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The Resist US-Led War Movement salutes Iran and the Axis of Resistance for its continuous struggle and victories against US imperialist war. The Iranian people's steadfast unity showed that the years of sanctions, assassination of their leaders, bombing of their homes and schools, and murder of their school children by the US-Zionist warmongers can be defeated by a people resolved to defend their national sovereignty and independence. This victory is a significant contribution to the struggle of all peoples to end US-led wars and their root, US imperialism. As such, we in the movement for a genuine, just peace have a responsibility to stand in steadfast solidarity to defend it while also working to put an end to the continuing US-Zionist attacks on Lebanon and Palestine. Throughout the war, the Trump regime showed that the only card it had to play was its military--and just a few weeks into the war, it became clear that the so-called "most lethal military in the world" and its most lethally-armed Zionist attack dog would fail to topple Iran, which exploited US weaknesses not only militarily, through the targeting of US bases and assets in the region, but also economically, by taking control of the Strait of Hormuz and targeting key oil infrastructure of US allies in the Gulf. Diplomatically, the US also grew more and more isolated, with its allies in Europe and Asia refusing to help it militarily in this war of choice. Iran thus succeeded in forcing the US to make major concessions in negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), with the final terms of a deal to be settled after a period of 60 days after the MOU is signed including: permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon; removal of the US naval blockade on Iran; $300 billion for reconstruction of Iran; termination of all sanctions on Iran; agreement to not impose any new sanctions and to not deploy additional forces in the region; directing the US Dept of Treasury to grant waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation; and unfreezing or lifting restrictions on funds and assets of Iran. Not to be trusted, the US and Israel have continued their acts of aggression even during negotiations and despite the ceasefires in Lebanon and Palestine, showing how flimsy any words and agreements made by the US and Israel are. This includes the deadly Zionist airstrikes in the South and Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in recent days which have killed dozens of people, and the incessant killings of civilians in Palestine. This even includes the Trump regime's continued and constant threats to return to full scale war. In response to these violations, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz again showing that it won't back down amidst U.S.-Zionist continued aggression against the people of West Asia. The lesson here is not that US imperialism and Zionist occupation and aggression are treacherous, that we already knew. The more important lesson is that the peoples' struggles of Iran and the Axis of Resistance are stronger than the paper tiger. The people's struggles endure because they are rooted in the defense of dignity, sovereignty and collective survival. This lesson resonates with all the oppressed peoples of the global south, who recognize that it is they themselves who have the right to determine their nation's own destiny, not any outside force. Iran and the Axis of Resistance have clearly exposed the limits of US imperialist power, demonstrating that Iran's sovereignty cannot simply be bombed into surrender and the alliance with US imperialism that the gulf states so passionately forged has proven to be paper thin and that puppetry with the US does not win security or independence. This is because US imperialism, with its war machine and its lackeys, like Israel, is the main obstacle to genuine peace in the world. War will exist as long as imperialism exists, and the resistance forces in West Asia continue to pose one of the greatest challenges to this economic system led by the U.S., a system that supports the existence of the settler colonial and genocidal entity of Israel. It is the duty of the peace loving people of the world to rally in support of this people's resistance, to act in solidarity with this force which is fighting against full US domination in the region. The peace movement must protest U.S. and Zionist embassies, take to the streets, shut down US military bases, blockade arms shipments to Israel and the Gulf monarchies, target the war profiteers enabling these genocides and wars against the people of West Asia and the world, like Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, PALANTIR, Bell and RTX or multinational mining and tech companies that build the systems and provide the natural resources for the weapons of war. The people will not rest until every imperialist force is driven out of West Asia and the world.  All across the world, some form of war proliferates. There are active kinetic wars, the preparations for greater war, staging for war, war games, and other forms of militarization that cause devastating effects on peoples' lives and livelihoods. The US is an imperialist power in decline, finding itself more isolated than ever, yet precisely because it is in decline it is desperately trying to cling to its position as the number one hegemon in the world, making it the number one threat to peace and stability in the world. With its economic strength waning and China's rising, it turns to its only other option to cling to power--that is its military, an immense complex that consumes nearly $1 trillion in spending this year and which Trump recently proposed to increase to $1.5 trillion next year, far far larger than the nearly $9 billion of the next 10 largest militaries combined in the world after itself.
