Are we heading towards a Third World War?

In this article, we will focus on the arguments of the Internationalist Communist Tendency on the prospect of a Third World War. Among the groups of the communist left outside the ICC, the ICT tends to defend the clearest internationalist positions against imperialist war, and this is why they have always been included in our appeals for the groups of the communist left to make common statements against the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. One of the reasons why the ICT has consistently rejected these appeals is that we have different perspectives on the evolution of the world situation, notably on his issue of a march towards world war.  In our view, while these differences should not stand in the way of such joint actions as issuing common declarations against war, since we both share the same fundamental internationalist principles, they are nevertheless important for the following reasons:

• It is absolutely essential for revolutionaries to have a clear grasp of the main tendencies in the world situation and thus what they prepare for in the future. Obviously, the perspectives they put forward are subject to ‘testing’ in the living laboratory of history, but working on a purely day-to-day, immediate basis can be dangerous for their practice, their interpretation of current events, and even their capacity to hold on to basic principles;
• In this context, it is vital not to underestimate the main danger facing the working class, which is the accelerating drift of capitalism towards chaotic and uncontrolled military conflicts as part of a bigger spiral of self-destruction involving ecological collapse, economic crisis, and so on;
• It is essential to understand that the proletariat in the central capitalist countries is not faced with conscription into a world war in the foreseeable future, and that the development of the defensive struggle around mainly economic issues is the essential precondition for mounting an offensive struggle against the system as a whole. This is part of the antidote to falling into immediatist ‘anti-war’ strategies which can easily lead to a weakening of internationalism.

The ICT’s position on the alignment of imperialist forces and war preparations

According to the ICT in particular, the world economic crisis resulting from the fall in the rate of profit has reached such a point that only the level of destruction that would result from a Third World War would be sufficient to allow the birth of a “new cycle of accumulation”. We won’t enter into this particular argument here because it is evident that such a level of destruction is far more likely to end in the extinction of humanity than a new period of capitalist prosperity. Rather, we will examine the process that is leading towards such a catastrophic outcome, in order to highlight the most urgent threats to the future of the planet and its inhabitants. And here, the ICC is one of the few revolutionary organisations to argue against the idea that the dominant tendency we are seeing today is the formation of new imperialist blocs and thus a coordinated march towards world war. These two phenomena are inseparably linked, as we wrote in May 2022 in our updated orientation text on militarism and decomposition: 

“a world war is the ultimate phase in the constitution of imperialist blocs. More precisely, it is because of the existence of constituted imperialist blocs that a war which, at the outset, concerns only a limited number of countries, degenerates, through the playing out of alliances, into a generalised conflagration”[1]. 

Our 1991 text on militarism and decomposition[2] was written in the wake of the collapse of the eastern imperialist bloc dominated by the USSR, an event which marked the definitive opening of decadent capitalism’s final phase, the phase of decomposition. It recognised that history had demonstrated that, in the epoch of capitalist decadence, there is a permanent tendency towards the formation of imperialist blocs, and that the disappearance of one imperialist bloc had, hitherto, meant the formation of a new bloc. But having considered the possibility of the emergence of a new bloc around the most economically powerful countries of the day – Germany and Japan – it concluded that neither power was in a position to carry out this role (and still less the former bloc leader, the USSR, which was itself in a phase of disintegration). It then identified the fundamental elements justifying this conclusion:

“At the beginning of the decadent period, and even until the first years of World War II, there could still exist a certain ‘parity’ between the different partners of an imperialist coalition, although it remained necessary for there to be a bloc leader. For example, in World War I there did not exist any fundamental disparity at the level of operational military capacity between the three ‘victors’: Great Britain, France and the USA. This situation had already changed considerably by World War II, when the ‘victors’ were closely dependent on the US, which was already vastly more powerful than its ‘allies’. It was accentuated during the ‘Cold War’ (which has just ended) where each bloc leader, both USA and USSR, held an absolutely crushing superiority over the other countries in the bloc, in particular thanks to their possession of nuclear weapons.

This tendency can be explained by the fact that as capitalism plunges further into decadence:

- the scale of conflicts between the blocs, and what is at stake in them takes on an in­creasingly world-wide and general character (the more gangsters there are to control, the more powerful must be the ‘godfather’);

- weapons systems demand ever more fantastic levels of investment (in particular, only the major powers could devote the necessary resources to the development of a complete nuclear arsenal, and to the research into ever more sophisticated armaments);

- and above all, the centrifugal tendencies amongst all the states as a result of the exacerbation of national antagonisms, cannot but be accentuated.

