“We will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” These were the words US President Donald Trump used in his inauguration address in January to declare a new phase in the second Space Race. By invoking Manifest Destiny—the ideology of the colonisation of North America and genocide of the indigenous population—Trump is staking out the US’s claim over space against its rivals.
Trump’s second presidency has dramatically shifted towards the increased militarisation of space. The budget for the Space Force, a section of the US military under the Air Force established by Trump in his first term, increased by more than US$11 billion to almost US$40 billion this fiscal year. This is part of a US$113 billion increase in the overall military budget to more than US$1 trillion, which a White House <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf">budget summary document</a> says is in part to “revive the warrior ethos of America’s Armed Forces”.
Even ostensibly civilian agencies like NASA are being drawn in. As with many other areas of government spending, Trump has savagely cut NASA’s budget—except in areas relevant to waging war. Almost everything else has had its funding eviscerated: funding for climate science has been cut in half, astrophysics by two-thirds, and public engagement is entirely gone.
Among the flurry of executive orders Trump signed at the beginning of his second term was one directing the Department of Defense to begin development of what would come to be known as the Golden Dome. This would be a network of projectile detection and interception infrastructure designed to destroy inbound missile attacks, much like Israel’s infamous Iron Dome and already existing anti-missile systems operated by the US military. Unlike the Iron Dome, the Golden Dome will not be based on the ground, but in Earth orbit.
In reality, it will be less of a dome and more of a sphere made up of thousands of satellites sweeping across the sky above anywhere and everywhere on the planet. The satellites will be equipped with advanced rockets, lasers or particle beams designed to destroy nuclear warhead-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as soon as they’re launched by enemies of the US empire, instead of later on in their flight path.
The idea isn’t new. An orbital missile “defence” system was first proposed in 1983 by then-US President Ronald Reagan in the form of the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars”, but it was never realised. Now technology has advanced such that the prospect of American weapons literally hanging over all of our heads at all times is within reach.
Our planet’s orbit has been used for waging war for decades already. The US has had secret surveillance satellites collecting imagery of the Earth’s surface since as early as 1960, only two years after the first American satellite of any kind was put in orbit. Since then, satellite images have been extremely valuable intelligence for American wars around the world. Images from American satellites were shared with Israel as it executed its genocidal campaign of destruction in Gaza over the last two years.
The National Reconnaissance Office, the US’s secretive department for space-based surveillance, has been working on putting potentially over a hundred satellites in orbit that can see the same level of detail as the Hubble Space Telescope—the difference is that these spy satellites are pointed down at us instead of out into space. The cherry on top of this global panopticon is the involvement of Elon Musk and his company SpaceX, which provides orbital communications for the US military through its Starshield satellite constellation.
The militarisation of space is not uniquely American. Ever since the end of World War Two, the conquest of space has been seen as a vital element of global imperial domination.
Space Race One, between the US and USSR at the height of the Cold War, has been mythologised as a competition of exploration, culminating in putting humans on the moon and returning them safely home. The reality is that it was an intense arms race with a simple logic: if you can land a rocket carrying people on the moon, you can also land an ICBM carrying a nuclear warhead on your enemy.
Space Race Two is between the US and China. Both have plans to put humans on the moon in the next decade and have their sights set on even more distant landings. If they come to fruition, we will likely see humans walk on an extraterrestrial body again soon. But the main factor motivating these excursions to far-flung places is not so much the places themselves, but how they help the imperialist powers better dominate Earth.
China has its own constellation of intelligence-gathering satellites, and has also been developing its capabilities for space-based warfare. In January 2007, China flexed its muscles by successfully destroying one of its own satellites with a missile launched from the ground. The South China Morning Post <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3327224/china-fields-golden-dome-prototype">reported</a>
in September that China has an operational prototype of a missile “defence” system similar to the proposed Golden Dome.
That there may be not only one but two planet-engulfing machines of observation and destruction is terrifying. It foreshadows how much deadlier an all-out war between the US and China would be than any previous war. Governments in all of the most powerful countries are dragging us towards such a conflagration with their <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/world-military-spending-explodes">exploding military budgets</a>. The drive to war must be opposed wherever it happens: sea, land, sky or above.

Danica Rachel

Trump’s final frontier of warfare

Pass the sick bucket! You might have predicted that Anthony Albanese’s first White House meeting with Donald Trump would be bad, but it exceeded the worst expectations. 
What made the whole thing so dreadful?
Was it Albanese fawning over Trump and congratulating him for “the extraordinary achievement” of a ceasefire deal in Gaza, even as Israel continues to kill dozens of Palestinians daily with US-made weapons?
Was it Albanese hailing the countries’ military record, claiming the two had “stood side by side for freedom and democracy”? Did that include Vietnam, Anthony? Iraq? Afghanistan? Did that record include Australian and US backing for dictators across the Asia Pacific even as they murdered their citizens? Or their support for Israel as it wages its genocidal war in Gaza? 
Or was the biggest problem Albanese spitting in the faces of the 7 million Americans who had taken to the streets three days earlier in the “No Kings” protests against the right-wing authoritarian Trump regime?
It’s hard to pick which one of these is most offensive.
But that’s not how the national media saw things. 
There, it was celebration all around. The mainstream media praised Albanese to the skies for his achievements where other world leaders had failed. The prime minister had got into the good graces of the president and brought home the bacon. Trump had even called Albanese “a great prime minister”. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Michael Koziol called Albanese’s trip “a raging success”. Opposition leader Sussan Ley initially tried to make ground by demanding Albanese sack Australian ambassador Kevin Rudd for disrespecting Trump, but within 24 hours she too was forced to join in the establishment’s hurrahs.
But what was it that they were celebrating? Nothing other than Albanese walking into the White House and coming out with an agreed plan to take the world closer to war.
Albanese and the Australian ruling class, and the capitalist media that fight for their interests, wanted two things out of this meeting: to get Trump to openly support the delivery of AUKUS nuclear submarines to Australia, and to confirm US involvement in mining and processing Australia’s extensive deposits of rare earths and critical minerals. They got both. 
China’s emergence as a rival hegemon in the Asia-Pacific threatens US domination and, by extension, Australian power. Dealing with the threat from China is now central to American imperialist concerns. But the US is also involved elsewhere, from the Middle East and Latin America to Ukraine and the Baltic states. The Australian government wants the US to prioritise the Asia Pacific to ensure China is prevented from controlling the region. Their job, therefore, is to tie America down in the region and to reinforce in the eyes of successive US presidents Australia’s value as an ally.
This is what the AUKUS pact is about, to convince the US (and Britain) to sell nuclear attack submarines to Australia with delivery to start in 2032 and, eventually, to build some in Australia. Their only purpose is to project Australian power into the South China Sea, the most likely arena for a clash with China, and to integrate Australia into US war plans. 
The cost of the submarines is already estimated at $368 billion, and given the whole history of military procurement, we can anticipate the final figure will be much higher. In the meantime, the Albanese government is paying $3 billion to US shipyards and $20 billion to build port facilities in WA to service the US nuclear submarine fleet. The cost to humanity if the submarines are deployed in a war with China will be incalculable.
Before this week’s meeting, Trump had, from the perspective of Australia’s ruling class, been disconcertingly silent about AUKUS. What’s more, he had sponsored a review of the whole program, to report by the end of this year. So, when Trump told the joint press conference that it was “full steam ahead” with the AUKUS program, there were whoops of joy from Australia’s defence and security establishment. They can keep banging the war drums. Tick one for Albanese.
Then there was the issue of rare earths and critical minerals which are an essential component in the production of a wide range of products, civilian and military. Over the past two or three decades, the Chinese government has invested huge amounts of money in securing for Beijing a virtual monopoly in processing these minerals. Two weeks ago, as part of the escalating tensions with Washington, China announced export controls, confirming US fears that China could cripple America’s military preparations. 
Enter the Albanese government. Over the past five months, Canberra has been working with Washington to expand the extraction and processing of Australia’s rare earth deposits as an alternative source of supply for the Pentagon. 
This week’s meeting saw Albanese and Trump sign off on an agreement to invest in or subsidise up to $8.5 billion into the industry to get things moving. This comes on top of $2 billion of public money paid or committed to two mines in the NT and WA, one of which is backed by Trump’s second favourite Australian, Gina Rinehart. The industry will be guaranteed a minimum price level to ensure the mine owners rake in profits. According to the White House, the agreement will achieve “critical mineral and energy dominance”, with Australia and the US having first pick of the minerals and control over exports, allowing Canberra and Washington to reward friends and punish enemies. Tick two for Albanese.
That the nation’s politicians with few exceptions, foreign and military policy strategists, military chiefs of staff and newspaper editors can all cheer Albanese on for a splendid job in Washington tells us a lot about their priorities. They are cheering for an escalation of war planning in our region, for the diversion of funds from social services, education, health and welfare to military build-up, and for a more repressive environment that comes with such developments. And all in the hands of our Labor government, which is demonstrating once again its devotion to the interests of the ruling class.

