U.S. threats against Korea in a changing world

The following remarks were delivered at the People’s Summit on Korea in New York City on July 25. Scroll to bottom for video.

I want to salute the People’s Summit for Korea and congratulate the activists, organizers and thinkers for their incredible efforts and their success. I’m proud that I had the opportunity to participate as a convenor with the United National Antiwar Coalition and observe the careful planning of this event. 

I’ve opposed the U.S. war, occupation troops and sanctions used against Korea and opposed the forced division of Korea for over 50 years. 

This gathering, which is desperately needed, is a serious political undertaking.

It has been carried out with the greatest attention, because the radical changes in the world demand we recalibrate and plan at a higher level.

With great seriousness, Korean forces are reorienting their own milieu and reaching out widely, wherever they have influence. We should all take note.

We all need to consciously strip away illusions. The whole Korean people, North and South, have demonstrated in the millions their desire for peaceful reunification.

Huge campaigns asserted that Korea is one, demanding the United States government sign a peace treaty to end the 1950-53 war. The whole people demonstrated their aspiration with general strikes, uprisings, massive marches and even in elections.

The Korean people deserve peace, autonomy and self-determination!

The biggest impediment to this peace is U.S. imperialism through the U.S. occupation and the U.S. military bases.

U.S. occupation 

There are 70 U.S. bases in South Korea, including the largest overseas U.S. base, Camp Humphrey, along with a thicket of additional U.S. bases in East Asia in Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Guam, Hawai‘i, along with nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, destroyers, drones, satellite reconnaissance and tens of thousands of troops.

These U.S. bases strip the land, foul the sea, contaminate the air, corrupt and distort economies and dominate political life.

This problem is not faced only by the Korean people.

Let’s look at global economic reality. This is a time of tremendous global change. U.S. imperialism is in decline and decay. But it is not going down quietly.

There are times in history when war and politics converge with economics, with changed material reality, to create a true turning point, a point after which things cannot and will not ever be the same. Such points in time are marked by fierce struggle, which appears chaotic.

In the 1950s, when much of Europe and huge swaths of Asia were in ruins following World War II, U.S. imperialism made the rules. These were ruthless rules of a vicious, neo-colonial new order.

The U.S. war against Korea started in June 1950. It was Washington’s first effort to roll back the revolutionary wave sweeping Asia. The U.S. and its allies imposed a level of destruction and death nationwide similar to what we see in Gaza today, with famine and not a building left standing.

There were literally no more targets in North Korea. The toll was horrific!

Four million Koreans died.

But the U.S. war against Korea did not end in a U.S. victory, in a U.S. reconquest of all of Korea, such as existed when Japanese imperialism was the colonial oppressor of Korea. The U.S. military was unable to move into China.

Korea was the first real U.S. setback

Revolutionary determination, revolutionary morale is a material factor. 

U.S. imperialism has never forgotten this Korean accomplishment.

The Korean people have never forgiven the destruction. 

What is different between now and 1950-53? The U.S. accounted for over 50% of world global production in 1950. By 1960 this was 35%, and by 1980 it was 25%.

According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the U.S. will account for only 11% of world industrial production by 2030. Production has grown globally, and with new technology and rapid modernization and new levels of cooperation due to the BRICS group, Belt and Road and a host of other new levels of coordination among developing countries of the Global South, it is moving even faster.

UNIDO predicts China will have 45% of global industrial production in 2030. China is willing to share its technology and help the formerly colonized countries in their development. (UNIDO, page 17) 

The capitalist class in the U.S. is frantic to reverse this decline in industry. The U.S. capitalists arrogantly want to still conduct business as they did in the 1950s, even though U.S. industry will soon produce only one-ninth of global production.

The U.S. ruling class blames China for its spectacular level of modern industrial development. China has the capacity to plan. Its key industries and resources are owned by the whole people. That’s the game changer.

U.S. imperialism views the productive capacity of every country as a threat.

Even its allies and compliant underlings are a target, because the U.S. capitalists are desperate to extract every possible concession and dollar of profit.

Tariffs against every country are ruthless. Tariffs of 10% or 25% or 50% and more won’t reverse the U.S. decline, they will speed it.

The White House demands that the South Korean regime, already compliant, pay for its own occupation by U.S. troops. This is intended as a humiliation and will also cut deep into the lives of Korean workers.

This attack on Korean workers goes hand in hand with an all-out attack on the working class here in the U.S., where 50% of the population live paycheck to paycheck according to a GOBankingRates survey from January 2024. Education costs and medical care are prohibitive. Almost 40% of the population doesn’t have access to clean drinking water, and there is the highest per capita prison population in the world. Racism poisons the air we breathe.

