Here are my (I am far from he specialist in this field, so information should be taken with a grain
of salt):
It would be premature to categorize current China-Russia relations as either a “partnership” or an
“alliance,” but both are fuzzy concept because there are no permanent friends in world politics, only
permanent interests. Somehow France and USA managed to co-exist in NATO, so why not China and Russia.
But here much depends on push of the neocons in the US administration and especially in completely infested
with necons State Department. with enough thrust pigs can fly and they drive those to countries tor
the formal alliance (at least in a form of “nuclear attack on one is an attack on both”):
Both Rozman and Nye are, in fact, looking at different sides of the same coin. However, both have
missed something. The future of a China-Russian relationship depends largely on relations these two
countries have with the West, especially the United States. If Washington pushes too hard on oil
prices, Ukraine, and NATO expansion toward Russia, and if the U.S. rebalances too far against China
in the Pacific, China and Russia may indeed move towards a formal alliance, even if that may not
have been what they originally wanted.
The deal is significant to regional security as well as geopolitics. China’s improved
air defense capabilities will greatly complicate any efforts to conduct aerial operations or missile
attacks against the Chinese mainland, even with stealthy drones, longer-ranged cruise missiles, or
new bombers, all part of the new US “third offset” plan. In wartime, the S-400 could even support
Chinese airstrikes by knocking out enemy fighters flying above their own bases and cities. On the
strategic level, the S-400 sale would facilitate Sino-Russian cooperation, as well as facilitate
other sales and joint projects like submarines and space operations.
Ukrainian coup d’état of February 2014 moved Russia much closer to China and openly hostile to
the USA. That was a dramatic change that US neocons wanted so much. They essentially unleashed
“Cold War II”. That got what they wanted: they blocked EU-Russia cooperation. But it comes with a price.
http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-and-china-are-building-ties-against-the-west-2014-10
According to Missile Threat, a website operated by the George C. Marshall and Claremont Institutes,
it would make sense for Russia to reach out to China for help with an early warning missile system.
China has the technological capability to build a satellite system necessary for Russia’s early-warning
systems, while Russia could provide China with the technology necessary to protect itself against
medium-range ballistic missiles.
… … …
Ultimately, the crisis in Ukraine might benefit China more than any other country.
This trend is confirmed by Russians:
The expert spoke to Sputnik in an interview saying that, “The US solves tactical problems, but
very seriously loses strategically, as a consequence of the placement of US missile defense system
in South Korea, the result would be the rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing, in particular,
in the sphere of missile defense.”
Again, probably not an urgent problem unless some existing Chinese aircraft in service are
on their last legs and urgently must be replaced. In which case they could go with Airbus if
the situation could not wait. China has options. Boeing does not.
The west loves to portray the Chinese as totally without ethics, and if you have a product
they can't make for themselves, they will buy it from you only until they have figured out
how to make it themselves, and then fuck you, Jack. I don't see any reason to believe the
Chinese value alliances less than the west does, or are any more incapable of grasping the
value of a give-and-take trade policy. The west – especially the United States –
favours establishing a monopoly on markets and then using your inability to get the product
anywhere else as leverage to force concessions you don't want to make; is that ethical? China
must surely see the advantages of a mutually-respectful relationship with Russia, considering
that country not only safeguards a significant length of its border from western probing, but
supplies most of its energy. There remain many unexplored avenues for technical, engineering
and technological cooperation. At the same time, Russia is not in a subordinate position
where it has to endure being taken advantage of.
Trade is hard work, and any partner will maneuver for advantage, because everyone in
commerce likes market share and money. But Washington has essentially forgotten how to
negotiate on mutually-respectful terms, and favours maneuvering its 'partners' into
relationships in which the USA has an overwhelmingly dominant position, and then announcing
it is 'leveling the playing field'. Which means putting its thumb on the scale.
Lessons from Dr. Strangelove: The Risks of Deploying Low-Yield Nukes on Submarines
by Natasha E. Bajema
Stanley Kubrik's cult classic, Dr. Strangelove, has a lot to teach us about the practicalities of nuclear deterrence. Using
the film as a frame, we explore how other countries might view the deployment of low-yield nukes on U.S. submarines.
The low-yield nuclear warhead allegedly provides the U.S. with a needed capability for
deterring the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia, a prospect considered more likely under its current
nuclear doctrine. Proponents claim these new weapons are prompt,
useable
,
and capable of circumventing Russia's air defenses.
The Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine USS Nebraska (SSBN 739) transits the Hood Canal as it returns to Naval
Base Kitsap-Bangor.
But these claims beg two questions. Does this new weapon lead to enhanced credibility?
If so, at what cost?
Russian Forces Officially Enter the Crimea Region of Ukraine
Whenever U.S. policymakers express their fears of a "capability gap", it's hard not to
think of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 parody of nuclear weapons policies,
Dr. Strangelove
.
While
esteemed
experts have proposed plenty of valid arguments
against deploying low-yield nuclear weapons on submarines, it is
also worth considering what the film might teach us about credibility, capability gaps, the practicalities of deterrence
theory, and the essential role of perception.
I
Getting Into the Minds of our Adversaries is Essential for Achieving Nuclear Deterrence
After consulting with Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling, Kubrick defines deterrence in
his film as "the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the fear to attack."
Schelling suggests the threat of violence implied by deterrence requires explicit or
implicit collaboration between a "deterrer" and a "deterree" to achieve the common interest of avoiding mutual
destruction. This assumes country leaders are rational, spend time
evaluating
the costs and benefits of multiple courses of action, and communicate clearly about the nature of their deterrent. The
country being deterred will refrain from an action if it proves to be too costly.
If
one party refuses to collaborate or uphold the assumption of rationality, then deterrence fails.
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To determine what might be costly for its adversaries, the U.S. must therefore get
into their heads and see the world from their perspective.
An adversary must
believe
that
the U.S. has the will and capability to follow through with a particular threat. The deterrent must be credible.
II
A Capability Gap is Whatever You Make of It
Since nuclear deterrence does not involve the actual "use" of nuclear weapons, but
rather the threat of their use, it occurs largely in the minds of the "deterrer" and the "deterree".