Tom Bramble

Albanese visits Washington in the service of imperialism and war

It’s no secret that Australian universities are increasingly enmeshed with the defence sector and weapons companies. Now, TAFEs are being tuned up to serve Australian imperialism and the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. 
A recent federal government announcement of a $28 million National Security TAFE Centre of Excellence in Adelaide illustrates the trend. The facility boasts “state-of-the-art equipment” to help apprentices develop artificial intelligence and robotics skills. According to the South Australian government, it will be central to fulfilling Australia’s “national security needs”. What this actually means is training young people to build weapons of war and destruction. 
Another example is a recent advertising blitz by Roger Cook’s Labor government in Western Australia. The premier says that, as the country becomes increasingly tied to the US and UK military industrial bases, Western Australia “will play a central role” in building Australia’s military capacities. The state Labor government is spending $11.5 million on an AUKUS Defence Industry Incentive to provide handouts to military corporations and contractors to expand their workforces. 
In January, the state government invested another $14.6 million in a new WA Defence TAFE Centre of Excellence, which significantly expanded the number of military-related courses offered to meet the needs of the Henderson Defence precinct. The precinct, in the southern suburbs of Perth, will service and maintain nuclear submarines and employ 10,000 people. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced another $12 billion in extra funding for Henderson last month. 
Western Australia is key to AUKUS. In 2027, five nuclear-powered submarines from the US and UK will begin rotating through the HMAS Stirling naval base at Garden Island, 5 km off the coast of the Perth metro area. One thousand US military personnel and their family members will soon be based there as well, making the city a potential target in any major imperialist conflict. 
Defence Minister Richard Marles has repeatedly stated that Australia needs to build a “strong and resilient industrial base” to meet the demands of AUKUS. More broadly, the Australian ruling class wants to assert its regional power with a beefed-up military. To achieve this, the plan is to reshape attitudes and sections of the education system to cater to the needs of AUKUS. Strengthening Australian ties to the US military is central to this. 
The normalisation of militarism is also occurring in primary and secondary schools. A 2022 publication, Minors and Missiles, by the Medical Association for Prevention of War, reported an increasing trend for school STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) programs being tied to weapons companies, and that the Department of Defence is the lead agency in half of all national STEM initiatives.
This is only the beginning, and none of it is in the interests of working-class students. While governments spend millions of dollars building new military-oriented TAFE programs, they neglect systemic problems in the TAFE system (such as poverty wages for apprentices, old and outdated facilities, and underpaid teachers and staff) and refuse to do anything substantive to address the key issue of economic security facing young people—the housing crisis. 
Instead of militarising our TAFE sector, students should be offered courses to help make the world a better place, not ones geared towards building weapons of mass destruction.

