The Just War against Imperialism and Fascism Shall Prevail
Stephen Cho | Coordinator of the Korean International Forum
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The Iran war is accelerating the full-scale escalation of World War 3. Initiated by the US imperialist and Israeli Zionist invasion of Iran, the conflict has immediately expanded into a broader West Asian war. Iran and China, as well as West Asia and East Asia, are closely interlinked. Both Iran and China share a common adversary in US imperialism. As the Iran war intensifies, it will inevitably spill over into a war in Taiwan. The war in Taiwan is closely intertwined with the war in the ‘Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea)’; together, these constitute an East Asian war that will propel World War 3 into a stage no one can denyβits full-scale escalation.
The war in Ukraine originated from the 2014 Maidan coup manipulated by imperialism. Russia’s special military operation of February 2022 represents nothing more than a new stage and full-scale intensification of that war. It was with the full-scale escalation of the war in Ukraine in February 2022 that World War 3 broke out. The root cause that provoked, deepened, and expanded World War 3 is imperialism. The war in Ukraine is a war waged by imperialist NATO, with fascist neo-Nazis as its vanguard. Russia is engaged in an anti-imperialist, anti-fascist war, a war of liberation to emancipate the peoples of Ukraineβincluding its ethnic Russian populationβand a preventive war in defense of Russia itself. A war of liberation waged under the banner of anti-imperialism and anti-fascism is, in its entirety, a just war. Given that Russia and Ukraine are historically near-identical peoples, the war in Ukraine must be understood in its essential nature as a process of resolving an intra-national dispute.
In October 2023, the war in Palestine erupted and immediately expanded into a West Asian war. Once again, imperialism advanced the Israeli Zionists as its proxy. Then, in February 2026, the Iran war began. Whereas the former West Asian war centered on Palestine unfolded as a proxy war and localized conflict, the current West Asian war centered on Iran is being waged as a direct and total war. US imperialism no longer conceals itself behind the Israeli Zionists. The flames of World War 3, ignited in Ukraine in Eastern Europe, have now spread to West Asiaβand they will not stop there.
It is no secret that imperialism pursued a war in the ‘ROK’ between September and November-December 2024. The plan was to provoke a localized conflict against the Democratic Peopleβs Republic of Korea (DPRK), engineer a military coup in the ‘ROK,’ and trigger a full-scale war. Had it not been for the DPRK’s war deterrence capability and “strategic patience,” and the heroic resistance of the people of the ‘ROK,’ the war would have actually broken out. The war in the ‘ROK’ would have led directly to the Taiwan war, and subsequently to an East Asian warβthe full-scale escalation of World War 3.
The DPRK and China forged a blood alliance and fought shoulder to shoulder in their revolutionary rootsβthe anti-Japanese war of the 1930s-1940s and the anti-US war of the 1950s. By virtue of the agreement reached between President Kim Il Sung and Premier Zhou Enlai during the former’s visit to China in July 1961, and reaffirmed between Chairman Kim Jong Un and President Xi Jinping during the latter’s visit to the DPRK in June 2019, the DPRK and China are bound to automatically intervene on each other’s behalf in the event of an anti-imperialist war. The DPRK-China Treaty and the DPRK-Russia Treatyβconcluded on the basis of the agreement between President Putin and Chairman Kim Jong Un during the former’s visit to the DPRK in June 2024βboth establish the highest level of alliance relations. The fact that the Korean People’s Army subsequently joined the battle for the liberation of Kursk and fought with heroic valor serves as a clear demonstration of the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and military-strategic essence of the DPRK-Russia alliance. Today, the DPRK, China, and Russia form the most powerful military alliance in history under the banner of anti-imperialism. Accordingly, when the war in Taiwan begins, the war in the ‘ROK’ will begin as well, and vice versa.
Having failed to ignite an East Asian war centered on the ‘ROK,’ imperialism is now pursuing a war in Taiwan by exploiting the Iran-centered West Asian war, with the aim of triggering a war in the ‘ROK’ in the wake of a Taiwan conflictβthat is, an East Asian war centered on Taiwan. The reason imperialism persists in pursuing an East Asian war is simple: to propel World War 3 into a stage that no one can deny, to bring about its full-scale escalation. Through World War 3, imperialism seeks to build a “New Cold War” order.
