In his book, Vietnam: The (Last) War the U.S. Lost, Joe Allen analyses why President Lyndon Johnson decided on all-out war in Vietnam rather than make a deal that was on offer with nationalist forces.
He writes, “The Johnson administration chose war because anything less than a total victory of U.S. imperialism would be seen as a defeat. As Lyndon Johnson put it in 1964, ‘Surrender anywhere threatens defeat everywhere’.
“This wasn’t some peculiar perspective of Johnson and his advisers; it flowed from the position that the United States found itself in after the Second World War as the guardian of the capitalist world…..Vietnam was the weakest link in the chain of American imperialism during the Kennedy and Johnson years.”
The US is hugely weaker than it was in 1964. Economically and politically, it cannot claim to be the “guardian of the capitalist world”. In an effort to maintain its declining hegemony US rulers have launched brutal military interventions for decades, many of which have ended in costly and bloody defeat.
But it is very important to recognise that, as Trump weighs whether to implement his murderous threat that he would bomb Iran “back to the stone ages, where they belong”, he is again acting in the interests of at least a substantial section of the US ruling class and its corporate and banking elite.
He is not an aberration; he expresses a capitalist strategy at a time of overlapping and extreme crises.
The desperate grouping in the White House is so used to every imperialist horror that it believes it can repeat Gaza in a country of 92 million people. And this is necessary, these monsters believe, because otherwise the US will lose out, principally to China, in a redivision of the world based on shifting economic power. Such redivision lay behind the First and Second World Wars.
The threat is so great that it is necessary to strip away the previous lying rhetoric about humanitarian intervention and wars for democracy. Instead, there must be war abroad and war at home. Fire and ICE.
If the US loses to Iran, what will its rivals do? They will see not the kidnapping of Maduro in Venezuela but the humiliation of downed jets and anguished hunts for their crew, spreading economic crisis, allies suffering extensive damage, Iranian defiance and resilience. Perhaps Trump will see even worse defeats looming and try to fool the world into believing he has won.
But there is also immense pressure to wade deeper into the river of blood in the search for victory. That was what Johnson did in the 1960s.
It was US Air Force general Curtis LeMay, who came up with the phrase “back to the Stone Age” in Vietnam. LeMay had planned and organised the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, the deadliest air raid in history, killing an estimated 100,000 civilians and destroying much of the city in one night.
Twenty years later, he wrote, “My solution to the problem would be to tell North Vietnam frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.” For LeMay the use of nuclear weapons would have been acceptable.
But in the end, the US lost.
Our task is not to guess at Trump’s next genocidal lurch. It is to find ways to act against the US and the system that spawns imperialist horror.
It is to build on the mass feeling against the warmongers, to infuse every strike and struggle and election campaign now with anti-war feeling, to take action in Glasgow on 11 April, on the streets of London for Palestine and against the far right on 16 May.
This is not a time for business as usual.
The war is not only a vile and imperialist crime, but it’s also going to hit the living standards of every working class person in the world.
Price rises, shortages, deepening inequality, profits for the top, hardship for the rest.
So we need agitation and propaganda that is BOTH no to the war, no use of British bases AND to fight for price caps, rent freezes, no wage deals less than the RPI figure and linked to any rise in RPI later this year when all the increases in fuel and energy hit hardest, windfall taxes, a big rise in corporation tax, nationalising energy, water, transport and other key areas of the economy under democratic control to deal with shortages and distribution etc. Wage talks must now be transformed, linked to anti-imperialism as well as the usual issues.
This is not just a moment of Trumpist violence; it changes everything. And many millions across the world are ready to fight against imperial horrors.
Trump hoorays that the US has recovered its killers from the air, can turn to dust.