The U.S. spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined (according to SIPRI Military Spending Database, 2024). This huge military machine is the biggest source of profits to the billionaires. It’s a giant, unending subsidy to the largest corporations.

Corporations exist in the U.S. to maximize immediate profit, not to use shareholders’ money to invest in long-term development. There is no capability to invest the trillions of dollars needed for modernizing U.S. infrastructure — building railroads, ports, ships, new forms of energy and communication. 

I’ve written a lot about why late-stage, cut-throat, competitive, monopoly capitalism is incapable of the level of cooperative planning required for this new global stage of modern technology. This is a fundamental problem of U.S. capitalism.

Suffice it to say that U.S. strategists and military and industrial planners realize that their survival lies in pulling everything else down.

Their only remaining leverage – war

The only thing that can slow the productive capacity of developing countries is the absolute ruin of war. Sanctions, which are themselves acts of war, will bite deep, make life difficult and slow industrial production.

A recent study, this month, by The Lancet, a respected medical journal, estimates that U.S. sanctions cause a half million deaths a year … every year! This exceeds any form of war. 500,000 deaths a year! How?

Countries can’t buy chlorine to purify water, or syringes, or antibiotics, mosquito nets, diabetes or heart or cancer medicines, tiny batteries, fuel, fertilizer for crops.

The longest duration sanctions have been against any country is those against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). These are U.S. sanctions and United Nations sanctions, imposed at U.S. demand since the 1950s.

Despite this vicious weapon of creating artificial famines and disease, it is U.S. imperialism that is in irreversible decline. Targeted countries are finding more ways of trading with each other, despite the demands that all countries ostracize every one of the more than 40 sanctioned countries, which together are home to one-third of the world’s population.

This is true even as Washington resorts to greater and greater military expenditures — under both Republican and Democratic administrations, 

U.S. strategists are preparing for a new war in Asia, with bases and alliances and threats. It is aimed at China and at [North] Korea. We must take this threat of war seriously.

Although new technology has put more lethal power into the hands of the Pentagon in the form of drones, GPS guided bombs, computers and satellite communications, throughout history technological development breaks through and creates social and political change. This new technology has also given the formerly colonized peoples new tools of self-defense. This has undermined the strategic position of the imperialist powers.

The Pentagon found that it was unable to prevail in a 20-year ground war in Central Asia against one of the poorest, least-developed countries in the world: Afghanistan.

Latest imperialist setback

The most important U.S. proxy, Israel, despite billions of dollars and massive infusions of military equipment, in 22 months has been unable to defeat the heroic Palestinian people, who have built their weapons, even using repurposed Israeli missiles, working deep in tunnels. Political will and morale have again been proven to be powerful.

Israel tried to widen the war, to reverse their failure in Gaza with a surprise attack on Iran. The U.S. provided the most modern weapons. But the Israeli military found it could not sustain 12 days of Iranian response. 

Iran’s missiles showed the capacity to break through the Iron Dome, crash David’s Sling. The Zionists found they were not invincible.

Consider courageous Yemen

Through more than seven decades the DPRK has held the line, pursuing socialist development and self-reliance. Our comrades who have traveled to the DPRK always describe the beautiful cities: Pyongyang, rebuilt from total rubble, now with wide tree-lined boulevards, modern apartment buildings and metro system. It’s a city full of parks and schools.

The spirit of Juche, socialist planning and self-reliance has won out in the ability to protect the Korean people from another round of horrific U.S. war. 

In this global struggle, it is increasingly clear that there are two class camps. One is a tiny class of multi-billionaires who want to control the planet and all its resources by creating divisions and wars and wielding a death machine. This exploiting class is up against a global working class that is growing in size, skills and consciousness of itself and its ability to collectively solve the problems ahead.

Anyone who supports the working class has the duty to support the Korean people’s mobilization.

The first step is to demand that the U.S. troops get out of Korea!

Close all U.S. military bases!

End U.S. military occupation! 

End the sale of ultra-offensive weapons to South Korea.

Fight U.S. plans to build a military alliance in the Pacific. 

End the demonization of the DPRK and its socialist construction. 

End all military aggression against China and the DPRK; end provocative war games, military exercises and nuclear threats. 

End the repression against workers in South Korea who demand labor rights and protections.

Our role in the U.S. is to defend the Korean people in their struggle against U.S. war, sanctions and the division of the Korean Peninsula.

Death to U.S. imperialism!

---

Panel titled “Solidarity and Sovereignty: Anti-Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific.” Sara Flounders’ talk starts at the 1:01:00 mark

View all videos from the Summit on YouTube.