International Relations at UFABC.
Note
[I] This short article is a text developed and adapted from our research presentation at the seminar. Political crisis, the new right, the State and class conflicts in Brazil, at UNICAMP in December 2024. The seminar was the closing event of the research activities of the group Neoliberalism and Social Classes in Brazil. With funding from CNPq, the group carried out research involving the theme of the seminar title, as well as the international context. On the occasion, we also paid tribute to Professor Armando Boito Júnior, who retired and is a great intellectual reference for us. I would like to thank Ana Penido, whose data and information brought to the event helped to enrich this article.