Ella Marchionda

The militarisation of TAFE

The term “new world order” (not the conspiracy version) generally refers to a major shift in world politics, in which the old economic, political and social structures are reshaped to fit the demands of a new era. 2025 is shaping up to produce precisely this—a more violent, authoritarian, hierarchical alternative.
The United States under Donald Trump’s regime is the prime case in point. Trump has unleashed ICE agents pumped up on unbridled power, deployed National Guard troops to the streets of major cities, weaponised the Department of Justice against his personal enemies, enacted the largest cuts to health care in US history, attempted to scrub trans people from public life, imposed steep tariffs on dozens of countries, rebranded the Department of Defense the Department of War and much more. It is possibly the most rapid political transformation the world has ever seen outside of a major war.
But it’s not just the United States. The far right is in power in Italy, Hungary and Finland, is the main opposition party in France, Germany, Portugal, Austria and Belgium, and is an established part of the political furniture everywhere else. In the United Kingdom, polls indicate that Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK would win a general election if it was held today. 
The situation is admittedly less severe in Australia, although there is clearly a coterie of wannabe führers waiting in the wings, from the ragtag group of March for Australia organisers to One Nation’s Pauline Hanson (who is rising in the polls) and Liberal MPs Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Politics is happening at a much faster rate than normal. A major new policy or directive is announced almost every day in the United States alone. Trump’s fascist former chief strategist Steve Bannon calls it “flooding the zone”: a deliberate strategy of overwhelming the media and public with a constant barrage of announcements and controversies, making it difficult to focus on any single issue or broader strategy. It’s like being punched repeatedly in the face so badly that it’s impossible to string together a coherent thought or exit strategy.
But there is a method amongst the madness. Conservatism is driven by a reverence for capitalism and its foundational inequalities between the rich and the poor. They rule over us on a macro level by wielding state power, and on a micro level in every workplace. Conservative ideologies are derived as a defence of this status quo. That is why they so strongly venerate hierarchies in all social spaces—bosses rule over workers in the economy, powerful countries rule over the weak geopolitically and men rule over women in the home. One of the best ways of naturalising a historically specific social phenomenon is by reproducing it in all walks of life, thus making it feel eternal. 
Capitalism is also an extraordinarily violent society, from the everyday violence of poverty through to the violence of the police and imperialist war. Conservatives, again, venerate this state of being—there’s the stereotypical tough guy protecting his weak, fragile woman; the ICE agent bashing down doors and pelting with rubber bullets anyone who tries to get in his (occasionally her) way; and the warped world of the UFC.
You might have noticed I’m talking about conservatives, rather than singling out the far right. The latter exist in the world of the former, and the lines between traditional conservatives and the new far right are murky. There’s a tendency to look at the conservatives of yesterday (pre-Trump) as though they were more palatable (pretty outrageous if you’re old enough to remember George Bush, the butcher of the Middle East). 
While it’s the case that some modern far-right parties and leaders were previously fascists on the margins, there’s also a general shift within conservatism further to the right—like the Republicans of old who have fallen in behind Trump. There’s also a through line between the generations, brilliantly depicted in Ali Abbasi and Gabriel Sherman’s 2024 film The Apprentice, which chronicled how Donald Trump was mentored and moulded by conservative lawyer Roy Cohn, who famously prosecuted the Rosenbergs during the height of McCarthyism.
Conservatism is shifting in this direction because of a series of political, social and economic ruptures that have engulfed the globe over the last fifteen years. Every period of capitalist crisis has produced a new political form as the system tries to stabilise itself and adapt to new conditions. Out of the Great Depression and Second World War came an era of greater state intervention into the economy and increased social spending—all based on the new riches flowing from the postwar boom. The economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s produced the neoliberal era, as states and bosses privatised public assets, cut social welfare, intensified the exploitation of workers and opened the global South to even greater plunder.
The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 heralded a new, prolonged period of instability. The state bailed out the wealthy and paid for it through waves of austerity that slashed workers’ living standards. Consequently, the traditional parties of the political centre were discredited across much of Europe and took a beating in the US (hence Hillary Clinton’s failure and Trump’s ease in sweeping away the mainstream Republicans). Out of the ensuing polarisation emerged the far-right politics that dominate today, and waves of progressive social movements and new left-wing parties.
A series of further crises compounded all this. The COVID years produced a new anti-lockdown, anti-vax conspiratorial audience for the right and the radicalisation of billionaires like Elon Musk, and was followed by years of steep inflation. Catastrophic climate change is no longer a concern for the distant future, but a reality bearing down on the world right now. As temperatures keep rising, a new series of crises will emerge as millions—and then billions—are forced to relocate, supply chains break down and crops fail. Even as our rulers fail to act on any of this, they are no doubt anxious about what it will mean for their system in the future.
But the major global development is the rising imperialist conflict between China and the US and its Western allies. To put it simply, all things being equal, China is on track to overtake the United States economically, including in the most innovative high-tech industries. Economic might creates military might, and together they create global domination. That’s how the US rose to the top of the imperialist pecking order. This is a serious long-term crisis for the US ruling class, and every other country still betting on and benefiting from the Western alliance. 
The old order is no longer working for those who created it. Hence, a new world order is necessary. It’s impossible to understand anything about the political chaos of today without this context. 
Take Trump’s tariffs, which have been imposed on friends and foes alike, and decried by many as economic irrationalism. It’s an attempt to force companies to bring production back on shore. Why is this necessary? Here’s one pertinent example: shipbuilding has all but disappeared from the US, but naval power will be crucial in any future conflict in the Asia Pacific. There’s a method to the madness.
Then there’s the crackdown on undocumented migrants, who compose a key part of many low-wage US workforces. To prepare a civilian population for war is to imbue them with a vicious nationalism and hatred towards perceived foreign enemies. Endless headlines and speeches about “a war on US borders” and “illegal aliens invading the US” are part of that ideological conditioning.
There’s also the broader “war on woke”, which is a major offensive against the rights of the oppressed. Basic notions of fairness, equality, diversity and acceptance might be tolerated when the ruling class is trying to convince us that the entire world is fair and equal. But it’s antithetical to the conservative belief that “might is right”. 
It’s been obvious for years that the chaos of modern capitalism would produce a new (if partially reheated) form of politics. But 2025 has made that form a whole lot clearer. It includes rising militarism, the fortification of borders, state authoritarianism and the junking of progressive liberal values. To caveat this a little—it’s still early days, and we don’t have a crystal ball. But it would be wrong to ignore the reality unfolding around us. To change the world effectively, we must understand what is happening.
One counter to the notion that we’re living in a new world order is that it is purely a product of the Trumpified Republican Party and its international allies: if Trump is booted in three years, then this will all be over. There are a few things that suggest the situation is not so simple.
First is that when Joe Biden was president, he attempted to chart a different course. He used subsidies to entice industry to reshore, proposed a major spending package to rebuild America’s decaying infrastructure (both of which, it was argued, would create well-paying jobs to alleviate trashed living standards and social chaos), and imposed targeted tariffs on China and other adversaries, while putting serious effort into strengthening economic and political bonds with US allies. It too was a plan to strengthen US imperialism, but with more carrots and fewer sticks. It bombed. Much of the spending was blocked by Congress (including some Democrats) and the US capitalists made no serious attempt to discipline the detractors into supporting it. The “other way” failed.
Second, aspects of the new approach are being adopted by parties not of the right, most notably UK Labour, which has imposed a harsh new border policy, cut social spending, designated Palestine Action as a proscribed terrorist organisation (which has led to the arrest of thousands of supporters) and continued the Tories’ fight against trans people.
Third, the wheels Trump has set in motion will not necessarily just stop spinning when he leaves the White House. Some aspects of his program will probably be dropped, such as the open hostility to traditional allies. But some things can be so utterly transformed, or destroyed, that they are not easily reinstated. Take USAID: it could take years to rebuild the structures and networks of international aid distribution that have been obliterated by Trump, and there’s no certainty that any future administration would see this as a priority. Not to mention that we have no idea what will happen at the next election; Trump might seek an unconstitutional third term or successfully pass the crown to J.D. Vance. 
Finally, moments in which liberal centrism has stabilised in the past fifteen years have done nothing to stave off the radicalisation of conservatives and their quest for power. Joe Biden, after all, was followed by Trump 2.0 and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is warming the seat for Nigel Farage. 
More importantly, we should not desire to return to the old order. That one sucked too. It was an order in which Wall Street was bailed out while the poor were evicted, the US enforced its supremacy by dropping bombs on the Middle East, historic numbers of immigrants were deported and billionaires bought super yachts while millions went hungry. 
There is, however, another way, one that does not rely on bankrupt politicians and parties. We can instead look to the power of workers and the oppressed to fight the right, overthrow the billionaires and build a genuinely new world order based on equality and human liberation. 
There has been no shortage of mass struggles in recent years. More people protested in the 2010s than any other decade in human history. In just the last month, Gen Z protesters have overthrown governments in Nepal and Madagascar, and mobilised in Indonesia, Morocco, the Philippines, Timor-Leste and Peru.
And in the last few weeks, mass workers’ struggle has returned to the streets and workplaces of Europe, with the Italian general strike in solidarity with Palestine, a similar general strike scheduled for Spain and general strikes against austerity in France. 
The people are furious, and rightly so. What we need is a politics that can draw together all these struggles, direct them against the rich and powerful and fight for a socialist society that replaces hierarchy with equality and violence with peace.

Eleanor Morley

Are we living in a new world order?

