Pentagon Budget: A Blueprint for World War III

• Pentagon Budget: A Blueprint for World War III
  by Bill Van Auken, https://www.wsws.org/ , 4 Feb 2016 
  Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s speech Tuesday previewing the Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2017 spelled out Washington’s advanced preparations for military confrontations with the world’s second- and third-largest nuclear powers, Russia and China.
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  Delivered to the Economic Club of Washington, DC, an appreciative audience whose sponsors include the major arms manufacturers Boeing and Northrop Grumman as well as financial giants like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, the defense secretary’s speech presented an unabashed declaration of Washington’s intentions to assert its hegemony over the world’s markets and resources by whatever means necessary, up to and including a nuclear holocaust.
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  The presentation made by Carter, a longtime technocrat of America’s military industrial complex, provides a powerful vindication of the warnings made by the International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site that the deepening crisis of US and global capitalism is posing a real and growing danger of a Third World War.
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  The biggest increase proposed in the Pentagon budget is the quadrupling of funding for the US military buildup against Russia in Europe—projected to rise from $800 million to $3.4 billion. In addition to the 65,000 troops Washington already garrisons on the European continent, the funding increase will pay for the “heel to toe” rotation of full armored combat brigades into the former Baltic republics, on Russia’s doorstep, as well as other eastern European countries.
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  This proposal represents a flagrant and provocative violation of the agreements reached with Moscow in the wake of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union not to station large numbers of NATO troops on Russia’s borders.
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  In addition, large quantities of military hardware, including tanks, artillery, infantry fighting vehicles and other weaponry, are to be stockpiled in close striking distance to Russia to allow for the speedy intervention of additional US combat brigades from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Poland, Bulgaria and Romania.
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  President Barack Obama issued a statement Tuesday declaring that the 400 percent increase in funding to encircle Russia “will enable the United States to strengthen our robust military posture in Europe and improve our ability to uphold our Article 5 commitments to NATO members.” By invoking Article 5, which requires NATO to militarily defend any member against attack, Obama was reiterating the vow he made in 2014 that the US would put “boots on the ground” to defend the Baltic republics, thereby making their right-wing and virulently anti-Russian regimes the trip wire for a war that would have incalculable consequences.
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  The other major focus of Carter’s speech and of the proposed budget itself is the buildup of US military pressure against China under the banner of the “pivot to Asia,” with particular emphasis on the modernization of the US war fleet for confrontations in the South China Sea.
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  Carter did not mince words about Washington objectives, which are to use military force to maintain US hegemony in Asia and quell any threat to its dominant position from the rising economic power of China, subordinating China to US economic and strategic interests and reducing it to a semi-colony of US imperialism.
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  The US, the defense secretary said, would act to “maintain the stability in the region that we have underwritten for 70 years,” warning China that “to disrupt the security environment where half of humanity lives and half of humanity’s economic behavior is not a good idea.”
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  Washington, he continued, was carrying out its military buildup to be able “to impose unacceptable costs on an advanced aggressor that will either dissuade them from taking provocative action or make them deeply regret it if they do.” Employing the language of total war, Carter added, “In this context, Russia and China are our most stressing competitors.”
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