When President John F. Kennedy first took office in 1961, many people perceived the
credibility of the U.S. nuclear deterrent to suffer from a so-called "missile gap" vis-a-vis the Soviet Union -- a threat
which turned out to be in error. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 and Khrushchev's bluster about the Soviet superiority
generated a widely-held impression that the U.S. trailed far behind the Soviets in ballistic missile technology. But the
gap was actually in United States' favor.
Ham radio operator Dick Oberholtzer and his wife listening to radio signals from Sputnik I.
Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images
To close the gap, the Kennedy administration deployed the "Jupiter" nuclear missiles
to Italy and Turkey with the Soviet Union as their intended target. Meanwhile, Khrushchev decided to place
intermediate-range missiles in Cuba in an effort to restore the perceived imbalance in capabilities.
A Soviet freighter is photographed just after leaving Cuba to return home.
Naval History & Heritage Command
Dr. Strangelove
suggests that a capability gap
exists because we think it exists. Alternatively, it exists because we fear our adversary thinks it exists. The gap does
not have to exist beyond the human imagination. It is the fear evoked by the perceived capability gap that matters.
Therefore, w
hatever U.S. policymakers think
about the supposed "capability gap" will have real world effects. But these effects will not necessarily benefit U.S.
national security in the way they intend. It depends on how their adversaries think about it.
III
Understanding the Discord Between Credibility and the Requirement for Rationality
In the film, plans to enhance credibility of a nuclear deterrent go awry, bringing
about the very nuclear catastrophe such actions were designed to prevent.
A deranged general activates a Top Secret plan designed to ensure prompt retaliation
in the event of a Soviet attack on U.S. leadership by allowing lower-level commanders to give nuclear launch orders. If
a first-strike nuclear attack inevitably leads to an all-out nuclear war, it would never be in the Soviet Union's
interest to start one.
American actor Sterling Hayden as General Jack Ripper in 'Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love
The Bomb' directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1964. In the film, the delusional General Ripper orders a nuclear attack on
the USSR, which triggers a Soviet doomsday device.
Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
As absurd as it seems, creating a situation in which the loss of central command and
control of nuclear weapons might occur was perceived as an effective strategy for enhancing credibility during the Cold
War.
As absurd as it seems, creating a situation in which the loss of central command and
control of nuclear weapons might occur was perceived as an effective strategy for enhancing credibility during the Cold
War. By exacerbating the risks and uncertainties inherent in nuclear conflict, adversaries were believed to refrain from
taking escalatory actions.
The problem with enhancing credibility of a nuclear deterrent is that such actions
rely on the strict rationality of both parties. Even if leaders are rational in the purest sense, they often lack
necessary information to properly analyze the costs and benefits for all possible courses of action, which can lead to
dangerous miscalculations.
While U.S. policymakers may perceive the new low-yield capability as
enhancing credibility, Putin may still be prepared to call the U.S. bluff on the strength of its will to use nuclear
weapons of any yield.
IV
When Nuclear Deterrence Theory is Translated into Practice, Nuclear War Becomes More Probable
As illustrated in
Dr. Strangelove,
plans grounded
in deterrence theory are prone to nuclear catastrophe when put into practice. Decentralizing command and control
enhances credibility, but it also introduces a significant risk of unauthorized nuclear war.
During the Cold War, the U.S. deployed thousands of tactical nuclear weapons to Europe
to credibly deter an attack from the Soviet Union where it enjoyed significant conventional superiority.
Many tactical nuclear weapons required pre-delegation authority to enhance
credibility. For example, the
Davy
Crockett
light recoilless rifle carried a W54 warhead with a yield of 10 to 20 tons. These weapons were mounted on
jeeps, operated by a three-man crew, and deployed to the front lines in Europe.
A U.S. Army soldier operates a Davy Crockett mounted on a jeep as three fellow soldiers stand by and watch on a
snow-covered road during the Vietnam War. The Davy Crockett was the U.S. Army hand or jeep portable weapons system
capable of firing atomic or conventional warheads.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Although the weapon's lethal radius famously exceeded its range, Carl Kaysen, a
prominent nuclear deterrence strategist during the Kennedy administration, expressed greater concern about its implied
pre-delegation authority.
I can't imagine a situation in which it could be safely deployed and used. How are you going to command it? How are
you going to be in control of it? You'll have some sergeant in a jeep firing off nuclear weapons because he's in
danger of being captured.
Carl Kaysen
Nuclear deterrence makes good sense in theory, and holds up in the minds of deterrer
and deterree. As long as nuclear war does not occur, deterrence has succeeded. However, when nuclear deterrence is
implemented as a military strategy, it can translate into absurd situations that actually increase the risk of nuclear
war.
V
Communication is Essential, but Perception is Everything
The conflation of communication with perception was a paramount theme in
Dr.
Strangelove.
In the film, the President goes as far as allowing the Soviet Ambassador into the War Room to clear up
any misunderstandings.
But, clear communication does not guarantee accurate perception.
This
is where the new submarine-launched low-yield nuclear warhead becomes especially problematic. Deploying low-yield
nuclear warheads on a strategic delivery system produces
dangerous
uncertainties
if U.S. policymakers attempt to use them. And they have to at least be willing to use them for the
sake of credibility.
A port quarter aerial view of the nuclear-powered Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine USS Nebraska (SSBN 739)
underway in the Atlantic.
U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 3rd Class Christian Viera
If they're used, will the Russians perceive the attack as limited? If asked this
question, Dr. Strangelove would likely respond: "The whole point of a limited response... is lost...if your adversary
can't tell the difference!"
If under attack from a ballistic missile submarine, the Russians are likely to assume
the worst if they can't determine the exact yield of the warhead on an incoming SLBM. And the worst would lead to
nuclear war with the United States.
In fact, as a result of this risk, U.S. policymakers
might
be self-deterred
and reluctant to use these weapons in the first place. Putin is likely to anticipate this, which
would entirely defeat the purpose of the new capability while increasing the potential for nuclear war.
VI
We Need to Move Beyond Capability Gaps as Drivers of Nuclear Weapons Policy
In his film, Kubrick demonstrates the absurdity of a capability gap in a concluding
discussion about "doomsday gaps" and "mineshaft gaps".
The new low yield nuclear warhead deployed on ballistic missile submarines fails to
enhance credibility. It also increases the risk of nuclear war. As a result, this new weapon does not make us safer, but
rather invites potential misunderstanding with adversaries.
Let's draw on lessons from history and pop culture and avoid repeating past mistakes.
