United States President Joe Biden has sanctioned the use by Ukraine of American-made long range missiles, allowing them to be fired into Russia itself.
And so the war in Ukraine and Russia is ratcheted up several notches.
Biden has previously resisted calls from Ukraine president Zelensky, and from France and Britain, for the US to permit use of its Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), which have a range of up to 190 miles, because of the inevitable increase in tensions with Russia that it would provoke.
The danger of this war spreading even wider, with even more devastating consequences, is obvious.
It is probable that both France and Britain will now also allow use of their long-range missiles to be used by Ukraine.
The German Chancellor Olaf Sholz is now coming under pressure from the war-mongering Greens, as well as from the conservative CDU and Free Democrats (FDP), to follow suit.
Sholz is no doubt concerned that the far-right AfD and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which split from The Left Party, which have both campaigned against Germany’s involvement in the war, will benefit from any decision to escalate Germany’s involvement.
The Greens are now among the most hawkish in Germany. The Economy minister and Green candidate for Chancellor Robert Habeck has said that he would send Germany’s long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine if he won in the country’s elections in February, called as a result of Sholz pulling the plug on the ruling SPD, Green and FDP ‘traffic light’ coalition.
Clearly, no-one should have any idea that the Green Party is an anti-war party.
Socialists must oppose this latest decision of Biden and the US government, and protest at any decision to allow use of long-range weapons by Britain, France and Germany.
Escalation of the war will benefit no worker in Ukraine, Russia, or any European country, all of which are endangered by any extension of the war beyond its existing boundaries.
The immediate beneficiaries will be the arms manufacturers. The capitalist class in the USA and Europe hope to benefit from a NATO victory. But it would be at an enormous cost to life. It is always workers who pay the heaviest price in any war.
Workers must resist the call of the war drum beat. Your enemy is not the workers of the other side. Your enemy is your own ruling class.
Socialists should have opposed the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just as we should have opposed the encirclement of Russia by the US-led NATO alliance, and just as we should have opposed the recent introduction of North Korean troops on the ground in support of Russia.
The important questions for socialists is not who fired the first shot, or who retaliated against what. It is in whose interests the war is being fought.
Our job as socialists is not to back one or the other side in what is an inter-capitalist, inter-imperialist war but to try to forge an independent working-class response in opposition to the war.
This war is about imperialist rivalry, about access to resources, world trade and the ability to extract surplus value out of the international working class. It is a war that is the prelude to a future military conflict between USA and its allies, and China and its allies.
The international working class has no reason to back either side in a fight about which imperialist power remains or becomes the world’s top exploiter of labour.
We must organise, argue and protest, to fight against the working class being seduced into backing its own national capitalist class in its fight for world capitalist domination.
We must oppose the war from an independent, international working-class perspective, seeking to remove the ruling governments in all the participating states, and across the globe.
In Britain we must do what we can to oppose Britain’s involvement and this war, and in the war on Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Campaigns must be waged inside those trade unions with pro-war policies such as Unite and the GMB. We need to see workers taking action to prevent the export of arms.
The movement towards war shows the urgency of the those in the anti-war movement helping to create a new mass democratic socialist/communist anti-war party.
To abolish war we have to abolish the system that causes war. We have to abolish capitalism.