All counter-revolutionary wars today are a direct outcome of imperialism. The only way to end these wars is to end imperialism, and to do that, the people must resist and fight against them, up to the waging of revolutionary wars waged by liberation movements to end imperialist exploitation and oppression. This is a just and necessary response to imperialist wars and the exploitative system that they protect. What other option do oppressed peoples and nations have in the face of such a system? Today i will provide a few points of analysis of the contradictions inherent to imperialism to help us understand the root causes of war and militarism toward the building of an international united front for just and lasting peace. The Contradictions of Imperialism and Flashpoints of US-Led War One contradiction is between the workers and the monopoly capitalist ruling class. The latter always seeks to maximize its profit, and this will always be by laying claim to the labor power of workers who sell their labor power in order to survive. In this relationship, workers experience constant skyrocketing inflation, unemployment, food shortages, and forced migration while the profiteers in government hold the power of the state to start new wars for their own gains. Another contradiction of imperialism is that between oppressed nations and peoples on one hand, and the imperialist countries on the other. The imperialist ruling class is never satisfied with exploiting the labor of just the workers within its own countries. Its endless drive for profit pushes it to violently expand. In this way, wars will always be instigated by imperialist states to grab the land and resources of other nations and peoples. In trying to secure more labor to exploit and more land and resources to plunder, the US has installed new puppets or strengthened their sitting lap dogs or ensured chronic instability in countries like the Philippines, Haiti, El Salvador where puppets are more than willing to enter new deals to sell off our land, build new bases, open up special economic zones for the manufacturing of weapons and war technology, or rent out prisons to cage deported migrants from the US and use arms supplied by the US and military trained by the US to violently suppress people who rise up and resist. In its colonies like Puerto Rico and Guahan, the US has drastically increased its military presence, by reopening former installations like Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico where they brought in F-35s and 15,000 troops to stage for the attack on Venezuela; or by increasing the scale and frequency and types of war drills practiced in military exercises in Guahan to practice for a future war with China. To secure their spheres of influence in the neocolonies, the US has updated old frameworks like the Monroe Doctrine in tandem with launching new initiatives like the Shield of the Americas, to regain or hold on to access to land, minerals, transport routes, agricultural production, and cheap labor by formalizing alliances with willing governments in Latin America and the Caribbean to arm and expand military operations under the guise of controlling the flow of migration and drugs. The US has devised new schemes like the Pax Silica initiative, to secure its dominance in chips, AI and high tech by controlling supply chains, critical minerals and industrial hubs in the US and in the allied countries under the guise of mutual economic security, when it is really about subjugating the economies of its puppets and even its imperialist allies to the priorities of Washington. The US has forged a multitude of bilateral Status of Forces Agreement and other multilateral military agreements with countries stretching from the arctic through Europe, down through Latin America and across Asia and the Pacific to ensure US forces can operate, train and even conduct operations on the sovereign soil of other countries with or without the establishment of formal bases. And the US continues to try to impose its vision of a new middle east and greater israel, using its zionist attack dog to commit genocide of the Palestinian people and wage war on Lebanon and Iran. All of this fuels poverty, starvation, and lack of jobs and livelihood--and forces people to flee and migrate to Europe, Canada and here to the US. As I look around this hall, I see many people who are here as a result of these conditions, members of diaspora communities driven here because of imperialist greed and then subjected to the fascist repression faced by all the working people in this country. Nations will never take this blatant oppression lying down forever, and so another inherent contradiction of imperialism is that between the imperialist states and those asserting their national independence from foreign aggression and wars of intervention. Under this imperialist system, in just the last year we have seen the drastic escalation of this contradiction. This has looked like the bombings and invasions, kidnappings or assassinations of resistant leaders with the intent to install leaders more willing to comply with the US dictates. We saw the attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Maduro and First Combatant Cilia Flores; the US-Zionist ongoing war on Iran; the extreme strangling blockade on Cuba and aggressive threats to invade and take over the country; the threats against Nicaragua and Colombia and the meddling in the elections of the latter. On the flip side, we have also seen nations in the Sahel--Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger – taking advantage of weakness of French imperialists to eject their former colonizers. Since these countries are actively pushing back against unilaterally imposed sanctions, attempted