Labour governments have always had right wing, anti-working class foreign policy, and Blair’s New Labour is no different.
The new cosy world of "partnership" has in Blair’s eyes eliminated conflict between worker and employer. So in theory whatever the employers want as a foreign policy or military alliance must also be endorsed by the workers and their representatives.
Unfortunately for Mr Blair his rhetoric has not eliminated the bitter conflict of competition between different sections of employers - at home or abroad.
Indeed it is in the name of this competition that Blair has become the most hawkish advocate of increased "flexibility" of labour - a polite word for the "neo-liberal" policies at the centre of the drive towards globalisation. "Flexibility" means acceptance of low pay, minimal welfare provision, poor working conditions and chronic insecurity - to keep prices low enough to secure increased market share.
This contradiction between partnership and competition raises a potential problem even for the most die-hard of class collaborators. With so many powerful bosses to form partnerships with, what happens when they fall out among themselves? Where the interests of "British" employers clash with those of "foreign" employers, it would appear that the trade union and labour movement - which has obligingly identified its interests as identical to the "British" employers - should line up alongside them, and help them fight it out.
But many of the "British" employers with whom right wing union leaders are most eager to partner up are also "foreign" employers - whether they be Japanese, Korean, French, German or American.
Does "partnership" between Rover workers and their German bosses in BMW mean that they must hope to undercut and defeat Jaguar workers and their American Ford owners?
The very question shows how absurd is Blair’s idea of partnership. The only people to gain from this notion are the employers, who are able to push home the advantage and pocket the profits, untroubled by even the vaguest threat of resistance from union leaders.
The confusion of this approach is bad enough when it comes to the day to day economic struggles over pay and conditions in industry: but it becomes even more dramatic on the question of international military conflict.
Imperialist countries like the USA, Japan, Britain, and other EU countries, preserve the trappings of democracy and relative prosperity for their "own" workers at home at the expense of the exploitation, oppression and misery of countless millions of workers and peasants in dependent economies throughout the world. Their ruling classes, and the military machine created to defend them, have no intention of allowing that relationship of forces to alter.
Whatever the rhetoric, the imperialist ruling classes fight wars - whether against Hitler, Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic - not to liberate the oppressed but to strengthen their own control, extend their own markets, preserve their access to oil and other raw materials, and improve the conditions for exploitation.
Break from imperialist alliances
Throughout most of this century Labour politicians have in essence shared Blair’s view that their job is to act as the most loyal recruiting sergeants for the armed adventures of the British ruling class. Labour and trade union leaders not only slavishly supported their "own" imperialists in wars against "foreign" imperialism in two world wars, but in government they resorted without compunction to armed force to repress colonial liberation struggles.
Labour’s extreme right wing Foreign Secretary in 1945, former TGWU leader Ernest Bevin, was a key advocate of the British nuclear weapons programme, and an architect of the Cold War NATO alliance, now presided over by the equally right wing Lord Robertson of Kosovo.
Today NATO no longer serves as a focus for the Cold War: many of the former Warsaw Pact countries it once opposed are now members of NATO. What was once the orchestrator of the Warsaw Pact, the feared superpower of the Soviet Union, is now the wilting, economically dislocated Russian Federation, whose main use of military force has been in the repression of autonomous national revolts such as Chechnya. Although Russia retains a rusting and increasingly dangerous nuclear arsenal, not even the most crazed anti-communist could now argue that there now is a threat of Russian tanks invading Western Europe. Many socialists and others argued throughout the Cold War that there never was any real threat to the West from a Stalinist bureaucracy committed to "peaceful coexistence" and building "socialism in one country".
In the absence of even the pretence of a major threat to counter, NATO - like the latest notion of an EU "rapid defence force" - represents a mechanism for reinforcing the rule and domination of imperialist governments and the capitalist system of exploitation. It remains a thoroughly reactionary alliance, whose existence and continued arsenal of nuclear weapons acts as a provocation and an excuse for Russia and other countries to maintain their own nuclear capability.
The world’s leading imperialist country, the USA, while pressing forward with a massive armaments programme under the guise of "fighting Communism" has been repeatedly involved in wars to secure its military and political dominance since 1945. These include the savage slaughter of the Korean war; numerous interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean; prolonged war in Vietnam Cambodia and Laos; a failed intervention in Somalia; and more recently the Gulf War and the wars in the Balkans.
