Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.wsws.org
Ukraine attacked Russia with more than 1,000 drones overnight Saturday, in the largest bombardment of St. Petersburg since the Second World War. The attack, in which Russia’s Defense Ministry counted 1,015 drones across 15 regions, Crimea and the Black Sea, was one of the heaviest bombardments of Russian territory since the war began.
These strikes are directly funded by the NATO powers, which have provided Ukraine with over $100 billion in weapons, and are carried out on the basis of targeting data provided directly by their militaries.
The latest attack is a response by the NATO powers to the warning Russia gave European governments on September 30, that threats to Russia’s territorial integrity would be met with “the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons.”
Faced with this blunt warning that their actions risk triggering a nuclear war, the NATO powers are escalating. On October 12, General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s top commander in Europe, threatened to “break” the enemy’s “warfighting system,” including “anything and everything that supports, sustains, or controls that force.”
Under these conditions, there is a growing admission within the US and international media that NATO and Russia are entering a “world war.” In one of the foremost examples, the Financial Times published Saturday a column titled, “Are we sleepwalking into World War III?” by its chief foreign affairs commentator, Gideon Rachman.
Rachman declares that, “Regions and countries that have for decades taken peace for granted—western Europe, east Asia, the Gulf states—now have to wrestle with the prospect, or the reality, of war.” It has become “commonplace,” he notes, “for world leaders to speculate publicly about the outbreak of a third world war.”
Rachman, citing a quote attributed to Leon Trotsky, declares, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
But the US and Europe are not “sleepwalking” into World War III. They have been marching toward it since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The first President Bush proclaimed a “new world order” on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War. That war was followed by the intervention in Somalia, the bombing of Bosnia and the 1999 war against Serbia, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the proxy war in Syria and the US-backed Saudi war in Yemen.
Since 2022, these wars have merged into a single global conflagration. It includes the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine; the Israeli genocide in Gaza, armed and defended by Washington; the bombing of Iran in June 2025; and the war against Iran launched on February 28 of this year.
The objective is the redivision of the world among the old imperialist powers. This violent and ongoing project includes the breakup of the existing Russian state, which will open up the vast Eurasian landmass to unfettered capitalist exploitation. For the oligarchs of finance capital, the loss of a few hundred million lives would be a small price to pay for this rich prize.
In Rachman’s telling, however, the danger of world war proceeds entirely from the actions of Russia and China. In this narrative, the threat of “world war” began with the decision Putin made in February 2022, with no antecedent history. Rachman asserts that an inflection point was reached when “Putin launched his ‘special military operation.’ In that time, the global political atmosphere has been transformed.”
The Russian invasion of Ukraine did not come out of nowhere. It was a reactionary and desperate response by the Russian capitalist oligarchy to years of provocations by NATO. NATO’s own leadership has said as much. In an interview published by the Washington Post in May 2023, then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared that the war “didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014.”
Stoltenberg continued, “And since then, NATO has implemented the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War … Until 2014, NATO allies were reducing defense budgets. Since 2014, all allies across Europe and Canada have significantly increased their defense spending … this is a huge transformation of NATO that started in 2014.”
In 2014, the United States funded, armed and supported the coup that overthrew the pro-Russian government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and installed the present regime, a dictatorship ruling under martial law. Since then the United States and NATO, as Stoltenberg explained, surged money and weapons to Ukraine, turning it into a frontline state for war against Russia.
But the Maidan coup was itself an outcome of decades of imperialist policy that had pushed the boundaries of the NATO alliance to Russia’s doorstep.
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Rachman correctly centers the driving force of the eruption of global war in “a shift in the global balance of power.” He notes that, “In 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the G7 nations—the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan—accounted for around two-thirds of global economic output … By 2022, the G7 represented about 43 percent of global GDP.”
This shift, according to Rachman, is “encouraging revisionist powers to challenge the global dominance of the US and its allies.” China’s share of world output rose from under 2 percent in 1989 to about 17 percent in 2024, according to World Bank figures.
However, by 2022, Rachman notes, the G7 still accounted for “about half of global military spending.” The old imperialist powers retain a military superiority they no longer possess economically. It is they, not China, that have spent the past 35 years at war, seeking to reverse by force what they are losing in the world economy.
The most bizarre element of Rachman’s column is his effort to blame the reemergence of global war on the public’s opposition to it. He writes that “the growth of anti-war sentiment in the US” has “created an opening for revisionist powers,” that US President Donald Trump “is clearly attracted to the idea that the US should retreat from its security commitments to its allies” and that “the greatest risk of a third world war may lie in that very uncertainty.”
This argument is nothing but a stock-in-trade trope of the John Birch Society, which argued that the failure of the United States to dominate the world was due to the insufficient commitment of the American government to military violence. By Rachman’s deranged logic, if the populations and governments of every belligerent country were fully committed to war to the last drop of blood, there would be no war!
Beset by an all-pervasive capitalist crisis and the growth of working class opposition, the imperialist powers seek through war a way out of their problems. The global eruption of imperialist war is only intensifying the class struggle and the capitalist crisis. It is driving workers and youth into struggle around the world, from the United States to France—where students and workers filled the streets this week against a government that has billions for rearmament and nothing for social needs.
The working class has no stake in the redivision of the world. It is workers who will be sent to fight and who will die in their millions if the conflict between NATO and Russia crosses the nuclear threshold. It is also the working class that has the power to stop it, through the building of an international socialist movement.
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