An illegal invasion unleashes mass slaughter in the Middle East. Western leaders clamber to justify the horror. Those responsible commit untold war crimes but never face prosecution from spineless international courts. When the occupation finally ends, airstrikes, disease and malnutrition will be estimated to have killed a million people.
This is not 2023 in Gaza. It’s 2003 in Iraq. The perpetrators are not the openly fascistic ethno-state of Israel, but the “civilised” rulers of Britain, the US, Australia and others like them. 
The chief ideological <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blair-defends-war-on-iraq/">spokesperson</a>
and international defender of this massacre was Tony Blair, British Labour prime minister from 1997 to 2007, whose notorious <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/6/8/dodgy-dossier-haunts-blair">“dossiers”</a>
claimed the Iraqi government was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
While the US provided the main military force behind the invasion, Blair supplied troops, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36712735">false justifications</a>
and rhetorical ammunition. Twenty-two years later and still dripping in blood and complicity, this butcher of Iraq is returning to the Middle East to oversee a so-called peace process in Gaza.
US President Donald Trump’s “20-point peace plan” for Gaza—a document that Blair himself <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-02/leaked-document-reveals-details-of-trump-peace-plan/105839640">helped</a>
to develop—specifically designates a role for the former prime minister. Under the proposal, he will serve alongside the US president on a transitional body that overrides any Palestinian representation and indefinitely dictates the future of postwar Gaza.
Disturbingly, the White House <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70155nked7o">directs</a> this “Board of Peace” to “create modern and efficient governance that ... is conducive to attracting investment” into a low-tariff “special economic zone”. This is business shorthand for low wages, corporate handouts and violations of workplace rights.
Such a task could find no more enthusiastic enforcer than Blair. Indeed, Trump’s previous dystopian vision for a free-market Gaza “Riviera” first <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/07/06/tony-blair-think-tank-worked-trump-riviera-plan-for-gaza/">originated</a>
from the twisted hive mind of the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change”, one of the ex-Labour leader’s numerous think tanks and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37416855">consultancy</a> firms.
Well before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Blair government’s priority was “ensuring British companies benefit from any post-war reconstruction contracts,” as was <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/in-lead-up-to-war-u-k-officials-and-businesses-planned-on-dividing-the-spo">revealed</a>
in a 2002 telegram brazenly entitled “Iraq: Dividing the Spoils”.
Blair’s appointment is a deliberate message from the Trump administration that Western imperialism’s arch-criminals still reign supreme and that Gaza’s reconstruction will be pounced upon as a shameless profit-making exercise.
All this is familiar ground for Blair, whose ten years in government hinged on market deregulation and the privatisation of Britain’s public infrastructure. Upon losing power in 2007, Blair was immediately appointed as Middle East envoy by fellow warmonger George W. Bush, and turned his attention to merging his political responsibilities with private business ventures.
While serving in Jerusalem, Blair took up a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/jan/10/blairjpmorgan">part-time position</a> as senior adviser with investment bank JP Morgan, for which he quickly brokered a deal between the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government and Wataniya Mobile to establish a privately run cell network in the West Bank, according to UK current affairs program Dispatches.
Jacobin magazine <a href="https://jacobin.com/2017/09/the-ghoulish-post-politics-career-of-tony-blair">reported</a>
in 2017 that Blair had also used his connections as envoy to orchestrate the development of oil fields off Gaza’s shoreline under the aegis of the British Gas Group, another JP Morgan client.
All told, Blair has leveraged the political ties he developed as UK prime minister and peace envoy to win lucrative deals and amass a personal fortune of £60 million as of 2015, according to the Telegraph’s <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/11670425/Revealed-Tony-Blair-worth-a-staggering-60m.html">analysis</a>.
And while he continues to <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/tony-blair-putin-cant-use-iraq-to-justify-ukraine-invasion/a-65037323">insist</a>
that invading Iraq was about spreading “democracy” to the Middle East, he’s had no qualms accepting <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/12/tony-blair-institute-continued-taking-money-from-saudi-arabia-after-khashoggi">sizeable donations</a> to his “Global Change” think tank from US-aligned dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/27/tony-blair-conflict-interests-middle-east">Gulf states</a>. He has long fostered personal and political ties with tyrants from Muammar <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/23/-sp-blair-gaddafi-letter-thanks-spy-cooperation-libya-uk-dissidents">Gaddafi</a>
to Hosni <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/02/tony-blair-mubarak-courageous-force-for-good-egypt">Mubarak</a>.
Whatever form Gaza’s postwar governance takes, this man’s involvement ensures Western and Israeli interests will be imposed on Palestinians as ruthlessly as decades of occupation and neoliberal ransacking were forced upon civilians in Iraq. As former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/09/29/tony-blair-gaza-strip/">Washington Post</a> last month, “the Israelis ... respect him”.
Tony Blair is an unindicted war criminal and foremost embodiment of rapacious capitalism. A gold-class seat in hell is waiting for him.

Ruby Healer

Tony Blair: war criminal in charge of Gaza peace

The fiftieth anniversary of Papua New Guinea’s independence this month was marked by the announcement of a proposed major joint defence treaty between PNG and its former colonial power, Australia. “We’re talking about totally integrated forces,” PNG’s Defence Minister Billy Joseph told the ABC on 15 September, “Australian Defence Force and PNG Defence Force using the same equipment...fighting together, defending our sovereignties as an integrated force”. 
So much for independence. 
Albanese might <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/visit-papua-new-guinea-golden-jubilee">pontificate</a> that Australia and PNG are “neighbours, partners and equals”, but this military agreement shows how things really are. It continues Australia’s 120-year domination and exploitation of PNG.
From 1906 until 1975, PNG was a colonial possession of Australia. School history curricula in PNG acknowledges this, but for Australian students, this nearly 70-year long period of domination likely comes as a surprise. 
In their 2024 article “‘The Moat of Oblivion’: Australia and the Forgetting of Papua New Guinea” academics Helen Garner, Jonathan Ritchie and Brad Underhill suggest that that in the nineteenth century era of White Australia, politicians did not try to integrate PNG into the Australian national identity because most Papuans were, and are, non-white. 
The Australian state did not want to launch a genocidal frontier war akin to those waged against Indigenous peoples on Australia’s mainland and Tasmania, or to encourage migration of whites to PNG. Instead, PNG was shunted “somewhere else” in Australia’s nationalist and cultural mythology, as an island that belonged to Australia, but was not occupied by Australians. This political separation underpins the exploitative nature of Australia’s engagement with PNG. 
While ostensibly an Australian territory, from 1906 onwards Papuans were denied democratic rights, including the right to vote. Even after being incorporated as Australian citizens in 1948, Papuans required permits to travel south. Many Papuans who left the island were ensnared in “blackbirding”—a slave labour system where Pacific Islanders were forced to work on Queensland plantations. 
Sequestering Papua New Guinea also smashed up the migratory traditions of Pacific Islanders. As Gardner et al describe: “The six-kilometre stretch of water between the northernmost Queensland Island Saibai and the Shore of Papua was both a physical and conceptual barrier between continental Australia and the island of New Guinea in the minds of white Australians—but not those of the Torres Strait for whom it had always been a pathway rather than a boundary”. 
The Australian state imposed both English and Christianity on the people of PNG in its colonising drive, attempting to force national cohesion along Western capitalist lines on highly differentiated peoples. To this day, PNG is the most<a href="https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2017/07/20/papua-new-guineas-incredible-linguistic-diversity"> linguistically diverse</a> place on earth, with more than 800 recognised languages. 
Australia’s interest in PNG has always been imperial. Viewed through military eyes, the island is Australia’s gateway to (and from) the Asia Pacific. 
The theatre of imperial conflict expanded from Europe towards Asia in World War II, and with this shift, warfare came closer to Australia’s neighbourhood. In January 1942, Japan invaded Rabaol—a township on the PNG island of New Britain—with the intention of capturing the capital Port Moresby. Had this occurred, it would have represented an incursion upon the northernmost flank of Australian, and therefore US, influence. 
The ensuing Kokoda Track campaign, which repulsed the Japanese invasion, has been incorporated into nationalist myths as an epic chapter in Australian war history. Papuans—whose own homes were besieged—are remembered only as helpful sidekicks in this mythos, as “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” tending to wounded soldiers. 
Ironically, Australian politicians were motivated to abandon PNG as a colony in order to ensure their ongoing imperial influence. As World War II gave way to the Cold War, Australian politicians realised that holding formal colonies was no longer tenable, as major social struggles for national liberation took place in Asia and Africa. 
Australian politicians feared PNG might fall under Communist influence, like many other national independence struggles at the time, without a negotiated transition to independence. Jon Piccini argues this in his 2024 article “‘Time is Against Us’: Anti-Communism, Decolonisation, and Papua New Guinean Independence” in the journal Australian Historical Studies. Catholic organisations worked to foster anti-Communist attitudes among the small PNG elite—and leaders of the trade union movement—as part of their attempts to cultivate a future ruling class loyal to Western capitalism. 
Piccini quotes Richard Krygier explaining that his organisation, the Catholic anti-communist outfit Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, intervened in PNG to “pre-empt the field before the Communists and their friends emerge on the scene”. Whether and on what terms the people of PNG wanted independence was of marginal concern in these circles. 
Preparations for PNG’s independence began in the 1960s under a series of Liberal and Country Party federal governments. In 1964, Australia’s Department of Territories cut the pay of PNG’s public servants to that of 40 percent of Australians doing the same work—supposedly as a precursor for dealing with fewer resources in an independent state. 
Whitlam’s Labor government, elected in 1972, accelerated the move towards independence. In 1973, PNG transitioned to “self-government”, and on 16 September 1975, became fully independent. Gyngell describes that PNG’s first governor-general, Sir John Guise, noted during independence ceremonies that “Papua New Guineans were lowering the flag of their colonisers, not tearing it down”. Typical of paternalistic colonialism, these events have been remembered as examples of Australia’s benevolence towards PNG.
But as even former Australian prime minister Paul Keating admitted in his memoirs, this “benevolence” brought limited benefits to the people of PNG. “As colonialists,” he wrote, “Australia’s army has been generally benign but I’m not sure we were much good at the task. Not least, we had bequeathed Papua New Guinea a public sector and a military force, modelled on our own, that were expensive and quite unsuited to the needs of a developing country”. 
Since independence, PNG has experienced endemic poverty. As of 2022, fewer than 20 percent of households had access to safe drinking water and fewer than 10 percent safely managed sanitation. 
Australia has never been motivated by humanitarian concern for Papuans. It is not concerned with poverty, the education of girls, corruption or rising sea levels, whatever its official statements on Pacific relations might say. Since independence, successive governments have worked to maintain Australia’s economic and military domination of the region. 
According to the Australia—Papua New Guinea Development Partnership Plan of 2024-2029, Australia is Papua New Guinea’s largest trading partner, allocating $637.4 million in loans and grants, and $2.56 billion in budget support loans. Australia has more or less taken for granted that PNG’s economic reliance on Australia will ensure their political affinity to Western capitalism and therefore pliancy to its military presence. 
As imperial tensions between the US and China have steadily heightened, Australia has worried about waning influence. A 2023 naval security agreement launched between China and the Solomon Islands—typically seen as safe in Australia’s sphere of influence—gave the Australian establishment a scare that China’s economic leverage might win them more military allies in the Pacific. 
Albanese’s Labor government has doubled down on their real ambition: reliable, no holds barred military access to PNG. In August, Defence Minister Richard Marles announced that $500 million would be spent on the long-expected expansion of PNG’s Lombrum naval base. 
Should the proposed mutual defence treaty between Australia and PNG materialise, it will represent a formalisation of the existing state of affairs, as well as a guarantee—from Australia’s perspective—that PNG will remain in the Western camp. 
From colonisation, to independence, and after, Australia has never cared about the rights and wishes of Papuans. Their intention has always been to dominate the region economically, to secure military acquiescence.