Natasha Bajema is the Founder and CEO of Nuclear Spin Cycle and the host of the Authors
of Mass Destruction Podcast. Follow her on Twitter
@W
MDgirl
.
The rise of China has been a looming threat to the U.S. primacy on the world stage, as
Beijing increasingly seeks to push the United States out of its immediate periphery and
ultimately Asia
. Facing an increasingly powerful China, Obama initiated the strategic rebalancing of U.S.
interests from the Middle East to East Asia. The "
pivot to Asia " aimed to slow down the rise of China as a great power, and also to free the
United States from the shackles of the Middle East wars. In this context, Obama's successor,
Trump, in his 2019 State of the Union address
noted that "great nations do not fight endless wars." For that matter, the Trump
administration has followed its predecessor's overall strategy to pull the United States out of
the Middle East and refocus on its attention on the looming threat of rising China.
Trump, for his turn, has upped the ante by waging a trade war against China and has
increased the U.S. military presence in its vicinity
. In April and May 2020, the U.S. Navy deployed several warships to the South China Sea,
including Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Montgomery to counter Beijing's "
bullying ." Meanwhile, three of the eleven U.S. Navy aircraft
carriers are currently patrolling the Pacific, sending a powerful signal to China.
Washington has also resorted to economic sanctions
to counter Beijing and is considering the
deployment of ballistic missiles to Asia pacific; a move that could shift the balance of
power in favor of the United States.
The recent outbreak of the deadly coronavirus has also enabled the U.S. administration to
increase its diplomatic attacks
against China, blaming Beijing for hiding the truth about the spread of the deadly virus. It is
interesting to note that U.S. officials in reference to China are increasingly using the word "
communist
," a reminiscent of the Cold War great-power rivalry between the United States and the Soviet
Union. Washington's efforts to slow down and hinder China's rise, as a potential
peer-competitor are in line with the realist predictions that great powers seek to ensure that
no other power can challenge them.
Over the years, the United States has also
increased its defense spending, which is
projected to reach a historic record of $740.5 billion for the year 2021. Meanwhile, some
analysts have even
argued that the U.S. defense budget exceeds $1 trillion. Furthermore, the United States is
investing in new military technologies, including missile defense systems to
counter China's "[development of] missile capabilities intended to deny the United States
the capability and freedom of action to protect U.S. allies and partners in Asia." In the same
context, as China
unveiled its own "game-changer" DF-17 hypersonic missile, the United States is
pressing for its own "super-duper" missiles -- as Trump
calls them -- to take the lead in the emerging arms race for hypersonic missiles. Russia,
for its part, has also deployed Avangard hypersonic missiles, claiming
that it can reach twenty times the speed of sound.
With respect to nuclear weapons, the Trump administration has also called for the expansion
of the role, and capabilities of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The 2018 Nuclear
Posture Review (NPR) observes the "need" for replacement, sustainment and modernization of
the U.S. nuclear triad. Following the NPR, the United States has deployed
low-yield nuclear warheads, which in turn could lower the threshold of the use of nuclear
weapons. Furthermore, some reports
suggest that the United States, after decades of a moratorium, may conduct its first
nuclear test.
The new changes in the U.S. nuclear policies are reflective of the recent developments in
great power rivalry with Russia and China and are in line with realist
predictions that great powers go into a great length to maintain a credible nuclear deterrence
against other nuclear states. In this vein, Russian president Vladimir Putin recently
signed
Russia's nuclear deterrent policy, announcing that Russia, in response to conventional attacks,
would use nuclear weapons. Ironically, Putin's move echoes President Dwight Eisenhower's "
massive
retaliation " policy, which implicitly threatened nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union
in response to any conventional aggression against America's allies.
Although much smaller in size compared to the United States and Russia, China for its own
part, has embarked on modernizing its nuclear arsenal, fielding a greater number of warheads. A
report by the
Center for Strategic and International Studies indicates that the number of Chinese nuclear
warheads between 2012 and 2019 grew from 240 to 290, suggesting a 21 percent increase. From
Beijing's perspective , however, "rising strategic
threats" emerging from Washington, mandates the country to increase the number of its warheads,
and complete its nuclear triad.
The Trump administration has also set on the path of abandoning international arms control
agreements, unshackling the U.S. military from previous limitations. In the latest case, the
Trump administration, citing Russia's violation of the
Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), withdrew from
the four-decade arms control agreement in August 2019, allowing the U.S. military to develop
and
test previously banned intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Notwithstanding the official
reasoning however, the decision to abandon the INF treaty has more to do with concerns over
China's
growing intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which is not bound to any restrictions.
As the expiration date for another arms control treaty, the New
START is approaching, the Trump administration is pressing
China to join any future agreement between Washington and Moscow; a demand that seems to be
unlikely given China's own insecurities, and small nuclear arsenal. In the case of INF for
example, reports indicate that China could
lose up to 95 percent of its ballistic missiles capability, should it join an agreement
similar to INF. These developments are consistent with Realist
dictums that states are concerned with their relative gains when joining international
regimes, such as arms control agreements.
After more than three decades of primacy on the world stage, the United States is facing
serious challenges emerging from Asia. To counter them, the United States has sought to
increase its relative power and simultaneously contain its closest competitor, Beijing, which
after two centuries of absence from the world stage, is bent on upending the current ordering
of the international system. In any case, the current U.S. approach to increasing military
spending, nuclear modernization and unilaterally abrogating multilateral agreements are
consistent with realist predictions of great-power rivalry. In this context, under the likely
scenario of a second Trump term, one should expect the United States to continue abrogating
international regimes, and to further increase military expenditure, which in turn could
trigger another arms race, reminiscent of the Cold War era.
Sina Azodi is a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council and a foreign policy advisor
at Gulf State Analytics. He is also a PhD candidate in international relations at the
University of South Florida. Follow him on Twitter @Azodiac83.
Says US would need to come down to China's level for arsenal
China confirmed on Wednesday that they would be happy to join trilateral nuclear arms
limitation talks with the US and Russia, but would only do so if the US drastically cut its
nuclear stockpile to be in line with China's
####
From the CNN link: "I can assure you that if the US says that they are ready to come
down to the Chinese level (of nuclear weapons), China will be happy to participate the next
day. But actually we know that's not going to happen," Fu Cong, head of the Chinese Foreign
Ministry's arms control department, said at a press briefing in Beijing Wednesday
###
LOLZ! That's a pretty good response and I'm surprised they didn't say this much earlier,
but I assume Beijing & Mosocw have it all in hand. Now I would follow this up with If
it helps, we will increase our nuclear capacity to 6,000 plus deployable nuclear weapons and
then negotiate a reduction. Agree?