The same is true of this last factor as of state capitalism: the more the bourgeoisie's different fractions tend to tear each other apart, as the crisis sharpens their mutual competition, so the more the state must be reinforced in order to exercise its authority over them. In the same way, the more the open historic crisis ravages the world economy, so the stronger must be a bloc leader in order to contain and control the tendencies towards the dislocation of its different national components. And it is clear that in the final phase of decadence, the phase of decomposition, this phenomenon cannot but be seriously aggravated.

For all these reasons, especially the last, the reconstitution of a new pair of imperialist blocs is not only impossible for a number of years to come, but may very well never take place again: either the revolution, or the destruction of humanity will come first”.

In our view, this framework remains valid today, even if the 2022 update on the question of militarism and decomposition recognised that in 1991 we had not foreseen the rise of China, permitted by the break-down of the old bloc system and the development of so-called “globalisation”, which in particular took the form of massive capital investment in China, not least from the USA, resulting in the frenzied growth of China as the new “workshop of the world”. However, for the ICT and others, China today is more or less in a position to form a new bloc capable of waging world war against the “West”. As its affiliate in Britain, the Communist Workers Organisation, argued in a recent article:

“the US-led West, by its repeated use of the ‘economic weapon’ has created an alliance of convenience amongst the sanctioned powers (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) which has now taken them into conflict with the West. As the war in Ukraine has already demonstrated, this is not a ‘new Cold War’ as some pundits claimed. The situation is totally different. In the Cold War, both the USSR and US were victorious powers and both had more to lose than gain from outright (and possibly nuclear) war, so conflict was not direct. The nearest they came to blows was in proxy wars and manoeuvres on the global chessboard.

Today the situation is entirely different. Given the stagnation of the capitalist system, no power is economically assured of its future, and all have intensifying problems of debt and declining capacity to maintain the kinds of society they have hitherto maintained. The rise of nationalism is not just found in the West. As is now well established, the unintended consequence of US capital seeking greater profits abroad in the face of the class war at home in 1980s and 1990s has been to nurture a challenger to its own hegemony in China. Here, Xi Jinping has cultivated a similar narrow nationalism asserting China’s new-found economic strength in contrast to the humiliation of its past treatment by foreign powers. And this nationalism is not confined to rhetoric about retaking Taiwan. China is already ahead of the US in several areas of technology (processing rare earths for example) and in AI...

…US military power is still far ahead of the rest of the world, and it is still the only global player in this respect. But cyber-technology and the fact that China has built a more modern fleet, etc., means the gap is closing and there is already a technological arms race between both powers. The rivalry here is not new and not confined to Trump. It was the Obama administration that first recognised the threat when it adopted the ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2011 but the policy then was to get involved with other Asian states (at the time 40% of growth in the world economy was located there) whilst at the same time maintaining direct links with China. Under both Trump and Biden US policy has become more aggressive towards China but whilst Biden sought to build alliances (AUKUS, etc.) in defence of ‘democracy’ against the ‘authoritarian’ states, Trump’s MAGA could be restyled ‘Make America Go it Alone’”. [3]

There is much that is true in this passage. The spectacular development of China as a world power in the twenty-first century marks a new level of bipolarisation of imperialist rivalries, which is the starting point for the formation of actual military blocs. Furthermore, the understanding that China has become the USA’s principal economic and imperialist challenger is indeed common to all the main factions of the US ruling class, from Obama to Trump. But we don’t agree that this means that China is already in a position to form a bloc around itself, for two main reasons:

• First, the Chinese bourgeoisie has itself clearly recognised that it is not yet able to fulfil one of the criteria mentioned in our 1991 text: a crushing military superiority over its potential ‘bloc partners’ and, by extension, a capacity to directly confront its main imperialist rival, the USA. Hence the Chinese road map towards becoming the world’s leading power by 2050 is based first and foremost on the development of its economic power across the world, as embodied in its hugely ambitious “New Silk Road” project, as well as its very real engagement in the technological race with the US. This does not mean of course that these economic projects don’t have a significant military dimension, nor does it rule out the danger of open military conflicts with the US or its allies, notably over the issue of Taiwan or control over the South China Sea. Such conflicts would be highly irrational from the point of view of China’s grand plan, but at the same time they are made more likely by the fact that China is more and more sinking into the economic crisis, and threatened by an ever stronger tendency towards fragmentation, factors that will tend to undermine its long-term economic (and thus military) aspirations and push it towards self-destructive, short-term options.
• An “alliance of convenience” is not a bloc, which as we have said requires submission to a single bloc leader, above all given the unleashing of the ‘every man for himself’ tendency in the phase of decomposition. China’s “everlasting friend”, Russia, maybe be happy to receive China’s economic and ideological support for its Ukraine adventure, but there is no indication that it is willing to subordinate itself to China. Even though Russia’s economy is puny in comparison to China’s, and increasingly weakened by the Ukraine war, Russia still sees itself as a leading military power in its own right, and the history of Sino-Russian relations, punctuated by border disputes and moments of open warfare, has in reality made it wary of being too tightly embraced by its everlasting friend. Similarly, while both Russia and China feted Modi’s appearance at the recent Beijing summit, immediately after India’s row with the US over Trump threatening Delhi with new tariffs, there is a long history of military conflict over the borders between China and India, the latest of which exploded in 2024, while China has consistently supported Pakistan in its disputes with India. So, India certainly has no intention of meekly following China's lead.

