On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden delivered a warmongering rant at the United Nations General Assembly, demanding an escalation of war against Russia and Iran, and threatening China.

Just one day after Israel killed nearly 500 people in a brutal bombing campaign against Lebanon, and as Israeli bombs continued to level buildings in Lebanese towns and villages, Biden restated his unequivocal support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the wider war throughout the Middle East.

Referring to the Iranian-backed group in Lebanon, Biden declared, “Hezbollah, unprovoked, joined the October 7 attack, launching rockets into Israel. Any country would have the right and responsibility to ensure that such an attack could never happen again.”

The US president demanded a “stronger position to deal with the ongoing threat posed by Iran. We must deny oxygen to its terrorist proxies.”

At the same time, US troops and the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier are on their way to deploy to the Middle East in support of Israel’s offensive against Lebanon and ultimately Iran.

Biden was, if possible, even more aggressive in demanding an escalation of war with Russia. “When Russia invaded Ukraine, we could have stood by and merely protested,” Biden said. Instead, “America stepped into the breach, providing massive security... assistance.” As a result, “NATO is bigger, stronger, more united than ever before.” He added, “we cannot let up... we will not let up on our support for Ukraine.”

Driving Biden’s point home, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has driven hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian men to their deaths on behalf of the imperialist powers, declared, “This war can’t be calmed by talks. Action is needed.”

“Russia can only be forced into peace,” he said.

The UN General Assembly is the occasion for a major escalation of global war. In the coming days, Zelensky will hold high-level meetings with US officials over the expected announcement that the US and UK will enable Ukraine to use NATO weapons to attack targets deep inside of Russia.

The ramifications of such a decision, which could lead to nuclear war, are so great that they are reportedly producing divisions within the state. According to an article in the Washington Post, published Tuesday:

There are splits within the administration: Even after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made clear his firm opposition to loosening the rules around ATACMS strikes, Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicated this month in a visit to Kyiv that he was open to the Ukrainian arguments and would ultimately bring them back to Biden for a broader discussion in Washington. That discussion is ongoing, officials said, with those inside the National Security Council trying to manage the differences between the Defense Department and the State Department.

In his remarks before a UN Security Council Ministerial Meeting on Ukraine Monday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought to link Russia, Iran, North Korea and China in a reboot of George W. Bush’s statements about an “axis of evil” prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“As Tehran provides Putin with drones, ballistic missiles, and training, Russia is sharing technology with Iran on nuclear issues, as well as space information,” Blinken said. “This as Iran continues to arm, to train, and to fund proxies in the Middle East to carry out terrorist attacks across the region and beyond.”

This is said by a leading official of a government that has “armed, trained and funded” Israel as it carries out a genocide in Gaza and terrorist attacks in Lebanon, including the pager explosion attack last week.

Blinken added, “China, another permanent member of this council, is the top provider of machine tools, microelectronics, and other items that Russia is using to rebuild, to restock, to ramp up its war machine.”

This from a leading official of a government that worked systematically to provoke the Russian invasion of Ukraine by providing the far-right regime in Kiev, installed in a 2014 coup, with billions in weaponry, and that has systematically escalated the conflict over the past two-and-a-half years.

With the US presidential election just two months away, any serious discussion of these wars is excluded from the campaign. Both the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump are unequivocal backers of the Gaza genocide. And if Trump questions US involvement in Ukraine, it is only because he believes all of the US resources should be devoted to the conflict with China.

Amidst his warmongering, Biden peppered his remarks at the UN with bland and rosy declarations about the path forward. He was, he stated, “more optimistic about the future than I’ve ever been since I was first elected to the United States Senate in 1972.”

In fact, underlying the extreme recklessness of the imperialist powers, above all the United States, is an intensifying economic, social and political crisis.

Among the anxieties of the capitalist oligarchy is the fate of the US dollar. In an article published in the pro-US Chatham House think tank, David Lubin, the former head of Emerging Markets Economics at Citigroup, declared that “US dollar dominance is both a cause and a consequence of US power.”

Lubin continued, “While dollar dominance is uncomfortable for many countries, US military power... will preserve its status as the top currency for the foreseeable future.”

With these words, the former Citigroup banker reveals the Arcanium Imperii, or secret of the empire: That the millions of people who have died in wars waged by the United States all over the world, from Korea to Vietnam, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and now Russia, Gaza, and Libya, were sacrificed to secure the hegemony of US imperialism.

In other words, global domination through military violence is the last, best desperate hope of the American financial oligarchy to preserve its wealth and privileges. This military offensive will involve an intensified war on the working class, of which the catastrophic collapse in living standards under Biden will be just the prelude.

In his opening remarks to the General Assembly, UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres warned, “our world is in a whirlwind... geopolitical divisions keep deepening. Wars rage with no clue how they will end, and nuclear posturing and new weapons cast a dark shadow. We are edging towards the unimaginable, a powder keg that risks engulfing the world.”

Accurate as these warnings are, Gutteres spoke as though the causes of this looming catastrophe were a natural disaster or an act of God, not the actions and statements of the American president and other imperialist leaders that spoke immediately after him.

It falls to the working class to advance its own solution to the deepening crisis. All over the world, workers are entering into struggle against the stagnation of their living standards as an ever-greater share of social resources are directed to war. Stopping the escalating bloodbath requires fusing the economic demands of the working class with the building of an anti-war movement, animated by the perspective of international socialism.