I LOVE your answer, it is even better than the Chinese response, which I agree was pretty
tongue-in-cheek. Maybe you should be a diplomat – it's not too late.
It also occurred to me that China has a Cuban option if the US insists on ringing it with
missiles and them moves nukes up to the region. Beijing would only have to mention the
possibility and Washington would go apoplectic! Remember that the Cuban missile crisis had
its origins in the USA installing Nike/Jupiter IRBMs in northern Turkey which would have a
very short flight time to target in the Soviet Union. Putting nukes in Cuba was an et tu
Brute move and completely unexpected, coz the enemy is always dumb.
Ringing China was on the cards from the mid-1990s, so of it already implemented such as
'Super Bastions', i.e. building up bases such as Guam & Diego Garcia to take more
bombers, nuke armed submarines etc. The down side of that is that they make very tempting
targets to hit with nukes themselves, both bases being far from any other country.
Just at what point will the US understand that building up its military forces in the
region is massively retarded? Unfortunately the French and the British have signed on. India
still hasn't learned its strategic lessons either as we have seen recently with China where
it tried to change the balance (via J&K new state declaration etc.) and got wedgied. The
US loves its naval exercises with India in the region coz the USN doesn't and will not have
enough (of the right) ships to do so itself ($$$) so being nice is a bit of a freebie.
Backing up India 100% wouldn't be but it does look good in public when soothing words come
from Washington.
Hong Kong has a long history of being the base camp of western intelligence agencies in the
Asia-Pacific. Much has been written about the western intelligence agencies' covert operations out of Hong Kong
before, during and after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China.
In the case of Russia, too, western intelligence activities are showing signs of making
another determined push for a post-Putin scenario in the Kremlin. The West's calculation is
that if Putin were to step down in 2024, he would very soon become a "lame duck". Like in Hong
Kong, western intelligence has developed extensive networks within
Russia through which it is feasible to fuel unrest if political uncertainties coalesce with
social and economic grievances. The Russian counter-intelligence is very well aware of this
danger.
Putin has outwitted the western game plan to destabilise Russia. The constitutional
amendment allows him to seek another two six-year terms and he intends to keep everyone
guessing. Keeping the western adversaries guessing is also what the Chinese security law in
Hong Kong hopes to achieve.
The western intelligence operating out of the city henceforth comes under direct scrutiny of Beijing .
Recruitment of local agents, planning and mounting operations inside China, or inciting unrest
in Hong Kong to weaken China -- such covert operations become far more difficult and risky for
the US, British and Australian intelligence. Interestingly, Xi used the expression "external
sabotage and intervention" in his conversation with Putin today.
Beijing and Moscow have voiced strong support for each other's moves to strengthen national
security. On June 2, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said,
"We note that the national referendum on constitutional amendments, a major event in
Russia's political calendar, is going on smoothly. Results released by the Central Elections
Commission reflect the Russian people's choice. As Russia's friendly neighbour and
comprehensive strategic partner of coordination for a new era, China will always respect the
development path independently chosen by the Russian people and support Russia's efforts to
realise lasting stability and promote socioeconomic development.
"We stand ready to work together with the Russian side to act on the consensus reached by
our heads of state, deepen all-round strategic coordination and mutually-beneficial cooperation
in various areas, and bring greater benefits to our two peoples."
On the same day, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in Moscow, "We
noted the entry into force of the law on ensuring national security in the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region of the PRC on July 1, 2020 by the decision of the Standing Committee of
the National People's Congress of China.
"In this context, we would like to reaffirm that Russia's position of principle on the
situation in Hong Kong remains unchanged. We respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity
of the PRC and consider all issues pertaining to Hong Kong to be China's domestic affair. We
are against any attempts by external forces to interfere in relations between the central
government and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the PRC."
Cooperation between the Russian and Chinese security agencies in the realm of internal
security can only stem from a high level of mutual understanding at the highest level.
Significantly, on July 4, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov poured cold water on
President Trump's invitation to Putin to attend a G7 summit in the US, calling it a "flawed"
idea.
Moscow has any number of legitimate reasons to distance itself from Trump's
invite, but what Ryabkov chose was very telling. He said, "The idea of the so-called expanded
G7 summit is flawed, because it is unclear to us how the authors of that initiative plan to
consider the Chinese factor. Without China, it is just impossible to discuss certain issues in
the modern world."
In effect, Rybakov thwarted Washington's move to isolate China. Trump's advisors were naive
to estimate that Moscow could be baited to join its containment strategy against China. Ryabkov
publicly administered the
Kremlin's snub.
Enter Russia. Coincidence or not, small fires are being lit lately on the Moscow streets as
well, and they are spreading into significant protests
against President Vladimir Putin. If the extradition law was the pretext for the Hong Kong
turmoil, it is the election to the Moscow Duma (city legislature) that has apparently triggered
the Russian protest.
Protestors in Moscow, August 10, 2019
Just as there is economic and social discontent in Hong Kong, the popularity of Putin has
declined lately which is attributed to the stagnation of the Russian economy.
In both cases, the American agenda is blatantly "regime change". This may seem surprising,
since the Chinese and Russian leaderships appear rock solid. The legitimacy of the Chinese
Communist Party over which President Xi Jinping presides and the popularity of Putin still at a
level that is the envy of any politician anywhere in the world, but the doctrine of "colour
revolutions" is not built on democratic principles.
Colour revolutions are about upturning an established political order and it has no
co-relation with mass support. The colour revolution is coup by other means. It is not even
about democracy. The recent presidential and parliamentary elections in Ukraine exposed that
the colour revolution of 2014 was an insurrection that the nation disowns.
Of course, the stakes are very high when it comes to destabilising China and Russia. Nothing
less than the global strategic balance is involved. The US' dual containment strategy against
Russia and China is quintessentially the New American Century project -- US' global hegemony
through the 21st century.
The US wagered that Moscow and Beijing would be hard pressed to cope with the spectre of
colour revolutions and that would isolate them. After all, authoritarian regimes are exclusive
and into the sanctum sanctorum of their internal politics not even their closest friends or
allies are allowed in.
