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The decisions taken as the NATO summit in Washington closed Thursday show the NATO imperialist powers are planning direct military intervention against nuclear-armed Russia. The day before, the NATO alliance had announced the creation of an office in Ukraine and of a NATO command in Germany to coordinate the war offensive against Russia.

The NATO powers pledged this week $40 billion more in military spending for the Ukrainian regime and that they would eventually let Ukraine into the 75-year-old military alliance. Most provocatively, Washington and Berlin agreed to station long-range guided missiles aimed at Russia in Germany. A joint declaration by the US and German governments states:

The United States will begin episodic deployments of the long-range fires capabilities of its Multi-Domain Task Force in Germany in 2026, as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future. When fully developed, these conventional long-range fires units will include SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons, which have significantly longer range than current land-based fires in Europe.

The NATO countries, having overseen missile strikes from Ukraine on Russian civilians in Belgorod and Sevastopol, are now creating conditions to launch missile strikes on almost all of Russia’s major population centers. Tomahawk cruise missiles, with a range of over 2000 kilometers, can strike deep into Russia. The shortest distance between Berlin and Moscow is just under 1,600 kilometers.

The Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) has a range of 1,725 miles (2,776 kilometers) and can evade missile defense systems. According to the US Army, “this land-based, truck-launched system is armed with hypersonic missiles capable of traveling well over 3,800 miles per hour. They can reach the upper edge of the Earth’s atmosphere and remain just beyond the range of air and missile defense systems until they are operational, at which point it is too late to respond.”

LRHWs deployed in Germany could not only hit Russia’s largest cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg. They could also reach Russian cities deep inside Eurasia such as Nizhni-Novgorod, Perm, Ufa, Saratov, and large parts of western Kazakhstan.

The aim of this decision, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) wrote, is “to develop a land-based weapon with a range of significantly more than a thousand kilometers.” It would be “either a cruise missile or a ballistic missile, the latter also with supersonic speed.” Such weapons, the FAZ added, could then be “directed from Germany at Russian targets, and with a range of 2,000 kilometers also at Moscow.”

German imperialism, which committed genocidal crimes in its attempts to subjugate Russia in the two world wars of the 20th century, is once again at the forefront of the war escalation. Long-range missile systems are needed, social-democratic German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said, to “make it clear to a possible Russian aggressor that we are able and willing to defend ourselves.” Pistorius threatened, “Any strike against us will also be answered—and conventionally.”

Social-democratic German Chancellor Olaf Scholz boasted as the NATO summit began that Germany wants to take on even more “responsibility” for NATO’s offensive against Russia. “Germany is the largest country in Europe within the NATO alliance. This gives us a very special responsibility,” Scholz claimed, adding that he could “clearly and unequivocally say: we will, I will live up to this responsibility.”

Scholz repeatedly boasted about the €100 billion special fund for the Bundeswehr that he initiated and the “change of course to such massive support for our defense capability” both “this year and in all subsequent years.” Germany, he said, will “take on tasks that are important, especially with the brigade in Lithuania, in particular with the joint command in the Baltic Sea region in Rostock, especially by providing the rapidly available armed forces of 35,000 men and women next year to be able to guarantee the security tasks of our alliance.”

What Scholz calls “security tasks” is, in reality, threatening Russia with war and placing Europe and the world on a hair trigger, where NATO can launch missile strikes on Russia at a minute’s notice. Indeed, the final declaration of the Washington summit made clear that it is preparing for war not only with Russia, but with Russia’s great-power allies across Eurasia.

“Russia remains the greatest and most immediate threat to the security of our allies,” it states, accusing Russia of having “shattered peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area and gravely undermined global security.” The NATO powers, it adds, “are determined to constrain and contest Russia’s aggressive actions and to counter its ability to conduct destabilising activities towards NATO and Allies.”

After decades of unpopular wars of aggression in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, the NATO imperialist powers are planning a further, global escalation of war to subjugate Russia and prepare for war against China.

The NATO declaration is silent on the NATO-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, instead threatening Iran, North Korea and above all China for keeping ties with Russia. It states: “The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has become a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine through its so-called ‘no limits’ partnership and its large-scale support for Russia’s defence industrial base. … The PRC cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation.”

NATO’s move to threaten Russian cities with missile strikes and also threaten China must be taken as a warning: they are setting into motion a conflict in which workers and youth in the NATO countries themselves would also suffer catastrophic casualties.

Russian officials responded by condemning the Washington summit and threatening military countermeasures. “Tensions on the European continent are escalating,” warned Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Russia sees “NATO’s decisions to set up separate logistics centers in cities on the Black Sea, the opening of additional facilities in Europe,” he continued, calling it “a very serious threat to the national security of our country [requiring] thoughtful, coordinated and effective responses to deter and counter NATO.”

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov pledged to “first of all develop a military response to this new game,” the Interfax news agency reported.

This response exposes the bankruptcy of the corrupt Russian capitalist regime established by Stalinism’s dissolution of the Soviet Union. A military response to NATO’s threats — devising plans so Russian missile forces can rapidly bomb Berlin, London, Paris, Rome and Madrid—only brings the world one step closer to a catastrophic nuclear conflagration. The only progressive solution to the warmongering of NATO is the mobilization of the mass opposition to imperialist war in the working class in an international, socialist anti-war movement.

Original article: wsws