Priya T.

Australian imperialism in Papua New Guinea: past and present

It is now generally accepted that Pine Gap, a military/intelligence facility just outside of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, has played a crucial role in the Palestinian genocide and other US-supported wars in west Asia. In response to the targeting of Iran’s nuclear facilities and defences against Houthi drones and missiles, more and more people are becoming aware of and questioning the facility’s operations.
Since it became operational in 1970, the stated purpose of Pine Gap has changed several times. Initially, the government said it was a space research facility. When its military use could no longer be hidden, the site was then said to be used for the verification of arms control treaties and to provide early warning of missiles launched from the Soviet Union and, subsequently, China. With every new revelation of the true nature of the facility, the Australian and US governments have changed their line as to precisely what Pine Gap’s purpose is. 
In 2013, CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden released a trove of classified documents covering covert US military activities. Some were directly related to Pine Gap; others were about broader programs that Pine Gap may be involved in. In a publicity campaign aimed at increasing transparency about Pine Gap, a former technician, David Rosenberg, wrote a book claiming to be an exposé. But the book, Pine Gap: The Inside Story of the NSA in Australia, was vetted and cleared by the US National Security Agency before it was released. As was the ABC mini-series Pine Gap.
So although we now know a fair bit about what Pine Gap does, we still do not know the whole truth. As more and more of the US military’s operations are conducted by remote control through communications satellites, Pine Gap’s importance is growing. This is reflected in the physical growth of the base itself. New radomes (the dome-shaped structures housing and protecting sensitive antennas and radars) have been built in the last few years, and more personnel have been based there. Much of this new information comes from the excellent work of <a href="https://declassifiedaus.org/author/peter">Declassified Australia’s Peter Cronau</a>.
What we do know is that Pine Gap is the most important US communications base outside of the continental US. This is primarily due to its location. The shooting down of a US U2 spy plane during a reconnaissance flight over the Soviet Union in 1960, coupled with the launch of the first communications satellites in 1962, led to the development of a rudimentary satellite-based communications and spy system by the Ramo-Woolridge Corporation (which later merged with Thompson to become TRW, which has since been acquired by Northrop Grumman—the third largest aerospace and arms manufacturer in the world).
At least three ground stations were needed to control geosynchronous satellites around the globe at an altitude of about 35,000 kilometres. (They are called geosynchronous because their movement is synchronised with the Earth’s rotation and they are therefore fixed above the same geographic point.) The first was to be in the US, and the second in Western Europe. The third would be equidistant from those and preferably in the Southern Hemisphere. Australia was, therefore, the obvious choice. In addition, the base needed to be far from the coast to avoid ship-based spying and in a remote location to keep it as secret as possible from the civilian population. 
While Pine Gap is just one of the three geographical points needed, the US and Western European bases have nearby alternatives should they go offline for any reason. Pine Gap has the distinction of being the only facility of its kind in the region: it is irreplaceable and therefore one of the most important pieces of real estate to US military interests, in Australia or anywhere. Without Pine Gap, the US cannot control the satellite operations that are now essential to the execution of war.
To our knowledge, these operations include things like the early warning systems of the US Defense Support Program (which detects missile launches), a task previously performed by the Nurrungar base near Woomera, South Australia, until taken over by Pine Gap in 1999. This forms a part of the US missile defence shield and that of US allies such as Japan and Israel. Satellites tracking heat signatures would have formed a part of the defences against Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. 
Pine Gap’s 45 satellite dishes control at least four geosynchronous satellites positioned above the Indian Ocean that monitor a vast range from the Pacific to Africa, their central focus being the area from China to West Asia. These satellites are the backbone of US signals intelligence (SIGINT) in the region. They intercept and download electronic signals across all bands, from radio to mobile phone and internet communications, which are then analysed at Pine Gap. They also control military communications between the US and its military in the dozens of bases and fleet deployments from Guam to Egypt.
Modern communications satellites are not geosynchronous and constantly travel around the globe at a much closer altitude of about 400 kilometres. These are the ones we can often see in the sky and are generally used for commercial communications. So while most of the satellite dishes at Pine Gap communicate with geosynchronous satellites, in the last decade or so, a new type of satellite dish has appeared: torus dishes. These are designed to intercept and download communications from low-orbit satellites as they pass through the region, sucking up every bit of data for analysis by the US National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
In short, Pine Gap has the capacity to control US military satellites, track missile launches, control military communications—including those to and from autonomous drones—provide all battlefield communications and intercept all satellite communications in the region. In about one-fifth of a second, information gathered from the ground in West Asia can be transmitted up to a satellite and back down to Pine Gap, where all these communications can be analysed. US military and intelligence agencies can then use the information to obtain targets, among other things.
Which brings us to Palestine.
Palestine is not Pine Gap’s primary focus, which has always been about gathering intelligence to help the US maintain global supremacy. Nonetheless, the US is providing support to Israel, including providing signals intelligence. This is not a new development. For example, we know that signals intelligence gathered and analysed at Pine Gap was passed on to the Israeli military during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
In 2013, NSA contractor Edward Snowden released classified documents showing that the agency has an agreement with the Israeli military’s signals intelligence, the notorious Unit 8200, to pass on all raw intelligence data collected, including data collected in third-party countries—like Australia. The agreement began in 1999, but earlier information-sharing arrangements have existed since 1968. A top-secret memorandum advised that the intelligence sharing had been broadened from Unit 8200 and the NSA to include the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad. It is noteworthy that this specifically includes information gathered on Australians and citizens from other Five Eyes intelligence alliance countries: Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
The Israeli military obviously does not rely entirely on the US for electronic communications surveillance; it has its own satellite and surveillance capabilities. It is therefore impossible to judge where and how any particular piece of targeting information was sourced. But it would be naive to believe that, over the last two years of relentless attacks, no information from the Australian facility was used.
Pine Gap is classified as a Joint Defence Facility, but the US military, through the National Reconnaissance Office, fully funds and controls it. The Australian government’s policy is that Pine Gap operates with its “full knowledge and concurrence”, though there is no official definition of those terms. 
Along with Australia’s weapons sales, both directly and hidden as “transfers” through the US, the use of intelligence gathered by Pine Gap makes Australia complicit in Israel’s crimes in Gaza. 
Jacob Grech is a member of Renegade Activists.