This is where Moscow has sprung a nasty surprise for Washington. The Russian Foreign
Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in Moscow on Friday that Russia and China should
exchange information on the US interference in their internal affairs. She flagged that Moscow
is aware of the Chinese statements that the US interferes in Hong Kong affairs and treats this
information "with all seriousness."
"Moreover, I think it would be right and useful to exchange such information through
respective services," Zakharova said, adding that the Russian and Chinese sides will discuss
the issue soon. She added that the US intelligence agency is using technology to destabilise
Russia and China.
Earlier on Friday, the
Russian Foreign Ministry had summoned the head of the Political Section in the US embassy
Tim Richardson, and presented him with an official protest against the US encouraging an
unauthorised opposition rally in Moscow on August 3.
Indeed, Moscow is far more experienced than Beijing in neutralising covert operations by the
US intelligence. It is a hallmark of the great skill and expertise as well as the tenacity of
the Russian system that through the entire Cold War era and "post-Soviet" period, there has
never been anything like the turmoil on Tiananmen Square in Beijing (1989) or Hong Kong (2019)
triggered by the US intelligence.
Moscow's message to Beijing is direct and candid -- 'United we stand, divided we fall.' No
doubt, the two countries have been in consultation and wanted the rest of the world to know.
Indeed, the message Zakharova transmitted -- on a joint firewall against US interference -- is
of epochal significance. It elevates the Russia-China alliance to a qualitatively new level,
creating yet another political underpinning of collective security.
Here's What You Need To Remember: Pentagon war plans already included the destruction of
cities as a way to destroy the urban and industrial backbone. "This should result in greater
population casualties in that a larger portion of the urban population may be placed at
risk."
"Bomb them back into the Stone Age," ex-Air Force general Curtis LeMay is reported to have
once urged as a way to defeat North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
But it turns out that had global nuclear war erupted during the early 1960s, it would have
been the Russians and Chinese who would have reverted to living like the Flintstones.
Related Video: Cold War Escape Tunnel Opens Under Berlin Wall
The document in question pertains to the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, which
governs the numerous war plans and their associated options that govern how America would fight
a nuclear war. In June 1964, senior military leaders (including Air Force Chief of Staff LeMay)
were sent a staff review of the current SIOP.
The report included questions and answers regarding the various nuclear targeting options.
These ranged from attacks on enemy nuclear and conventional forces while minimizing collateral
damage to enemy cities, to attacking cities as well as military forces on purpose. This latter
option would have been "in order to destroy the will and ability of the Sino-Soviet Bloc to
wage war, remove the enemy from the category of a major industrial power, and assure a post-war
balance of power favorable to the United States."
"Should these options give more stress to population as the main target?" asked one
question.
The answer was that Pentagon war plans already included the destruction of cities as a way
to destroy the urban and industrial backbone. "This should result in greater population
casualties in that a larger portion of the urban population may be placed at risk."
In another Pentagon analysis "on the effect of placing greater emphasis on the attack of
urban/industrial targets in order to destroy the USSR and China as viable societies, it was
indicated that the achievement of a 30 per cent fatality level (i.e., 212.7 million people) in
the total population (709 million people) of China would necessitate an exorbitant weight of
effort."
This was because of China's rural society at the time. "Thus, the attack of a large number
of place names [towns] would destroy only a small fraction of the total population of China.
The rate of return for a [nuclear] weapon expended diminishes after accounting for the 30 top
priority cities."
Note that while annihilating one-third of China's population was deemed uneconomical, the
U.S. military took it for granted that the Soviet Union and China would be destroyed as viable
societies.
14 hours ago Nice. Sounds like a lose lose situation. Carry on! 8 hours ago Whats
more scary is Russia Dead Hand program. it can automatically trigger the launch of the Russian
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by sending a pre-entered highest-authority order
from the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Strategic Missile Force Management to command posts
and individual silos if a nuclear strike is detected by seismic, light, radioactivity, and
pressure sensors even with the commanding elements fully destroyed. So even if we somehow nuked
them and they didnt have time to respond, Dead Hand would do it itself. 16 hours ago This was
before scientist fully understood how the prevailing winds and the jet stream circle the globe
in the northern hemisphere. Had this nuclear war on two fronts actually happened the radiation
fallout would have circled the globe in weeks and killed most of the people living north of the
equator in a matter of months.. Think the old Gregory Peck movie "On the Beach"... And rent it
if you can, it's a great movie.. 14 hours ago If I am not mistaken, was not the same General
Curtis LeMay the running mate of George Wallace in 1968? 14 hours ago Note, all plans of the
USA are always based on assumption of invisibility. The feeling is that the country is
protected by oceans and invisible to any retaliation. My conclusion: Nuclear bomb available to
both sides saved us from MAD. It is good that both Soviet Union and China developed nuclear
response. But look, amepikan plans are made in 1964 - Soviet Union had already launched in 1957
Sputnik and as one of my educated amepikan contacts said "Russians beat a s.....t out us", that
is scared to death.
So amepikan leadership could expect that they would not invite retaliation? May be the US would
win but what would be left from the US would hardly resemble normal society. 15 hours ago By
the late 1980s, the US had so many nuclear weapons that they pretty much ran out of viable
targets. The nuke weaponeers used to talk about "making the rubble bounce" by hitting the same
targets multiple times.
BTW, the highly classified "SIOP" was in effect until 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_Plan
13 hours ago This doctrine imo still exist. An obama aide leaked the same thing. If we go to a
nuclear war with either china or russia we will nuke both because we cant afford to have one
survive if we get destroyed. So, we can assume a nuke war with China or russia will send both
their nukes our way. 13 hours ago This kind of hyperbole article is not productive. National
war strategy should be secret. Freedom of press should have its limit. 9 hours ago I have a
suggestion, Pentagon. In the future, if you have an Endgame scenario & response, DON'T
PUBLISH IT ON YAHOO!
I think you are onto something there. When Putin unveiled the new weapons systems,
Peresvet I took to be a laser and it seemed a bit out of place as lasers are limited by
atmospheric conditions whereas Russian military equipment operates under all conditions.
Putin also spoke of completely new physics principles.
In what is shaping up as the next explosive geopolitical hotspot, one of China's most senior
generals said on Friday that the country will attack Taiwan if there is no other way of
stopping it from becoming independent in the latest rhetorical escalation between China and the
democratically ruled island Beijing claims as its own, Reuters reported.
