Exposing imperialist diplomacy

The quarter-million U.S. diplomatic cables that are now no longer secret undoubtedly contain enough information to expose the machinery of imperialist foreign policy as a combination of lies, coercion, extortion and war. Other such exposures have occurred historically, some in more favorable circumstances for progressive and working-class organizations.

One of the first things done by the Bolshevik Party, once it took power through a successful workers’ revolution in Russia in November 1917, was to publish the secret treaties that the Tsarist regime had signed with its imperialist allies, Britain and France. These treaties showed why the Russian ruling classes were ready to drag the worker and peasant masses into the bloodiest conflict yet: World War I. The treaties said that, in the event of victory, Russia would get the Dardanelles and Constantinople, that is, a warm-water port. The equally imperialist German-Austro-Hungarian-Ottoman alliance had, of course, made its own secret deals with others.

These high-level documents revealed that the massive slaughter of 20 million people in the war arose from imperialist economic and strategic interests. It had nothing to do with fighting for democracy. Spreading the truth about the cynicism of the rulers led to mutinies among the soldiers of both sides and helped bring the war to an end. The truth also strengthened the hand of the new workers’ government wherever the Bolsheviks and their allies were capable of getting it published. This included in Britain, where the Manchester Guardian published the documents on Dec. 12, 1917, and in the United States, which had entered the war on the British-French-Russian side that prior April.

The Bolsheviks’ exposure of secret diplomacy was a historical lesson for the workers’ movement: The lies imperialist politicians use to justify their wars are intended to obscure the strategic and economic interests of the billionaires and bankers who rule capitalist society. This same lesson holds today.

Another major exposure occurred in June 1971. The U.S. had been bombing Vietnam since August 1964. That’s when President Lyndon Johnson bludgeoned all but two of the 100 U.S. senators into backing the Tonkin Gulf resolution, using the pretext that North Vietnamese patrol boats had fired on U.S. destroyers. That resolution had authorized the funding of a much wider war.

But by 1971, a determined Vietnamese resistance and a strong popular opposition at home and within the U.S. military convinced many in the U.S. ruling class that continuing the war might lead to an even greater U.S. defeat.

This split in the ruling class led some intellectuals — including Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who formerly had supported the war — to photocopy the Pentagon Papers, a high-level assessment of the war on Vietnam. Ellsberg and others released the documents to the New York Times and Washington Post. Those newspapers — by then in tune with the faction in the ruling class that questioned continuing the war — published the revelations, exposing that the Johnson administration had contrived the entire pretext for the escalation.

Exposing this big lie became part of the argument for getting U.S. troops out of Vietnam, which happened in 1973. Vietnam finally fully liberated itself in 1975.

The WikiLeaks documents, on top of earlier revelations about how the government, from the president on down, lied to take the U.S. to war against Iraq and Afghanistan, are further proof that 21st-century U.S. diplomacy, like the U.S. war against Vietnam and imperialist World War I, is still based on lies and coercion. It’s up to the progressive, working-class and anti-racist movement to take this one step further and expose the class interests of the tiny few who benefit from war while the masses of people pay the ultimate price.