Jacob Grech

What you need to know about Pine Gap

After decades of hegemony, the two-state solution is no longer considered a viable or desirable solution to the decades-long oppression of the Palestinians among pro-Palestine activists in Australia. In Melbourne, where I am involved, the phrase “two-state solution” has been essentially banned from the platforms of the regular Gaza solidarity demonstrations. 
This is an extremely positive development. For decades, the two-state solution has served as a means to browbeat the more principled and radical supporters of the Palestinian people. Prior to the 1980s, the majority of Palestinian political parties supported the full liberation of historic Palestine, and the two-state solution was used by Labor Zionism to denounce them as extremists and coopt them into a more moderate position. 
The two-state solution reached its zenith in the 1990s during negotiations for the Oslo Accords between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel. During this period the Palestinian leadership under Fatah abandoned all sorts of rights and principles in exchange for the chimera of a Palestinian statelet in the West Bank and Gaza. While a minority of Palestinian capitalists and politicians have become fabulously wealthy as a result of this process, the Palestinian people have continued to go backwards, losing further rights and territory.
So the clear rejection of the two-state solution by the majority of serious pro-Palestine activists is an important breakthrough. It provides a stronger basis from which to build a movement that can demand real justice. And importantly, it opens up space for discussion about what sort of scenario might actually succeed in achieving genuine liberation for the Palestinian people. 
For most people, the alternative to the perpetual apartheid and oppression entailed by the two-state solution is the creation of a democratic state for all inhabitants of the area. Far from “driving Jews into the sea”, the idea is for Arabs and Jews to live together peacefully, with equal rights in a liberal democratic set-up. In many ways this is a worthy goal, and when it was developed in the 1960s, it was a progressive position for the Palestinian liberation movement to adopt. 
But many of the same issues that make the two-state solution unworkable also apply to one state. Most importantly, the Israeli state will not accept equality between Jews and Palestinians. Its founding ideology is that of an ethno-state: a state that exists for a particular ethnic group, with others as second-class citizens. This means a single state based on equal rights will never be achieved through negotiation or brought into existence through UN mandates or diplomacy. It requires the overthrow of the Israeli state. 
The Western powers, to which Israel is an important strategic and economic ally, would of course never accept this. The only one-state outcome it’s possible to imagine is one in which Israel is in effect allowed to annex the entirety of the Palestinian territory and expel millions of refugees.
Supporters of Palestine often refer to the defeat of apartheid in South Africa as proof that a transformation from a system of apartheid to democracy is possible. But mainstream accounts of this important history tend to downplay the crucial role played by the economically powerful, politically sophisticated and industrially militant black working class, which existed in South Africa but does not in Palestine. By repeatedly bringing the economy to a halt through strike action, these workers made it impossible for South African mines and ports to function reliably, and for capital to profit. This hit the rich where it hurts, and created enormous pressure for change. 
Only when it became clear that the old order was doomed did Western governments impose sanctions to try to expedite the transition so that the vital mines and ports of South Africa could remain functional and be relied on. 
Palestinians have no comparable economic power, excluded as they are from large parts of the Israeli economy, particularly its most strategic sectors. So traditional class struggle at a domestic level cannot create the economic disruption needed to break apartheid and end the occupation of all Palestinian lands.
At a global level, Israel is a nuclear-armed imperial outpost in a central region of world politics and a long-term strategic ally of the US. Far from facing crippling sanctions for its many crimes, it is still being armed, funded and courted by the world’s elites. Indeed, its utility to US empire has been reinforced in the last two years, given the ease with which it has crushed Hezbollah and subdued Iran. 
This alliance is likely to continue as long as imperialist domination remains a central plank of US foreign policy. Even if the US is somehow dethroned, then China or any other rising power would have a strong interest in allying with such a well-armed and strategically important state. China is already the second largest importer of Israeli goods, and Israel imports more goods from China than any other country, $19 billion worth annually according to the United Nations Comtrade database.
So while the apartheid system in South Africa could be ended without fundamentally disrupting the structures of global and regional imperialism, the same is not true in Palestine. In any case, the end of formal apartheid has not fundamentally changed the experience of the vast majority of working class and poor Black South Africans. Their living conditions are actually worse, meaning this is hardly a model to be aspiring to.
The harsh reality is that while many former colonies have been able to achieve some measure of national independence within the capitalist system, there are a number of cases where it is just not possible. In the Middle East, the examples of the Palestinians and the Kurds stand out, where the maintenance of national oppression is absolutely essential to the functioning of capitalism as it has been established over the last century. So just as it is impossible to imagine a capitalist America without anti-Black racism, there will never be a capitalist Middle East without the whole suite of religious, national and caste hierarchies that have been deliberately entrenched in the region. 
It’s long been argued by revolutionaries in the Middle East and elsewhere that overthrowing the Arab regimes, which pose as champions of the Palestinians while simultaneously accommodating to Israel and repressing movements that challenge it, is a prerequisite for a liberated Palestine. But the experience of the Arab revolutions that erupted in 2011 shows that simply replacing one capitalist government with another in no way brings closer the goal of ending the injustices that face the workers and the oppressed of the region. It’s clear now that in a very direct sense the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and that of the masses in the region and beyond, will require a more radical goal. To be precise, only the successful overthrow of capitalism across the region, particularly in key states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, can make possible the liberation of Palestine.
This doesn’t change the fact that the Palestinians will continue to have a central and leading role to play in organising popular resistance to Israel and capitalism, both inside occupied Palestine and in the neighbouring countries. But it does mean that the practice of seeking allies among the Arab regimes, which has been the long-term approach of the leading Palestinian factions, has to be opposed. Not only is it a betrayal of the Arab masses living under these regimes, but it is a dead end for the Palestinian struggle. 
Instead, efforts must be made to link up with the many economic, social and geopolitical grievances of workers and the poor across the region. This can most effectively be done by locating Palestinian oppression in a wider context of regional exploitation, oppression and imperialism, and Israel’s role in maintaining this unequal and oppressive status quo. This involves popularising a systemic critique of Arab capitalism and its role in propping up Western imperialism, and building a movement that can turn this critique into action. 
Those of us outside the Middle East also have an important role to play. Israel can survive and get away with its atrocities only due to endless Western support and funding. We have seen that a mass movement in Australia has been capable of shifting the terrain of discussion and politics, but not core aspects of government policy. It is similar elsewhere. To force Western governments even to begin to break ties with Israel would take immense struggle by workers, the kind of struggle that would make clear to the Albaneses of the world that the choice is between profits and social stability and continued support for genocide.
Standing in the way of this is the existing leadership of the workers’ movement, which has no interest in mobilising workers to make Australia’s support for Israel unviable. Such action would threaten not only the interests of Australian capitalism, which the union leaders do not oppose, but also the electoral fortunes of the Labor Party, which most union leaders are aligned with, and the relatively privileged position of the leaders themselves within the system, not to mention their future career prospects. 
To make the kinds of strikes that could lead to real sanctions against Israel and the arms industry happen today would require a profoundly more radical and organised working-class movement than what currently exists. This in turn presupposes the existence of a serious left in the workers’ movement, both able to lead action and carrying weight ideologically. Socialist-led unions, backed by a militant rank and file, could organise black bans of weapons companies and Israeli shipping lines, and engage in targeted actions to enforce them. The places where this has happened in recent years, for instance the dock workers in Greece, have long traditions of communist influence in the union. 
So both in the Middle East and in the imperialist West, fighting for revolutionary socialist politics grounded in mass working-class organisations is a vital step on the road to Palestinian liberation. This means rejecting both the two-state farce that serves to validate the status quo, and also the sort of liberal utopianism that assumes a single Palestinian state in the framework of capitalism is possible and able to bring liberation. 
Instead, a revolutionary socialist approach means a relentless and uncompromising struggle against all of the institutions that have become so discredited by their response to Israel’s genocide, including every powerful nation state on earth. Only a struggle for a socialist Palestine that unites the revolutionary workers and peasants of the Middle East with an insurgent, anti-imperialist working class movement in the West can hope to achieve liberation.
Omar is a long-time pro-Palestine activist based in Melbourne