Speaking at Beijing's Great Hall of the People on the 15th anniversary of the Anti-Secession
Law, Li Zuocheng, chief of the Joint Staff Department and member of the Central Military
Commission, left the door open to using force. The 2005 law gives the country the legal basis
for military action against Taiwan if it secedes or seems about to. Li is one of China's few
senior officers with combat experience, having taken part in China's ill-fated invasion of
Vietnam in 1979.
As Reuters notes the comments "are especially striking amid international opprobrium over
China passing new national security legislation for Chinese-run Hong Kong."
Taiwan's government denounced the comments, saying that threats of war were a violation of
international law and that Taiwan has never been a part of the People's Republic of China.
"Taiwan's people will never choose dictatorship nor bow to violence", Taiwan's Mainland
Affairs Council said. "Force and unilateral decisions are not the way to resolve
problems."
Taiwan is China's most sensitive territorial issue. Beijing says it is a Chinese province,
and has denounced the Trump administration's support for the island. Li Zhanshu, the
third-most-senior leader of China's ruling Communist Party and head of China's Parliament, told
the same event that non-peaceful means were an option of last resort: "As long as there is a
slightest chance of a peaceful resolution, we will put in hundred times the effort," Li Zhanshu
said. However, he added: " We warn Taiwan's pro-independence and separatist forces sternly, the
path of Taiwan independence leads to a dead end; any challenge to this law will be severely
punished".
Taiwan has shown no interest in being run by autocratic China, and has denounced China's
repeated military drills near the island while rejecting China's offer of a "one country, two
systems" model of a high degree of autonomy.
President Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party won presidential and
parliamentary elections by a landslide in January, vowing to stand up to Beijing. At the same
time, China is deeply suspicious of Taiwan's president Tsai, whom it accuses of being a
separatist bent on declaring formal independence. Ms Tsai says Taiwan is already an independent
country called the Republic of China, its official name.
The administration also took off the gloves with China over U.S. listings by mainland
companies that fail to follow U.S. securities laws. This came after the Commerce Department
finally moved to limit access by Huawei Technologies to high-end silicon chips made with U.S.
lithography machines. The trade war with China is heating up, but a conflict was inevitable and
particularly when it comes to technology.
At the bleeding edge of 7 and 5 nanometer feature size, American tech still rules the world
of semiconductors. In 2018, Qualcomm confirmed its next-generation Snapdragon SoC would be
built at 7 nm. Huawei has already officially announced its first 7nm chip -- the Kirin 980. But
now Huawei is effectively shut out of the best in class of custom-made chips, giving Samsung
and Apple a built-in advantage in handsets and network equipment.
It was no secret that Washington allowed Huawei to use loopholes in last year's blacklist
rules to continue to buy U.S. sourced chips. Now the door is closed, however, as the major
Taiwan foundries led by TSMC will be forced to stop custom production for Huawei, which is
basically out of business in about 90 days when its inventory of chips runs out. But even as
Huawei spirals down, the White House is declaring financial war on dozens of other listed
Chinese firms.
President Donald Trump said
in an interview with Fox Business News that forcing Chinese companies to follow U.S.
accounting norms would likely push them to list in non-U.S. exchanges. Chinese companies that
list their shares in the U.S. have long refused to allow American regulators to inspect their
accounting audits, citing direction from their government -- a practice that market authorities
here have been unwilling or unable to stop.
The attack by the Trump Administration on shoddy financial disclosure at Chinese firms is
long overdue, but comes at a time when the political evolution in China is turning decidedly
authoritarian in nature and against any pretense of market-oriented development. The rising
power of state companies in China parallels the accumulation of power in the hands of Xi
Jinping, who is increasingly seen as a threat to western-oriented business leaders. The trade
tensions with Washington provide a perfect foil to crack down on popular unrest in Hong Kong
and discipline wayward oligarchs.
The latest moves by Beijing to take full control in Hong Kong are part of the more general
retrenchment visible in China. "[P]rivate entrepreneurs are increasingly nervous about their
future," writes Henny Sender in the Financial Times . "In many cases, these
entrepreneurs have U.S. passports or green cards and both children and property in America. To
be paid in U.S. dollars outside China for their companies must look more tempting by the day."
A torrent of western oriented Chinese business leaders is exiting before the door is shut
completely.
The fact is that China's position in U.S. trade has retreated as nations like Mexico and
Vietnam have gained. Mexico is now America's largest trading partner and Vietnam has risen to
11th, reports Qian Wang of Bloomberg News . Meanwhile, China has dropped from 21 percent
of U.S. trade in 2018 to just 18 percent last year. A big part of the shift is due to the
U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade pact, which is expected to accelerate a return of production to North
America. Sourcing for everything from autos to semiconductors is expected to rotate away from
China in coming years.
China abandoned its decades-old practice of
setting a target for annual economic growth , claiming that it was prioritizing goals such
as stabilizing employment, alleviating poverty and preventing risks in 2020. Many observers
accept the official communist party line that the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic made it
almost impossible to fix an expansion rate this year, but in fact the lasting effects of the
2008 financial crisis and the aggressive policies of President Trump have rocked China back on
its heels.
As China becomes increasingly focused inward and with an eye on public security, the
economic situation is likely to deteriorate further. While many observers viewed China's "Belt
& Road" initiative as a sign of confidence and strength, in fact it was Beijing's attempt
to deal with an economic realignment that followed the 2008 crisis. The arrival of President
Trump on the scene further weakened China's already unstable mercantilist economic model, where
non-existent internal demand was supposed to make up for falling global trade flows. Or at
least this was the plan until COVID-19.
"Before the Covid-19 outbreak, many economists were expecting China to set a GDP growth
target of 6% to 6.5% to reflect the gradual slowdown in the pace of expansion over the past few
years," reports Caixin Global . "Growth slid to 6.1% in 2019 from 6.7% in 2018. But the
devastation caused by the coronavirus epidemic -- which saw the economy contract 6.8%
year-on-year in the first quarter -- has thrown those forecasts out of the window."