Imperialism is the external expression of monopoly capital. Transnational financial capital finances both transnational defense capital and transnational civilian capital, controlling them like a seesaw system. For instance, global asset management giants BlackRock and Vanguard are the first and second largest shareholders of both Lockheed Martin and Apple. In wartime, defense capital profits; in reconstruction, civilian capital profits; and financial capital, having invested in both, profits at all times. In the USA, civilian and defense capital have historically aligned with the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. Bloomberg of the Bloomberg Groupβone of the emblems of Zionist financial capitalβhas supported the Democratic Party, while Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group has backed the Republican Party. Zionist capitalists have also funded organizations such as AIPAC to exert influence over both parties. The Iran war is generating a dynamic in which Iranian and Arab oil and gas infrastructure is destroyed and the Strait of Hormuz is naturally blockaded, thereby reflexively advancing Israel’s three major “Greater Israel” economic projects: the Levant Gas Zone, the Ben Gurion Canal, and the IMEC. It is by no means coincidental that BlackRock is involved in these projects. Nor is it surprising that Israeli forces are attacking Iran’s largest gas field at South Pars at great risk, or that Netanyahu publicly warned against the use of the Strait of Hormuz. Behind every war, there has always been the greed of capital.
The concentration and centralization of capital gave rise to monopoly, and in the era of monopoly capitalism, inter-imperialist warβWorld War 1βbroke out, driven by colonial rivalry, among other causes. However, World War 1 produced the first socialist state in human history, the Soviet Union, and ultimately left the seeds of yet another world war. World War 2 began as an inter-imperialist war between imperialist states grounded in fascismβone of the two dominant systems within imperialismβand those grounded in social democracy, the other of its two principal systems. It was transformed into an anti-fascist war when the fascist states invaded the socialist Soviet Union. The socialist Soviet Union and the Comintern wisely formed a tactical united frontβa world anti-fascist frontβwith the imperialist states opposing the fascist powers, namely the USA and Britain, and led World War 2 to victory. As a result, a socialist camp and a national liberation camp emerged on a global scale, and revolution entered a period of great upsurge. Alarmed by this, the imperialist forces coalesced under the hegemony of a strengthened US imperialism, forming a modern imperialist system and camp that sought to avoid inter-imperialist war. They then inaugurated the “Cold War” eraβthe confrontation between the imperialist camp and the socialist camp.
During the “Cold War,” the socialist camp failed to expand itself into an anti-imperialist camp and thus failed to transform its confrontation with imperialism from a mere inter-system antagonism into a broader alignment of an imperialist camp versus an anti-imperialist camp. The entire anti-imperialist camp was even split by the conflict in the 1960s between the Soviet Union in the grip of right-wing revisionism and China dominated by left-wing opportunism. The imperialist camp exploited and fomented both the emergence of revisionist tendencies within the socialist camp and the deepening fissures within the anti-imperialist camp. Combined with an exhausting arms race and insidious propaganda, the imperialist camp succeeded in launching a decisive offensive against the socialist camp, generating a trend toward the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe.
Having thus seized world hegemony, the imperialist camp unleashed countless warsβin Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhereβunder a “unipolar order,” and carried out astronomical plunder under the banner of “the era of neoliberalism.” Then, amid deepening internal political and economic crises, it finally experienced the 2008 US-originated financial crisis, and under the general crisis of imperialism and the rise of Russia and China, a multipolar order began to take shape. Russia is the country with the oldest and most brilliant socialist heritage; China is a country whose economy has been integrated into the capitalist international order while its politics remain firmly under the control of the Communist Party; and the DPRK is the country that strictly adheres to the principles of socialism. What these nations share is that they are the world’s foremost nuclear-armed powers, equipped with hydrogen bombs and hypersonic missiles. As these countries have rallied under the banner of anti-imperialism into a united front, a fundamental shift has occurred in the historical confrontation between the anti-imperialist camp and the imperialist camp.