Omar Hassan

Two-state solution is rubbish, what will it take to liberate Palestine?

Eighty years ago, the United States government exploded over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the only two nuclear bombs ever used in wartime against a civilian population. Never before in human history had a single weapon caused such widespread death and destruction.
A report by engineers and scientists of the Manhattan Project (the US project that developed the bombs), based on a 1946 investigation in both cities, estimated that more than two-thirds of Hiroshima’s 90,000 buildings had been destroyed or badly damaged, including everything within one mile (1.6km) of ground zero, aside from a few structures made from reinforced concrete. In Nagasaki, buildings with reinforced concrete walls 25cm thick, more than 600 metres from ground zero, collapsed.
In Hiroshima, the bomb destroyed 26 of 33 firefighting stations, killing or badly injuring three-fourths of their personnel. It killed or badly wounded more than 1,800 of 2,400 nurses and medical orderlies, and left only 30 of 298 registered doctors able to treat survivors. Many of those not killed immediately burned to death in the subsequent firestorm, or drowned trying to escape it in rivers, or died within hours or days of radiation sickness. 
The Manhattan Project report estimated that Hiroshima suffered 135,000 casualties—more than half its population—and Nagasaki 64,000 out of a population of 195,000. Both figures were underestimates because they did not include prisoners of war and other foreigners, such as thousands of Korean forced labourers present in both cities.
People who survived the immediate effects of the blasts were not necessarily safe. Two years after the bombings, there was a notable increase in the rate of leukaemia among initial survivors, which spiked four to six years later. The largest number of victims were children.
But while the power of the bombs was unprecedented, the mass slaughter of civilians was anything but new. All of the major powers involved in the war carried out or assisted deliberate massive attacks on civilians: Japan’s 1937-38 Rape of Nanjing, which killed up to 300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers; the German Blitz of Britain, which killed around 43,000; the US-British firebombing of Dresden, which destroyed 90 percent of the city’s centre and killed at least 25,000 people, many of whom died of suffocation as all available oxygen was consumed by the conflagration; there are numerous other examples.
If the ruling classes of the warring countries had a similar amoral sense (the belief that any slaughter they engaged in was justified), the course of the war and a technological lead gave the US rulers the opportunity and confidence that they could get away with the greatest atrocities. In the last year of the war, US air raids systematically destroyed Tokyo, taking advantage of the large number of highly combustible houses to create firestorms. Early on 10 March 1945, some 279 US bombers firebombed most of eastern Tokyo, killing 90,000 to 100,000 people and leaving a million homeless; the destruction was even greater than that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In part, the atomic bombs were more “efficient” than earlier air raids: in the 10 March raid on Tokyo, fourteen US aircraft were shot down. But strategic decisions directed against the Soviet Union were a more important consideration. This was summed up by South Africa’s Nelson Mandela in 2003:
“Fifty-seven years ago, when Japan was retreating on all fronts, they [the US] decided to drop the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Killed a lot of innocent people, who are still suffering from the effects of those bombs. Those bombs were not aimed against the Japanese. They were aimed against the Soviet Union. To say, look, this is the power that we have. If you dare oppose what we do, this is what is going to happen to you.”
Looking forward to the next war between the “allies” was also evident in a memo issued to British airmen on the night of the attack on Dresden:
“The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
When the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949, considerably earlier than the US expected, the US quickly recognised a need to “outcompete” its rivals, beginning serious steps toward developing a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb. An investigation of the desirability and possibility of building the new bomb, chaired by Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had headed the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos laboratory, concluded: “The extreme danger to mankind inherent in the proposal wholly outweighs any military advantage”.
The extreme danger to the human race was less important than the military needs of imperialism. US President Harry Truman approved the development of the hydrogen bomb in January 1950. The first thermonuclear bomb was tested on 1 November 1952. It was more than 450 times as powerful as the Nagasaki bomb, with an explosive force of 15 megatons of TNT.
The US thermonuclear monopoly lasted less than a year, the Soviet Union testing its first hydrogen bomb in the following August. And although 15 megatons was an already unimaginable force, the Soviet government in 1961 tested a bomb with a force of 50 megatons. Within the test zone, brick buildings 55km from ground zero were destroyed. The heat from the blast was capable of causing third-degree burns 100km away. 
That test was, in part, an experiment designed to discover whether there was any inherent limit to the potential explosive power of a nuclear bomb. There wasn’t; in a report for the US Atomic Energy Commission, physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Isaac Rabi concluded that hydrogen bombs potentially have “unlimited destructive power”.
At the time, the 50-megaton thermonuclear bomb was too heavy to be carried by any existing missile or aeroplane. But technological “progress” has since created hydrogen bombs light enough for ten or more to be carried by a single missile.
And yet, today, all of the nine nuclear-armed states—United States, Russia, France, United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea—are attempting to “modernise” their arsenals, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions”.
SIPRI calculates the world nuclear arsenal at 12,241 warheads. “An estimated 3,912 of those warheads were deployed with missiles and aircraft ... Around 2,100 of the deployed warheads were kept in a state of high operational alert on ballistic missiles. Nearly all of these warheads belonged to Russia or the USA, but China may now keep some warheads on missiles during peacetime.”
In 2010, the USA and Russia agreed to a treaty (New Start) to limit their nuclear stockpiles and the number of warheads deployed on strategic missiles. But that treaty expires next February, and neither side has shown any real interest in renewing it, so the number of warheads able to be fired in minutes if not seconds is expected to increase.
Despite most nuclear arsenals being labelled “deterrents” by those who wield them, no government keeps nuclear bombs for peaceful purposes; they are intended for use when military and political conditions make that seem advisable. While the US and Russia have the biggest stockpiles, does anyone imagine that moral or humanitarian considerations would have more of a restraining influence on Benjamin Netanyahu than they have on Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin? At least one minister within the Israeli government has publicly advocated using an atomic bomb against Gaza—on which Israel has already inflicted destruction comparable to what was done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In short, the danger of capitalist governments letting loose nuclear weapons has not significantly decreased since 1945; in many respects, it is greater.