These expressions of the disruptive impact of national antagonisms within the “alliance of convenience” are a serious barrier to the formation of a Chinese-led bloc. But even more significant is the fact, noted by the CWO itself, that the US is itself adopting the policy of “Make America Go it Alone” and thus undermining the possibility of a stable alliance between the ‘democracies’. 

In the 1991 test we wrote: “In the new historical period we have entered, and which the Gulf events have confirmed, the world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterized the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the moment. A world of bloody chaos, where the American policeman will try to maintain a minimum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force”.

But while it has by no means renounced the use of massive military force – as we saw, for example, in the recent attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities - the USA’s attempts to “maintain a minimum of order” have ended up with the USA becoming the main factor in the exacerbation of disorder. This was plainly seen in Iraq in 1991 but even more so with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003. And, as we said in many of our resolutions and articles, in contrast to the past when it was the weaker powers that had the main interest in undermining the imperialist status quo, in the phase of decomposition it is the world’s strongest power which has become the main promotor of chaos across the globe. This has now reached the point where the Trump regime is openly saying it is no longer the world’s policeman and is more and more pitting the interests of the US against the rest of the world.

Thus, we can no longer talk about the “West” or a western bloc. The current divorce between the US and Europe, expressed in the very real threat to the future of the NATO alliance, US support for Europe’s populist and far right factions which oppose the European Union, alongside direct US declarations about the possibility of acquiring Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, are the latest stage in the disintegration of the whole ‘international order’ inaugurated in the wake of  World War 2. In this context, the US policy of making the European powers pay for the war in Ukraine is not aimed at increasing the latter’s subservience to an American-led order. This traditional goal has taken second place to the self-destructive drive of the US to undermine all its rivals, to sow chaos and division in the ranks of its former ‘allies’. For their part, as they increasingly see the US not only as an unreliable ally but even as a potential enemy, the commitment of major European powers like Germany to develop their military sector will tend to reinforce their resolve to stand up to American bullying and take their own place in the world imperialist Olympics.

We must add that a precondition for mobilising a state for war is a basic unity between the main factions of the ruling class. This is less and less the case in the US, where divisions within the ruling class – between left and right, Republicans and Democrats, but also between the clan around Trump and other branches of the state machine, and even within the MAGA camp itself, have become so vicious that, if you add to the mix the proliferation of armed groups motivated by all kinds of bizarre ideologies, the potential for civil war in the USA is emerging from out of the murky realms of science fiction and becoming increasingly concrete. 

This growing instability between and within states does not make the world a safer place even if it obstructs the reconstitution of military blocs. On the contrary, the lack of bloc discipline and growing irrationality of governing regimes tends to increase the risk of things getting out of control at the military level. And the menace of militarisation and war is both exacerbated by and further aggravates the danger of ecological breakdown on a planetary scale. Since the beginnings of the 2020s we have been more and more immersed in what the more insightful parts of the bourgeoisie term the “poly crisis” and we have called the “whirlwind effect” - a deadly spiral in which all the different products of a decomposing society act on each other and accelerate the whole drive towards destruction, confirming that the most tangible threat to the survival of human society derives from the process of decomposition in itself.

The two poles in the world situation

But there is another reason why we are moving towards a ‘world of wars’ rather than the reconstitution of blocs in view of a classic world war: the existence of an alternative pole to the spiral of decomposition.

The foundation of decomposition is the stalemate between classes, which means that in last decades of the 20th century, the bourgeoisie, despite the deepening world economic crisis was not able to mobilise the class for a new global war. And in our view the international proletariat has not been subjected to a historic defeat comparable to what it experienced after the crushing of the world revolution from the 1920s on, and which allowed the ruling class to drag it into the Second World War.  Certainly, it has been through a long period of retreat and difficulty, but the revival of class movements sparked off by the “Summer of Discontent” in Britain in 2022 was a sign that the working class, following a long period of subterranean maturation, was returning to the open struggle and embarking on the long road towards the recovery of its class identity and, ultimately, the revolutionary perspective which it can put forward as the only alternative to the putrefaction of this society. It’s true that certain parts of the working class, as in Ukraine and the Middle East, have indeed been dragged off to war, but this does not apply to the central battalions of the working class in Western Europe and North America.