coups, and other destabilization machinations of the imperialists, both the workers of the world and oppressed nations striving for liberation can find a friend in these states keeping imperialism at bay. Iran especially has shown that the US can be checked, as Trump scrambles to eek out a win against a country he has not been able to defeat. Finally, we see the intensifying competition between the biggest imperialist powers heightening all of the other contradictions. In fact, the key contradiction in the world that is driving US-led wars and aggression is the US competition with China. As they battle for land, resources, markets and labor power, they engage in tariff wars, proxy wars, propaganda wars, wars of aggression, wars of counterinsurgency against resistance in various countries, and fascist repression of their own people and by their puppets, all of which further immiserates the masses in their wake. For example, The Korean Peninsula is one of the key flashpoints in the US's war drive in the Pacific. The US is infuriated that it has not been able to defeat the DPRK's socialist construction for nearly 75 years. 62 military bases in the South facilitate a massive US aggression conducting 274-275 military exercises a year. The Demilitarized Zone between South Korea and the DPRK is the most militarized border on the planet, with the US-backed Korean War between the two never having formally ended. Despite years of advocacy for peaceful reunification from the DPRK, the US puppet regime in Seoul has constantly prepared for war for decades. The South China Sea is the other key flashpoint in the Pacific. As China expands its influence over the key trading routes and basing areas of the waterways, the US goads Southeast Asian countries into accepting its patronage to drag them into an open war with China. The Philippines is the key US outpost in this regard. Drawing on the revolutionary spirit of the historic anti-US resistance, the Filipino people waged a long campaign that successfully closed all the US bases in the former US colony. However, Philippine laws like the Visiting Forces Agreement and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement brought the US military presence back. Recent military sites under the legal auspice of EDCA are nearly all in line with the First Island Chain's path through the coasts of the country facing China. Japan's recent bilateral mutual defense treaty with the Philippines and the trilateral JAPHUS treaty including the US also shows Japan's willingness to bolster the US presence on the archipelago, and just last month for the first time since WWII, Japan sent troops to the Phlippines to participate in the annual US-led multi-lateral war exercises Balikatan, trainings which include rehearsals for beach landings of Taiwan. And a recent launching of a Tomahawk missile across the archipelago. Around these sites of militarization, communities mobilize to fight back against the killings of peasants and people in fishing communities, violence against women, and the de facto martial law of the fascist US-armed Philippine military. The many Pacific Island nations, caught in the iron web of the US "Island Chains", face massive expansion of military bases and live-fire exercises and dwindling social spending. With new exploration contracts being offered for deep sea mining and claims by large plundering seafood corporations of "illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU)" fishing against small fisherfolk, the US in particular has heavily militarized the area, providing state of the art coast guard boats, helicopters and training services to local militaries, mostly through the US colonial presence on the Marshall Islands US Coast Guard base. Yet the many people of these strong island nations have banded together over the many years to challenge base construction and the expansion of exercises at every step of the way through coordinated advocacy and mass mobilization. While these conflicts already cause great violence, instability, and displacement for people in the countries in which they occur, this rivalry also has the potential to turn regional wars of aggression into full-blown world war in the direct clash for endless profit. Together, these many flashpoints of struggle demonstrate the vast spread of the US war machine. But it also shows how this machine, at every single stage that it rears its ugly head, can be confronted and is challenged by the people of the region, arm in arm with an international movement against US-led war. The contractions of imperialism continue to heighten and the people stir and unite as US imperialism finds itself stretched beyond control. The exploited working and toiling classes of the people are confronting their exploiters in each of their countries. The oppressed nations are hammering at their imperialist chains and confronting the puppet regimes gatekeeping their liberation. The independent countries of the world are holding fast to their sovereignty against all forms of imperialist intervention. Together, they all find themselves in a common fight for peace and self-determination as inter-imperialist competition and rising peoples' movements drive the US towards its inevitable downfall. Along with wide scale mass mobilizations against US bases, joint exercises, and US-led counterinsurgency campaigns, armed liberation movements against the fascist regimes carrying out the will of US-led war fight on fiercely in the Philippines, Palestine, India, West Papua, and beyond. The time is ripe to bind our struggles together, wage militant struggle in each country to win a just and lasting peace. Together, we will break and shatter the US's overstretched "Island Chains" and Donroe Doctrines and forge new bonds of peace, liberation, and international solidarity. |