Events on the international stage are roiling, threatening the very future of humanity. There is no going back to the international “order” that has prevailed over the past 80 years—as oppressive to the majority of humanity and the planet as that has been. The rapid fire of events and developments in just the past week drives that home. 

• Trump not only continued to threaten Iran with renewing and escalating the war after the election, he also moved a third aircraft carrier strike group into the Mideast to concretely prepare that. Iran responded both with continued offers of peace but also stepped up attacks on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has largely shut down in retaliation for the U.S. war and which the U.S. has been trying to open back up. 

• Iran’s ally in Yemen, an armed Islamic fundamentalist group called the Houthis, that governs northern Yemen and is at war with the Saudi-backed “official” regime, seized a major port city. They threatened ships passing through the nearby Strait of Bab al Mandab that is one of the major shipping lanes connecting Europe to Asia. They launched serious attacks on Saudi Arabia, a major U.S. ally, killing over 30 people; Trump declared he was weighing whether to join the war on the Saudi side. (Go here and here to learn about the genocidal war waged by the Saudis against the Houthis—supported by both Democratic and Republi-fascist presidents—plunging Yemen into famine and cholera.) 

• Then, this past Friday, Trump announced a major deal for diesel with Russia. He temporarily lifted some sanctions that had been put on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine four years ago, and then immediately denounced Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not going along with this. In so definitively siding with Putin, Trump not only made a major shift in favor of Russia, he went further in ranging himself against the other nations in NATO (the alliance of the European imperialist powers which the U.S. led in assembling after World War II, and which has been a cornerstone up to now of how the U.S. dominated the world).

Through it all, China—which has risen over the past 30 years to now pose a strategic threat to U.S. domination around the world—has been providing support for Iran, as well as Russia, and seizing strategic advantage of U.S. difficulties in waging these wars.¹ 

Each of these developments is important—and explosive—in its own right, but taken together they are more than just the sum of their parts. They are tightly bound together, with each one interacting with and affecting the other, in unpredictable ways. This widening conflict holds the risk of escalating, including to nuclear weapons. The whole order put together by the U.S. imperialists after World War II and then strengthened after the fall of the Soviet Union over 30 years ago has been running up against its limits, and this is now being sharply expressed in the international arena as a whole. What happens in one part of the world can and does have profound ramifications as soon as the next day or week on the other side of the planet.

There Are No Tears to Shed for What Went Before

To be clear: there are no tears to shed for that old order. The horror, devastation and misery it wreaked all over the planet through its “80 years of peace” was terrible. You can go here, to our American Crimes page, to get just an inkling. But the new, fascist-initiated imperialist order now coming into being threatens to impose an even deeper level of barbarity and the heightening possibility of human extinction, whether through environmental destruction, nuclear war, or some combination of the two. And this will be true even if the mainstream imperialists were to somehow come into power. It is a system—the system of capitalism-imperialism—that is every day more and more running up against its limits. 

Bob Avakian, the revolutionary leader and architect of the new communism, has provided the orientation through which to approach all this:

The interests, objectives, and grand designs of the imperialists are not our interests—they are not the interests of the great majority of people in the U.S. nor of the overwhelming majority of people in the world as a whole. And the difficulties the imperialists have gotten themselves into in pursuit of these interests must be seen, and responded to, not from the point of view of the imperialists and their interests, but from the point of view of the great majority of humanity and the basic and urgent need of humanity for a different and better world, for another way. 

—Bob Avakian, BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian, 3:8

Imperialism is a system, and not a policy. It does not depend on who is in office. Both parties fight for its interests, even as they may differ, sometimes very sharply, as is the case now, over how best to defend those interests. Here too BA provides important grounding: 

Imperialism means huge monopolies and financial institutions controlling the economies and the political systems—and the lives of people—not just in one country but all over the world. Imperialism means parasitic exploiters who oppress hundreds of millions of people and condemn them to untold misery; parasitic financiers who can cause millions to starve just by pressing a computer key and thereby shifting vast amounts of wealth from one place to another. Imperialism means war—war to put down the resistance and rebellion of the oppressed, and war between rival imperialist states—it means the leaders of these states can condemn humanity to unbelievable devastation, perhaps even total annihilation, with the push of a button.

Imperialism is capitalism at the stage where its basic contradictions have been raised to tremendously explosive levels. But imperialism also means that there will be revolution—the oppressed rising up to overthrow their exploiters and tormentors—and that this revolution will be a worldwide struggle to sweep away the global monster, imperialism.

—Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:6

A Rare Time When Revolution Is More Possible

Let’s fix on that last point: that “imperialism also means that there will be revolution.” It is precisely at a time like this—when the contradictions of the system begin to boil over and the system itself increasingly runs up against its limits… when those who have run it are in sharp conflict with each other over how to deal with that situation and the old ways of settling those conflicts are shattering… when people find themselves jerked out of their slumber by events down the street or halfway around the world that “shock the conscience”—it is in these kinds of times that revolution to end that system of horrors is more possible.

And here’s what’s critically important. Because of the work that Bob Avakian has been doing for decades, humanity now has a fully scientific method and approach with which to comprehend what we face and a strategy for how to prepare now in order to seize on all that for fundamental revolutionary change. He has brought forward the new communism, one which builds on the important and profound insights of the first stage of communist revolution, while casting off that which was unscientific and forging a whole new synthesis of how to understand the world… and how to act to change it. This new communism is the key to enabling everyone to understand the deep and inescapable contradictions of this system that is driving this madness at an accelerating pace… to understand—and take advantage of—the weaknesses, stresses and conflicts within that system that make revolution more possible in this time… and to not only make that revolution when the time is ripe but to make it a real leap toward getting rid of all the chains on humanity.

It is critical as well to engage and wage vigorous struggle with people very broadly in these tumultuous days and weeks—those who have been politically active, as well as those who may newly rush into activity, or who may even stand aside but are deeply taking things in. It is critical to wake them up to what is actually happening and what are the terms through which to view it: not me or “my people”—or still less “my country”—but for the emancipation of all humanity… the eight billion on this planet whose very fate right now is in the hands of heartless monsters. In all this, it is important to wage struggle over the real road forward—not whether this or that program “makes me feel like I’m doing something worthwhile,” but what will actually match up to this challenge humanity is facing. 

For this we urge readers to get into, or return to and spread, Bob Avakian’s recent work Humanity On The Brink—A Forced March Into the Abyss, Or Forging A Way Out of the Madness—as well as his current essays and other seminal works of BA elsewhere on this site. 

That choice—between the abyss that this capitalist-imperialist system is marching us into, or the way out that we must and can forge, together—is existential. The time to make that choice is now.