Page:China in Revolt (1926).pdf/43

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States comes into sharp conflict with the annexation desires of British imperialism. In Canada as well as in Mexico and Brazil, and also in Chile and other smaller nations of the American continent, a stubborn battle for influence over these countries has been in progress for some years between the United States and Great Britain. This antagonism is extremely sharpened by the struggle of these strongest imperialist states over oil and rubber resources (America controls more than 70% of the total oil production, while England has practically a monopoly of the rubber supply).

The rubber war which we have witnessed for more than a year, has given renewed indication of the original sourses of these antagonisms between the United States and Great Britain. With no less clarity however, they appear also on the Asiatic Continent, where an economic rivalry is going on over the Chinese markets between American and English imperialism. This is the first factor which determines the policy of American imperialism, it is pushing America into an armed conflict on the Pacific with Great Britain. In the same manner in which the World war of 1914 was in the main determined by the British-German competition, the future world war will be a struggle between the United States and Great Britain for the position of world leadership. Only under two premises would this perspective be vitiated: if the proletarian revolution were to break out in these countries before the armed clash between them comes to a head, or else, if the disintegration of the British Empire takes on a more rapid tempo than heretofore, and if Great Britain were to be crowded out and forced to vacate its dominant position.

Much more complicated is the "European" policy of American imperialism. The distance between the United States and Europe is too great to permit the former to exert, today, any direct intervention in

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