Published in the November 2026 issue of the “Platform,” a monthly magazine of the World Anti-imperialist Platform
The Decisive Battle Between A2/AD and MDTF
Stephen Cho | Coordinator of the Korean International Forum and Organizer of the World Anti-imperialist Platform
6 November 2026
The flames of war in Eastern Europe, ignited by imperialism, are spreading into flames of uprising in the Western Europe. This is an inevitable phenomenon arising from imperialism’s unprecedented political and economic crisis. In particular, the astronomical sums pumped into the economy through inflationary policies during the 2008 US-originated financial crisis and the “COVID-19” pandemic produced unprecedented polarization, followed by high prices and high interest rates, a fatal conjuncture that ruined livelihoods. Having fallen behind in the engines of economic growth of the “AI” era, Western countries can no longer bear the high interest on their government bonds. The French government is trapped in a dilemma: without austerity, national default; with it, popular uprising.
At present, the ideological position of the major ruling parties in the Western Europe is social-democratic right. Western imperialist forces, centered on social-democratic right-wing regimes and using the Ukrainian neo-Nazis as their vanguard in the Eastern Europe, provoked the Ukraine war against Russia, aiming at most for Russia’s fragmentation and disintegration, and at least for the exhaustion of its national strength. The imperialist forces’ scheme was to bring World War 3 into full swing through a series of drives—the 2022 Ukraine war, the 2023 West Asian war centered on the Palestine war, and the 2024 East Asian war centered on a war in the ‘Republic of Korea (ROK)’—and thereby form a “New Cold War” system. However, due to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)’s war deterrent and “strategic patience,” and the heroic December Uprising of the ‘ROK’ people prevented the war in the ‘ROK’ and an East Asian war. Because the East Asian war scheduled for 2024 did not break out, the expansion to the Eastern European war and the full-scale escalation of world war were delayed.
In the second half of 2024, the imperialist forces launched an all-out war offensive. They conducted “Freedom Edge” among the USA, Japan, and the ‘ROK’ in late June; “RIMPAC” led by the Indo-Pacific Command in July and August; and “Ulchi Freedom Shield” between the USA and the ‘ROK’ in August. Together, these completed, militarily, the “Pacificization of NATO” that had been pursued politically at the Washington NATO Summit in early July. In August, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis and NATO launched the Kursk offensive in Eastern Europe, and in September the Israeli Zionists carried out concentrated attacks on Lebanese Hezbollah. The ‘ROK,’ which scrapped the September 19 Inter-Korean Military Agreement in June, followed up with a military leadership reshuffle and aggressive war exercises in August and artillery firing drills on Yeonpyeong Island in September. In October it launched the decisive drone attack on the DPRK. This attack continued through November and pushed the Korean Peninsula to the brink of war. When war still did not break out, it even attempted a self-coup in December, the first military coup since 1980, a self-coup. Also, in November, the US Biden administration lifted the restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles against Russia. In December, the Syrian Assad regime was toppled by the imperialist forces.
In the second half of 2026, the imperialist forces once again launched an all-out offensive. The West Asian war centered on Iran began when US imperialism took up the Israeli Zionists’ 2025 invasion of Iran in February 2026, bringing the Iran war into full swing. As of October, as the West Asian war and the Ukraine war expand and their battlefields converge, the Eastern European war and the East Asian war are being accelerated at an extraordinary pace. Eastern Europe and East Asia are strategic regions where the anti-imperialist camp and the imperialist camp are in confrontation as sharp as in West Asia. Following the NATO Summit in Ankara in early July, the Warsaw Security Forum in October served as an opening salvo. The former was a venue for high-level political work, agreement, and propaganda and agitation; the latter was the venue for the same work at the grassroots level. This time again, the joint exercises for aggressive war—RIMPAC, Ulchi Freedom Shield, and Freedom Edge—were conducted in July, August, and September, respectively. In July, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis bombed an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea, which, combined with the Israeli Zionists’ occupation of southern Lebanon, was enough to scrap the Iran–US memorandum of understanding (MOU). At the end of July in East Asia, under US direction and support, Japan’s Aegis destroyer conducted its first Tomahawk test launch. It was the most perilous provocation of war linked to the US strategy of deploying tactical nuclear intermediate-range missiles in East Asia. Condemnation and countermeasures from the DPRK, China, and Russia followed immediately. In particular, Russia responded with Vladimir Putin’s inspection of the Kuril Islands, which are disputed with Japan, followed immediately by a missile test launch. In September, a train carrying a former British prime minister, a former Swedish prime minister, and a former US CIA director was nearly destroyed by a Russian bombardment at a point 2 kilometers from the Polish border. Around this time, there were also military clashes near Denmark and over Lithuania. NATO’s blockade against Kaliningrad, the legalization of nuclear weapons deployment in Lithuania following Finland, and Ukraine’s drone production, supported by Britain and others, together with its large-scale drone attacks on Russia, are all extremely dangerous provocations of war that cross the “red line” of an existential threat to Russia.