Ten years after the end of the Gulf War, New Labour is still shamefully participating alongside the US in the illegal bombing of Iraq. According to official UN figures this has already killed well over 100 civilians, and injured countless more. Like the other US interventions, this is not about securing rights for Iraqi workers, but crushing the resistance of Saddam and forcing his regime to market oil on terms acceptable to western - and especially the US - governments.
This is all given new content with the advent of the new Bush administration, which has given the Star Wars 2 project increasing prominence. The Secretary of State and former Pentagon Joint Chief of Staff General Colin Powell, who led the 1990 war against Iraq, lost no time in proclaiming that the Bush team would press forward with its campaign pledges to construct a so-called "National Missile Defence System" - in reality a multi-billion-dollar project designed to give the United States a first-strike nuclear capacity. The first international trip of the new administration was the visit of new Defence Secretary Rumsfeld to Munich on February 3 to a European Defence conference to attempt get the support of other leading politicians.
Russia is protesting as the plans would be a clear breach of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missiles Treaty (ABM) signed with the USSR. Secretary of the Russian Security Council Sergei Ivanov, speaking at the Munich conference, argued that "destruction of the ABM Treaty will… create prerequisites for a new arms race, including one in outer space". China has also made clear its opposition: geographically China is under greater threat both from NMD itself and the subsequent arms race in the Indian sub-continent.
India has used these developments to carry out a test on January 17 of what it claims is an improved version of its Agni Two missile. This is an intermediate ballistic missile capable of reaching all of Pakistan and much of China. Given the fact that Pakistan also has nuclear capability and carried out its own tests in retaliation to the previous Indian salvo, the situation in the sub-continent looks precarious. At the same time the US is hypocritically claiming that nuclear proliferation is one of the justifications for NMD.
The strongest European doubts have been voiced by French President Chirac, who appears to be following the Russian line, while Germany has a somewhat ambivalent attitude. Blair, under some pressure because US bases in Britain will be central to the project, has refused to make any comment or allow any parliamentary debate until there is a formal request from the Americans to use the sites in Britain. Clinton’s military experts had already begun work, including some dramatic publicised failures, on a lesser version of the project, designed to both boost the falling U.S. corporate profit rates and to match the massive arms expenditures of imperialist competitors in Europe and Japan.
This National Missile Defence system is designed to increase the USA’s military profile and turn the clock back on the limited arms reduction treaties between the US and Russia. Most scientists believe that no real "defence" system can be constructed against a multiple nuclear warhead attack. But as in decades past, today’s military experts calculate "nuclear victory" not in terms of zero losses to the United States. The insane logic of nuclear war is instead based on "acceptable losses", a term that includes the incineration of tens of millions of Americans, provided the ’enemy’ is totally devastated while the U.S. retains the capacity to rise from the ashes and continue!
Socialists are for the abolition of NATO, against any European army, and for further major cuts in military spending. But we are also in favour of scrapping the existing armed forces in every country.
The experience of the development in the US since 1941 of the massively powerful "military-industrial complex", which fuelled the Cold War and increasingly exerted its control over politicians and presidents, underlines the fact that the armed forces represent the mailed fist of the capitalist state machine.
The defence of a workers’ state cannot be left to depend upon the uncertain loyalties of an officer corps largely drawn from the ruling elite, and an army schooled to obey their orders and sworn to allegiance to the monarchy and the capitalist state. Instead socialists must look to the mobilisation - when necessary - of a mass workers’ militia, democratically controlled, and armed to fight external aggression, not to repress workers at home.
And we are also against the proliferation of arms dealing, which has continued in Britain under New Labour, with arms being sold to many unsavoury regimes around the world.
The revelation early in 2001 of the development of a British equivalent to the "thermobaric" weaponry, used to deadly effect by the Russians against Chechen rebels in Grozny, is just the latest affront from an industry which is a leading source of death, pollution, corruption and repression on a world scale.
Socialists will bring this grisly trade to a halt, stop the continued hefty government subsidies to the arms trade, open the books of the arms dealers to reveal the scope of British involvement in scandals around the world, and set up urgent working parties of trade unionists and engineering experts on how to convert the existing arms factories to peaceful and useful production.