Accordingly, the imperialist camp has reached a realistic conclusion that its best course of action is to create a “New Cold War” system, pitting the Western imperialist powers and their satellites on one side against anti-imperialist nations such as Russia, China, the DPRK, and Iran on the other. In other words, they intend to achieve the goal of establishing this “New Cold War” system by mobilizing the Western imperialist powers and their followers as their means, and employing the method of waging World War 3 while denouncing anti-imperialist nations as a “New Axis of Evil.” Specifically, they aim to use West Asia, East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Central America as their primary theaters, expanding the West Asian theater centered on the Iran war into an East Asian theater centered on the Taiwan war, an Eastern European theater centered on the war in Ukraine, and a Central American theater centered on the war in Venezuela. For the imperialist camp, West Asia and Central America are perceived as relatively vulnerable links within the anti-imperialist camp due to the absence of anti-imperialist military powers armed with nuclear and missile capabilities. In 2026, the imperialist camp abducted the Venezuelan President and his spouse in January, strengthened the blockade of Cuba, and ignited the war against Iran in February.
The anti-imperialist camp seeks to achieve victory across all four theaters and the dismantlement of the imperialist camp by forming an international anti-imperialist united frontβled by Russia, China, and the DPRK as the world’s foremost nuclear and missile super powers, and Iran as a formidable missile powerβand by waging an all people’s resistance war combining armed struggle with mass struggle. The anti-imperialist camp holds an overwhelming advantage over the imperialist camp in terms of justification, capacity, and operations. As reality demonstrates, the imperialist camp has failed to seize the initiative, let alone achieve victory, in either the Ukrainian theater or the Iran-centered West Asian theater. As the number of theaters continues to grow, the defeat and collapse of the imperialist camp will accelerate to an ever more critical degree. The imperialist camp’s “two-front simultaneous victory strategy” is nothing but a discredited sophistryβone that has never succeeded in history and in which even they themselves no longer believe.
The anti-imperialist camp, possessing the cause of anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and national and people’s liberation, stands united. In contrast, the imperialist camp, driven mad by greed and barbarism, is becoming increasingly divided. Amidst a worst-case political and economic crisis characterized by low government approval ratings, astronomical national debt, and stagflation, the Western imperialist powers are splitting into factionsβthe USA versus Western Europe, “Chauvinists” versus “Globalists,” and “Anti-Deep State” versus the “Deep State”βwith their confrontations and conflicts intensifying daily. Within the USA, the ringleader of these nations, the situation has reached the brink of civil war. Like the film “Wag the Dog,” the Chauvinist government is misleading public opinion, while the clash between Chauvinists and Globalists intensifies as seen in the movie “Civil War.”
The unprecedented “Tariff War,” the “Annexation of Greenland,” the “Epstein Files,” and the war with Iranβall occurring under the second Trump administrationβare further deepening the contradictions within the imperialist camp. These events are forcing the Trump forces, who have wavered between an anti-Deep State stance and a pro-Zionist capital stance, to stand at a crossroads where they must choose one or the other. If the Trump forces abandon their anti-Deep State position, they will become “another Deep State,” leading to the collapse of MAGA. If they abandon their pro-Zionist stance, a civil war between the anti-Deep State forces and the “Zionist-Deep State” will be inevitable. The 250th anniversary of Independence Day in the USA on July 4 and the midterm elections on November 3 will mark decisive junctures at which these contradictions reach their climax.
As demonstrated by the military parades held in Russia in May 2025, China in September, and the DPRK in October, the unity of the anti-imperialist camp continues to strengthen to the highest level in history. In contrast, as revealed at the NATO summit in June 2025 and the Davos Forum in January 2026, the conflict between the USA and Western Europe within the imperialist camp has already reached a point where it seriously threatens the very existence of the “Atlantic Alliance” and NATO. Unity is the secret to victory, and division is the shortcut to defeat.
Anti-imperialism and anti-fascism constitute the supreme cause and noble justice of our era. All forces that agree with anti-imperialism and anti-fascism are rallying together on a single front on a global scale, waging a war of justice. The unity of the righteous anti-imperialist camp and the division of the unjust imperialist camp are accelerating. As history and reality prove, the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist camp, firmly united under the banner of justice and waging a life-or-death struggle, will inevitably triumph. The victory of the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist camp is certain.
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