In connivance with the current Marcos Jr regime, the United States is set to build at least four additional military bases and facilities in the Philippines. True to its puppet form, Marcos Jr wholeheartedly welcomed US demands in accordance with the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) including a ridiculous deadline to defeat the revolutionary armed movement within his term. On the one hand, the push to transform the Philippines into a US military outpost forms part of US preparations for war against China. But in the grander scheme of things, heightened military tensions in the region are symptomatic of US imperialism’s strategic decline.
From the late 1960s onwards, a convergence of forces started to dramatically work against the United States, effectively challenging its imperialist hegemony. Its economy was being overheated by military production in its war of aggression in Vietnam which did not result in ultimate gains for the country. The phenomenon of stagflation emerged alongside the rise of other capitalist countries which have become imperialist competitors.
US imperialism further decelerated in the 1970s when the Soviet Union caught up on war spending and achieved overall military parity. With capitalist restoration engineered by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1980s, China abandoned the socialist centralized planned economy and developed the market according to ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ eventually becoming the second largest economy in the world which put a further dent to US monopoly. The rise of China, Russia and other capitalist countries heralded the emergence of multipolarity in geopolitics and signaled the strategic decline of US imperialism.
In a multipolar world order, the US is on the offensive for self-preservation of its hegemonic global control of imperialism under severe crisis of overproduction and diminishing super profits. Social crisis and unrest intensify along with political crisis and conflict. In the end, to preserve its financial-economic control of the world’s economy, US imperialism is bound to utilize its machineries for war – by engaging in war and warmongering as in the case of the US-NATO war against Russia and its provocations in the South China Sea.
But arguably more important than the shifting of geopolitical tectonic plates, the revolutionary movements in the exploited countries of the world play an even more vital role in changing the balance of strength between the forces of anti-imperialism and imperialism in the entire world. They have the potential to overthrow pro-imperialist reactionary states and build new states that are completely independent; or push the existing states to become more politically independent of US imperialism and press for a new international economic order.
The ongoing armed revolutionary struggle in the Philippines led by the Communist Party of the Philippines therefore warps the US design. At the same time, the objective conditions of multiple social and economic crises are pushing the Filipino toiling masses to take up arms. These conditions are exceedingly favorable for the advance of anti-imperialist and democratic mass struggles. They arise as a result of the intensifying major contradictions in the world capitalist system. Once more they lay the ground for great disorder and turbulence in this system and the resurgence of the world proletarian socialist revolution.
Confounded by the rapidly worsening crisis of their system as a result of the unraveling of a multipolar world, the traditional and new imperialist powers are prone to seek solutions through intensified economic plunder and predation, fascism and wars of aggression. The people have no choice but to fight back with all vigor.