The implications of Putin’s “Chekhov’s Gun” speech at the Valdai Discussion Club on October 1, and of his observation of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) joint military exercise “Interaction-2026” the following day, are clear. The same goes for the ongoing NATO joint war exercise in Latvia and the joint war exercise involving ten European countries that begins in Poland on November 9. Britain’s recent emergency food stockpiling guidelines and the bomb threats targeting at least 34 passenger jets across Europe between November 2 and 5 belong to the very same context. Currently, Western political systems are facing an unprecedented, massive crisis, with massive protests in October followed by a chain of general strikes in November. Meanwhile, the “US Deep State,” which engineered the war in Ukraine alongside the “European Deep State,” has won the US midterm elections and taken control of Congress. All these multidimensional variables—the expansion of the West Asian and Ukraine wars, the merging of the two battlefields, popular uprisings in Western Europe, and the outcome of the US midterm elections—are converging in a single direction that decisively accelerates the Eastern European war.
The imperialist forces’ original plan is presumed to have been, in order: the Ukraine war, the Palestine-centered West Asian war, the ‘ROK’-centered East Asian war, and the Ukraine-centered Eastern European war. Having failed to ignite an East Asian war centered on the ‘ROK,’ they are escalating the West Asian war centered on Iran, while forcefully pushing for the expansion into the Eastern European war centered on Ukraine and the convergence of these two battlefronts. The Eastern European war and the East Asian war are closely linked. Eastern Europe and East Asia are where the three major powers of the anti-imperialist camp, the primary targets of the imperialist camp, are located. If just one of these two battlefields erupts, World War 3 escalates to full-scale. With two years of delay and uprisings sweeping across Western Europe like wildfire, the danger of the Eastern European war has escalated proportionally.
The basic stratagem of imperialism throughout the 20th and 21st centuries is the “Great Game” strategy, notorious for its policy of “containment.” Looking back over history through this lens, the “First Great Game” was the confrontation between Britain and Russia, the “Second Great Game” between the USA and the Soviet Union, and the “Third Great Game” between the USA-Europe and Russia-China. If the second is called the “Cold War,” the third can be called the “New Cold War.” In imperialism’s stratagem, threatening great powers are objects of containment and dismantlement, and small countries are objects of isolation and crushing.
Right after World War 1, Russia was transformed into the world’s first socialist state, and right after World War 2, the socialist camp including the Soviet Union and the national liberation camp formed a worldwide anti-imperialist camp. Today, with World War 3 under way, the world is entering a new phase in which the anti-imperialist camp is being strengthened and expanded at an extraordinary pace. Here, the most thorough socialist DPRK; China, a socialist state with Chinese characteristics, and Russia, a state with a socialist legacy, form a ranks of the strongest nuclear-missile powers armed with hydrogen bombs and hypersonic missiles, and the thoroughly anti-imperialist Islamic Republic of Iran has also joined as a missile power, together forming the leading force of anti-imperialism.
