Last week, a flotilla of NATO warships, submarines, and fighter jets, anchored by a U.S. carrier fleet, sailed north from a Norwegian naval base into the Barents Sea, located off the northern coasts of Norway and Russia. According to a report in the Barents Observer, “There are currently more NATO fighter jets above the Arctic Circle than any time [since] the breakup of the Soviet Union [in 1991].” This happened while U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was meeting with other NATO leaders in Oslo, Norway’s capital. While in Oslo, Blinken also announced that the U.S. will open a new diplomatic mission in Tromsoe, Norway, 217 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Imperialist rivalry on and below the seas north of the Arctic Circle has been building for years. Russia has enormous military power in the far north of the world, including most of its nuclear-armed submarines. A NATO strategy paper from last summer said NATO is working to create a “northern bubble” that will enable it to restrain Russia and monitor China in the far northern reaches of the world. While the U.S./NATO maneuvers were underway, Russia’s Northern Fleet began an anti-submarine exercise with an armada of its warships, also in the Barents Sea. All this military maneuvering and preparation is very much connected right now to the war in Ukraine, and the efforts of each side to gain advantage over a vast area of land, water, and air.

But there are even bigger compulsions driving the frenzied and increasingly dangerous buildup. The basic compulsion of capitalism is to “eat or be eaten” in the competition between imperialists. The lives of the masses of humanity, worldwide, don’t enter into those calculations. Neither does the well-being of the earth itself. Global climate change is seen by all the imperialist powers as an opportunity for profit. Vast areas of the earth, previously inaccessible because they were covered with ice, are opening up for exploitation by different imperialist powers. The imperialists are racing to “get there first,” before their rivals, and stake a claim to long buried resources of the planet. And they are coming fully armed, up to and including with nuclear weapons. The New York Times wrote that in today’s world, “There is a new Cold War atmosphere, mixed with melting ice, which affects military planning and opens up new economic possibilities and access to natural resources.”

Think about what all this tells you about how utterly worthless the capitalist-imperialist system is. The monsters at the top of it seize on disastrous climate change¹ as an opening for even more harmful plundering of the earth’s remaining resources. They seize on it to beat out their imperialist rivals in getting to new sources of enrichment. They prowl the remotest seas armed with nuclear weapons.

This foul imperialist system needs to be overthrown, as soon as possible.