Allen Myers

A warning from history: ‘This is what is going to happen to you’

Leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Western imperialism’s key military alliance, describe recently announced increases in European arms spending as a collective effort to “safeguard our freedom and democracy”. Some commentators have been even more emphatic in advocating stepped-up European armament. Writing in the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e0bd86f9-fd4a-4802-8199-44daaa97d13a">Financial Times</a> earlier this year, Bronwen Maddox, director of the London-based think tank Chatham House, called military spending “the essential public benefit above all”, placing it above expenditures on hospitals, pensions, education and other social services.
While such “public good” narratives dominate official chatter, another motive lies behind the rhetoric: consolidating Europe as the 21st century’s third global power alongside the United States and China. Three developments illustrate the scale and nature of the economic and military shift now under way.
First is the sharp increase in arms spending over the last decade. In 2024, European NATO members collectively spent nearly US$500 billion on “defence”—a 72 percent increase since 2014, adjusted for inflation. Over the past decade, military budgets more than tripled in Poland, Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania, and more than doubled in twelve other European NATO members. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, nearly doubled its military spending in real terms.
Second is the ReArm Europe Plan (as though Europe is currently disarmed), announced by the European Council in March. ReArm authorises European Union member states to increase borrowing to boost military spending by €800 billion over the next five years. It marks a significant policy shift, overriding the debt and deficit limits set by the 2012 European Fiscal Compact—a treaty requiring governments to keep deficits below 3 percent of GDP—and directing the European Investment Bank to prioritise lending to arms manufacturers.
Third is <a href="https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_236705.htm">the Hague Declaration</a> coming out of last month’s NATO summit, which goes further again. NATO is the closest thing Europe has to a unified continental military command. On average, its members spend just over 2 percent of GDP on defence. While the March ReArm Europe Plan allowed for extra spending of up to 1.5 percent of GDP, the NATO summit in June committed members to allocating 5 percent of GDP annually to the military, including security-related infrastructure. It also requires annual progress reports demonstrating “a credible, incremental path” towards this goal.
The aim is to increase Europe’s economic and military power through substantial investments in military-industrial capacity and weapons production. As Andrius Kubilius, European commissioner for defence and space, stated in a media release accompanying the announcement, “This is not just about military strength—it is about our readiness, strategic autonomy, and the future of Europe as a global player”.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for increased European military spending. In 2018, he suggested that it should rise to 4 percent of GDP. At the time, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-tells-nato-leaders-to-increase-defense-spend-to-4-percent-idUSKBN1K12BW/">according to Reuters reporters in Brussels</a>, NATO allies “shrugged off the demand”.
However, the astonishing surge of China’s industrial, technological and military capacities has left US strategists increasingly rattled about Washington’s declining relative power in the western Pacific. European leaders now appear to have recognised an opportunity as the US threatens to reduce its military commitments on the continent. In May, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared his ambition for the Bundeswehr to become the “strongest conventional army in Europe”. French President Emmanuel Macron, a long-time advocate of “strategic autonomy”—that is, less reliance on the US military—affirmed that the EU must become “a space power once again”.
New York Times correspondents <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/world/europe/macron-starmer-merz-trump-eu.html">Michael Shear and Jim Tankersley now report</a> that Britain, France and Germany, “are building parallel diplomatic and defense institutions for a future without the United States as the primary guarantor of economic and military security” in the region. The three countries, which have long been the dominant imperialist states in Western Europe, look to be entering an era of military coordination that is perhaps unprecedented.
The claims that current tensions signal a historic rift between the US and Europe is not particularly convincing, however. Those old enough to remember transatlantic discord over the Iraq invasion in 2002-03, which in part was a US attack on European interests, might recall a State Department spokesperson ridiculing Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg as “chocolate makers” after they held “a little bitty summit” to moot plans for an alternative military command to NATO. Or the time US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed Paris and Berlin as irrelevant “old Europe” has-beens. There was even a directive to congressional cafes to rename “French fries” and “French toast” to “Freedom fries” and “Freedom toast”. (Childish, petty politics predate Trump.)
Today, the European powers will likely uphold and reinforce the broader Western imperial bloc by augmenting their own capacities and allowing Washington to refocus its energies. “The ‘triangle alliance’, as Britain, France and Germany are sometimes now called, are already partners through NATO and the Group of 7—forums that include the United States”, Shear and Tankersley note. “Officials for the three European countries are careful to say that the institutions they are building are meant to supplement those alliances, not replace them.”
Of course, there are no guarantees in this shifting geopolitical landscape. And the leaders of imperialist states rarely say publicly what they are thinking and saying privately. So time will tell how things pan out. 
Yet some outcomes seem certain—most notably, who will ultimately bear the cost of this military build-up. The exemption of military spending from the European Fiscal Compact is particularly significant. Along with the deficit limit, the agreement requires EU members to maintain public debt below 60 percent of GDP. Though only loosely enforced, the compact has long been cited to justify cuts to working-class payments, pensions and public services.
Fiscal restraint, long demanded of governments, has now been relaxed—but exclusively for funds directed to arms manufacturers and related contractors. For everyone else, ever more “restraint” is on the cards. Maddox quoted an unnamed senior European minister speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February: “For 30 years, we have been taking money out of defence budgets and putting it into health and welfare. Now, we will have to reverse that”. 
In a <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/37053b2b-ccda-4ce3-a25d-f1d0f82e7989">Financial Times column</a> the following month, Janan Ganesh, a prominent British conservative commentator, asserted that, compared to rearmament, “all other priorities are secondary” and argued for Europe to become “a more militarised, less welfarist continent”. He added, “[T]he welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt”.
With European military outlays expected to more than double in the next decade, some governments are relying on increased borrowing or creative accounting to meet their targets. However, borrowing will be only a stopgap if the 5 percent mark is to be met. Many governments hold debt-to-GDP ratios <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w/2-22042025-bp">well above the average</a> (80 percent), and well above the level demanded by the Fiscal Compact. Greece (154 percent), Italy (135 percent), France (113 percent), Belgium (105 percent) and the UK (95 percent, albeit no longer part of the union) have already come under pressure to reduce spending to pay creditors. So even with fiscal rules being relaxed, the spectre of significant cuts to living standards looms.
Berlin has one of the more “balanced” budgets and therefore more fiscal room than most governments. It is embarking on a €400 billion borrowing binge to increase military spending from €95 billion in 2025 to €162 billion in 2029. Yet this month, the government announced that it will cut unemployment entitlements by between one and two billion euros, alongside reductions in rent support payments. “It should be called basic security and no longer citizens’ money”, <a href="https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/german-government-announces-unemployment-benefit-cuts">Chancellor Merz told Markus Preiss</a>, a presenter on one of the country’s public broadcasters, last week. 
In France, Prime Minister François Bayrou has announced sweeping spending cuts—including public sector lay-offs, eliminating public holidays and freezing tax brackets and welfare payments next year—to reduce the budget by nearly €44 billion. He described the country’s debt as a “mortal danger” that threatens to “crush” France. Yet he insists that military spending is “sacrosanct”. Last Sunday, President Macron announced a €6.5 billion increase to the defence budget.
While a few countries may have little interest in meeting a 5 percent military spending target—Spain has flatly refused to entertain the idea—the major European powers are moving decisively toward rearming and retooling their economies for geopolitical competition. If they succeed, the continent will increasingly come to resemble the United States: a society in which the military-industrial complex becomes economically overweight and increasingly politically influential.
That makes European rearmament a global problem. So too the attacks on European welfare. If some of the wealthiest countries in the world begin treating social welfare as secondary—to be sacrificed in favour of militarisation—it could signal a global shift. Workers worldwide have often pointed to Europe as evidence that governments have the resources to provide for citizens. If the message coming from European capitals is that this can no longer be the case, ruling classes everywhere will point to the new European model as the future, and paint social welfare as the legacy of a bygone era. Workers and the poor will face the prospect not only of being left to fend for themselves in an increasingly dog-eat-dog world, but of being enlisted to kill each other in a 21st-century-style imperialist Hunger Games.

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