A sub-strategy of the Great Game is the “Grand Chessboard” strategy. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who devised this strategy, together with Brent Scowcroft, forms the two main lineages of US imperialist military and diplomatic strategy. The former represents the main stream of imperialism—referred to as the “US Deep State”—comprising the social-democratic right wing of the Democratic Party and the ‘Neocons’ within the Republican Party; it seeks to divide and fracture Russia and China through “color revolution” operations and aggressive wars. The Yugoslav war was its rehearsal. The latter, as the imperialist non-mainstream comprising conservative Republicans—known as the “US anti-Deep State”—advocates “neo-isolationism” and promotes a strategy of “fortifying the Western Hemisphere.”
The Ukraine war is a war started by the European Deep State and the US Deep State, and the Iran war is a war started by the US Anti-Deep State in concert with the US Deep State. The former put the Ukrainian neo-Nazis in front, and the latter was instigated by the Israeli Zionists. The decisive difference between the two is that in the former the European Deep State favors expanding the war, while in the latter the US Anti-Deep State favors halting it. As the war against Iran turned unfavorable, the US Anti-Deep State has in effect closed US military bases in the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. This is out of fear of lethal strikes from Iran’s ballistic and cruise missiles and drones. In this respect, Iran’s Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) strategy must be viewed as having been realized in essence. Iran and Yemen’s Ansar Allah have each taken control of the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait—two “choke points.” When hegemony in West Asia passed from US imperialism to the “Shia Belt,” Saudi Arabia formed, together with Pakistan and Türkiye, the Mecca Mutual Defense Pact—the “Sunni Belt.” Although it is an opportunistic alliance with a pro-US, pro-Israel character, it is a clear sign of geopolitical and strategic retreat from the standpoint of US imperialism and the Israeli Zionists. By waging the Iran war, US imperialism consequently lost its hegemony in West Asia.
As in West Asia, similar things are bound to happen in Eastern Europe and East Asia. If the Eastern European war breaks out, US imperialism will inevitably be defeated and forced to retreat in Europe, and if the East Asian war breaks out, in the Western Pacific. This means that Russia, China and the DPRK, will respectively realize A2/AD. The USA touts Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF) and Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), but the reality is the opposite. Unlike in the past, even if war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula now, the USA would find it difficult even to intervene, let alone use tactical nuclear weapons. When the DPRK fires various hypersonic missiles carrying tactical nuclear weapons for a swift, decisive victory, the USA would not dare to respond in kind. This is because, if the USA attacked the DPRK homeland, the DPRK would immediately retaliate against the US mainland, and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) would occur.
Through consistent effort and struggle since the Korean War, the DPRK has built up sufficient strength to neutralize in a single stroke all military forces, including US forces in the ‘ROK,’ in a contingency. The JADC2 and Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) that the US boasts of, together with the MDTF, would be paralyzed and destroyed the moment war breaks out by the DPRK’s Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) carrying High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) warheads and its hypersonic missiles carrying tactical nuclear weapons. The Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS) under JADC2 and the Indirect Fire Protection Capability (IFPC), dubbed the “US version of Iron Dome,” are equally powerless. The DPRK possesses the capability to fire 9,000 missiles and super-large multiple rocket shells per hour, along with 870,000 artillery shells. This volume amounts to 300 to 1,000 times the interceptor missiles held by the USA and the ‘ROK.’ Such military power and operations of the DPRK serve as a decisive contribution to China and Russia realizing A2/AD. In addition, the DPRK stands in strategic solidarity with Russia’s Eastern European war through its participation in the battle of Kursk and its supply of missiles and other support, and intends to assist China’s East Asian war strategically and tactically with its cruisers and nuclear submarines. Military and strategic cooperation between the DPRK and Russia, and between the DPRK and China, is strengthened and expanded as time passes, fatally wrecking the containment strategy of the US and Western imperialism.
It is NATO, not Russia, that has been exhausted and weakened by the Ukraine war, and the Iran war has accelerated the division of the imperialist camp and the unity of the anti-imperialist camp. The anti-imperialist camp overwhelms the imperialist camp in every field: legitimacy, capability, and operations. Like the anti-fascism of World War 2, the anti-imperialism of World War 3 is a banner of justice and victory. Imperialism is destined to be burned to death by the very flames of the Eastern European war and East Asian war it ignited. World War 3 will be recorded as a new great upsurge in historical development, through the decisive defeat of the imperialist camp and the great victory of the anti-imperialist camp.