Out of the window indeed. Instead of presiding over a glorious expansion of the Chinese
sphere of influence in Asia, Xi Jinping is instead left to fight a defensive action
economically and financially. The prospective end of the special status of Hong Kong is
unlikely to have any economic benefits and may actually cause China's problems with massive
internal debt and economic malaise to intensify. Beijing's proposed security law would reduce
Hong Kong's separate legal status and likely bring an end to the separate currency and business
environment.
I honestly don't know if this article is or is not correct... But I wonder...
AmConMag publishes a major anti-China article on most days now. What is happening? What is
the mechanics of this... "phenomenon"?
A place where where Americans opposed to U.S. hegemony because it's harm on everyone
without being overwhelmed by the Neocon acolytes where can we go, anyone ever try to get a
word in on foxnews ?
If you try to reach out to twitter on Tom Cotton or Mike Waltz dismisses you as a
'Chinese govt / Iranian / Russian bot'
You know what, God will judge us and we will all be equal in he eyes of Him
Why should I be afraid. Why should I be silent. And thank you TAC for the opportunity to
post.
I too came here for interesting commentary, - and even better comments... five years ago or
so?
I found the original articles mostly okay, often too verbose, meandering for my taste but
the different point of view made them worthwhile. The readers' comments, now that is
priceless. That brings the real value. That's where we learn. That's where I learn, anyway.
:)
It never occurred to me to message to any politician, I think my voice would be lost in the
cacophony.
The target of my curiosity is that when all these articles start to point in one direction
(like belligerence toward China) how does it happen? Is there a chain of command? It seems
coordinated.
It's possible to be anti-neocon, for their being too ideological, and not pacifist. That is
basically my position.
I agree with most here on Russia and Iran. They are not threats, and in specific cases
should be partners instead. Agree on American imperialism being foolish and often evil. I
believe in a multipolar world as a practical matter. I don't take a soft view of China
however. I believe they do intend to replace nefarious American hegemony with their own
relevant, but equally nefarious, flavor of hegemony. There are few countries in the world
with such a pathological distrust of their own people. I truly believe that country is a
threat that needs to be checked at least for a couple of decades by the rest of the
world.
As to the editorial direction, I think it is merely capitalism. China's perception in
the world is extremely bad lately. I would fully expect the always somewhat Russophile
environment here to seize the moment to say 'see! Russia is not a true threat! It's China!'
RT itself soon after Trump's election I recall posted an article complaining about total
disregard for Chinese election meddling.
You can see when the people holding the leash give a tug on the collar. And it's clear that
the GOP is feeling the need for a warlike political environment.
The most blatant presstitution example, of course, was the National Review, going from
'Never Trump' to full time servicing.
This insane situation is only possible because people are sedated by mass media propaganda
and endless diversions from reality, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
T he world's worst Putin puppet is escalating tensions with Russia even further, with the
Trump administration looking at withdrawal from more nuclear treaties in the near future.
Moon of Alabama has
published a solid breakdown of all this, outlining the absence of evidence for the Trump
administration's justifications of its treaty withdrawals and explaining why China has nothing
whatsoever to gain by signing on to a trilateral New START Treaty. I have nothing to add to
this, other than to ask a simple question.
Do you consent to having a bunch of unseen military personnel
rolling the dice every day on the gamble that we won't wipe ourselves off the face of this
Earth in the confusion and chaos of rising hostilities due to miscommunication or technical
malfunction, as nearly happened many times during
the last cold war?
Do you consent to a
slow-motion third world war where an oligarch-led alliance of powerful nations works
tirelessly to absorb new nations into its imperial blob by any means necessary?
Do you consent to a world where weapons of Armageddon are brandished about by imbeciles with
inadequacy issues?
Do you consent to a world ruled by people who are so sociopathic that they are willing to
inflict endless mass military slaughter and risk a nuclear holocaust just to have more control
over the world population?
Do you consent to a world where we risk literally everything because a few overeducated,
under-mothered think tankers were able to market an idea called "unipolarity" at key points of
interest after the fall of the Soviet Union?
Do you consent to a world where powerful governments team up like a bunch of bitchy mean
girls against weaker nations that aren't in their clique?
Do you consent to governments spending lives, resources and treasure on bloodbaths around
the globe and treating terrestrial life itself like some trivial plaything instead of ensuring
the thriving of their own populations?
Does this seem like health to you?
Does this seem like sanity to you?
Is any of this something you want? Something you consent to?
Of course not. These questions are all redundant. Nobody with a healthy mind and a clear
picture of what's going on would consent to this madness, no matter what nation they live
in.
This whole insane model was rolled out without your consent. You were never asked if you
consented, because the answer would have been no.
Nobody gives their conscious and informed consent to this. The new cold war is as consensual
as sex after a Rohypnol-spiked drink, and the illusion of consent is just as nefariously and
artificially manufactured. People are roofied into sedation by mass media propaganda and
endless diversion from reality, and then power has its way with us.
If people were actually given informed consent about what is done in their name, none of
this would be happening. Weapons of war would have been destroyed long ago and we'd all be
working together in healthy collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem to ensure a
healthy, happy world for our children and our grandchildren.
There is no reason we cannot have such a world. We are the many, they are the few. They
manufacture our consent because they absolutely require that consent. A population which will
not be propagandized is a population which cannot be ruled.
All we have to do is inform each other about what's really going on. Then informed consent
can exist. And be withdrawn.
Those who consent include a large fraction of ignorant CIA/MSM-bedazzled young men, mere
punks looking for excuses to destroy something to aggrandize themselves to prove that they
are not teenagers anymore.
Their relatives and friends may not be so sure, but are nearly all cowards who will never
object to the mass media narrative.
They live in fear of, and social and economic dependence upon their tribes of church and
town, led by low-end tyrants who demand power as fake defenders, by posing with flag and
cross, and inventing foreign enemies behind every tree.
This class of the ignorant never sees beyond mass media narrative, so reform requires
eliminating oligarchy mass media.
The gang operation that DC has become, requires rethinking the institutions of democracy,
to preclude corruption.
Also rethinking of the means of action, as we no longer control those tools, and need new
tools to restore democracy.
Nearly all agree that only the most extreme collapse or conquest would permit forcible
restoration of democracy.
In the age of advanced weapons, that would require international embargo and a very deep and
prolonged recession.
Restoration by reason presumes that intellectuals somehow lead when instability and anger
weaken the corrupt.