The struggles that began in 2022 were mainly a response to the decline in living conditions brought about by the economic crisis, but it is also significant that they took place despite the outbreak of war on the margins of Europe and despite the intense propaganda campaigns about the need to defend Ukraine and democracy. And as the ruling class commits itself to building up the war economy, and increasingly withdraws financial support from social spending, the connection between the economic crisis and war is becoming increasingly apparent. We can see this, if only indirectly, through the attempts of the left wing of capital to ‘take charge’ of this kind of questioning in the ranks of the proletariat, for example through the popularisation of the slogan “welfare not warfare” in workers’ demonstrations.  

On a more spectacular scale, we have seen the very widespread strikes and demonstrations called by the trade unions in Italy, in particular the more radical “base unions”, in response to the genocide in Gaza and the imprisoning of the activists of the “Subud Flotilla” attempting to bring food and other supplies through the Israeli blockade.  Unlike the regular pro-Palestine marches in London and many other cities, which are obviously dominated by nationalist ideology, these actions give the appearance of being situated on a working class terrain, but as shown in a recent article in the ICT’s Italian publication Battaglia Comunista, they don’t escape the grip of pro-Palestine nationalism and thus the logic of imperialist war:

“Needless to say, the content was marked by humanitarian pacifism and reformism, without a shred of proletarian, i.e., class, internationalism: Palestinian flags dominated unchallenged, accompanied by the usual slogans ‘Free Palestine’, etc. The division of the working class by the unions was clearly visible: on one side were the Si Cobas workers (mostly immigrants), on the other those of the CGIL (mostly Italians), with little discussion. Battaglia Comunista intervened in various cities with a flyer, even though it obviously got lost in the tide of pro-Palestinian nationalism”[4]. 

But whether pacifism or nationalism is the main ideology invoked, such mobilisations are ways of recuperating proletarian indignation against capitalist war. In this case Battaglia was able to hold the class line, but as we have shown in various articles, an inability to understand the totality of forces behind the massacre in Gaza has led numerous would-be internationalists into very dangerous confusions. This has been very obvious with anarchist organisations like the Anarchist Communist Group, with its support for Palestine Action and other pro-Palestine activities, but even a current of the communist left – the Bordigists - has not avoided serious ambiguities around the question[5]. Here we should note that at a recent public meeting of the Bordigist group that publishes The International Communist Party, the ICP comrades made it quite clear that had been fully mobilised behind the strike in Italy, mainly through their involvement in various base unions. We have also argued that the ICT’s ‘strategic’ response to the war drive – the formation of No War But The Class War groups on a minimum platform – not only obscures the real role of the political organisation of the class but has also exposed them to dubious alliances with groups that are mor or less mired in leftism[6].

The problem of revolutionaries failing to demarcate themselves from ‘anti-war’ actions dominated by pacifism or nationalism is linked to a broader problem as mounting disgust not only at war, but also at  capitalist repression and corruption, often mixed in with attacks on basic living conditions, is provoking a wave of revolts around the world: the so-called “Gen-Z” movements in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, Kenya, Madagascar, Morocco and elsewhere, but these are ‘popular’,  movements bringing together different classes and strata, which in themselves cannot develop a proletarian perspective and invariably get trapped in demands for democratic change. And here we have also seen the ICT losing its head and tail-ending such movements. The article in this issue of the International Review, “Falling into the trap of the struggle for bourgeois democracy against populism [1]”, provides us with a number of examples.[7]

These mobilisations – to which we can add the big “No Kings” demonstrations against Trump in the US, which has even more openly marched millions  under the banner of defending bourgeois democracy against authoritarianism -  demonstrate the danger in the present situation of the working class being drawn onto false terrain, and the central importance of the defensive struggles of the working class, of reactions to the economic crisis on the proletarian terrain, because such struggles are the indispensable basis for the working class to recognise itself as a distinct social force, as a class for itself. And this in turn is the only starting point for the capacity of the working class to pose the problem of combating the capitalist system as a whole, with its wars, repression, pandemics and ecological devastation.  In sum, to develop its own autonomous revolutionary perspective and thus show the only way forward for all the layers of the population oppressed and immiserated by capitalism in decay.

Amos, November 2025