The core problem is the structure of a democracy that prevents the corruption by money
that has made the tools of democracy serve money power, including all branches of federal
government and mass media. Most educated people have little time to consider the reforms
needed. But it is not difficult to design a democracy not susceptible to corruption by money,
and the tribal cabals of factions.
Moi , May 27, 2020 at 08:43
With trillion dollar "defence" spending (including black) the US needs to learn a simple
thing about "you break it, you own it."
The phrase means if you break it, you pay reparations. It does not mean that you actually
own it.
michael888 , May 27, 2020 at 07:44
As Leroy Fletcher Prouty explains in his book "JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to
Assassinate Kennedy", war is essential to those at the top for easy profits and to control
global resources. Although not particularly well written and redundant in many sections, the
book is conceptionally sound and sadly thought provoking. There are more forces undermining
than promoting peace, and at higher levels of society in the US and in the world.
Laurence , May 26, 2020 at 23:31
Seems like a mainstream myth you are falling back on–calling Trump the Putin Puppet.
I wonder if you believe in all that rhetoric of Russia-Gate??
Just finished reading a book I highly recommend about history of Russia in our modern era,
and the Russian-American relationship and who is to gain from having one another as enemies.
(the book: Power of Impossible Ideas by Sharon Tennison) We need to be giving each other
respect for all of us to go forward, and not by parroting snipes! Russia and the US and China
stand to gain from cooperation. And we lose by confrontation.
Randal Marlin , May 26, 2020 at 17:50
Of course I agree with Caitlin Johnstone regarding all of her questions. But the one that
raises the most frightening, because realistic, question is: "Do you consent to having a
bunch of unseen military personnel rolling the dice every day on the gamble that we won't
wipe ourselves off the face of this Earth in the confusion and chaos of rising hostilities
due to miscommunication or technical malfunction, as nearly happened many times during the
last cold war?"
Iran shooting down a passenger plane in the wake of verbal escalation by U.S. President
Donald Trump's Administration is an example of the kind thing that can happen. What if the
plane shot down had been a U.S. military plane or warship? The lesson should be that verbal
escalation is not worth the risk. This is not a poker game, or if in some people's minds it
is, they should be not be permitted to get anywhere near decision-making in the matter.
anon4d2 , May 27, 2020 at 11:29
Are you alluding to a potential or actual aircraft shoot-down by Iran?
Perhaps you recall the passenger plane of Iran shot down by the US?
rosemerry , May 26, 2020 at 17:02
We can see by the way we are being treated during this pandemic that people do not seem to
have any idea what terrible decisions their leaders have already made, even just this
century. No regard for facts or truth, constant blaming and paranoia about "national
security" while ignoring evidence of advancing deaths in all our technically advanced
"democracies".
The whole assumption by POTUSTRUMP that Covid-19 is in motion just to stop his re-election
(he really seems to believe this-worse than WMD!) and that Big Pharma making money from a
vaccine is vitally urgent,( not cooperation with China perhaps even making a vaccine which it
would give to the rest of us) shows how far we have descended since the USA "won the Cold
War" but decided that world destruction was worthwhile anyway.
DH Fabian , May 26, 2020 at 16:54
Democrats and their party loyalists spent over three years trying to build support for war
against Russia. As Trump increased US/NATO troops near the Russian border (provocation), and
reinforced economic sanctions against Russia, one would think Democrats would be delighted.
Have you placed your bet yet, on whether Democrats will blame Russia or Chna for a 2020
defeat?
Moi , May 26, 2020 at 16:37
Government of the people, by the people, for the people and the people's name is Koch.
DW Bartoo , May 26, 2020 at 15:52
"No!" To a New Cold War against Russia and China.
"Yes!" To a sane, humane, and sustainable future for all.
Deceit, and the manipulation behind it, and Diversions, and the lack of greater curiosity
and attention paid to the deceits, along with cultural myths of superiority, the inculcation
of which falls to media and academia, all must be understood for what they are, their
purpose, and their consequences. and who, very specifically benefit$ from
things-as-they-are.
How many, however, dare question their culture?
Either the one they were born into or chose to embrace?
How often have those living in and identifying themselves with empire, found the courage
to question, to challenge, aloud, the myths, the unexamined assumptions?
Especially when the cost of doing so risks livelihood, social standing, and relationships,
be they with family, friends, or lovers?
Yet, what alternative have human beings of conscience?
Once one has come to understand those things which you, Caitlin, have fairly presented as
evidence of insanity, greed, and the lust for total control, what honest course is there but
to risk loss, to risk shunning, and even impoverishment?
Specifically, how many toil away at "jobs" which further entrench oligarchy, tyranny, and
authoritarian interests?
How many choose, again and yet again, to participate in rigged "electoral" processes, the
only purpose of which is to legitimize oligarchy, tyranny, and authoritarian power while
furthering the merest pretense of "democracy", that the sham may continue.
In a real and genuine democracy, would not the many actually get to vote on the question
of war? On healthcare for all, as a human right? On housing? On meaningful endeavor?
In other words, should not the many actually get to vote on policy, not on personalities
and cultural dog-whistle rhetorical devices which function simply to set the many against
each other?
To change the culture from militarized empire, profound understanding must be engaged, not
because the issues are especially complex, however convoluted the manipulatory rhetoric might
make things appear, or vicious the fallacious arguments used in favor of war might be;
"You are either with us or against us!", for example which is the classic phrase of "argument
with a stick", meaning an implied threat, but rather that far too many people were never
encouraged to engage in the critical thinking process, at all.
An honest educational system would do that, from the earliest grades.
An honest media, would also present useful information, not slant stories to inculcate the
fear, loathing, and confusion necessary to start wars based on lies, and notions of foreign
monsters all, inevitably, referred to as "the new Hitler", though Putin has been
well-villified and, in the U$, "liberals" and "deplorables", alike, are being told that China
is a land of authoritarian thieves who "stole our jobs", lied about (and "invented or
created") the coronavirus, and intend to rule the world.
An honest media would present actual, useful information and not coerce thought or
understanding in specific ways, telling people what and how to "see" or "not see" things.
The legacy media simply refuses to be anything but a propaganda tool.
Thus, U$ians, in particular, but people in "the west", generally, are fed a steady diet of
untruths, half-truths, unbaked idiocy, and triumphal imperialism.
Frankly, considering, along with the domestic propaganda, all the saber-rattling,
heartless economic sanctions, military bullying, and nuclear weapons buildup of both the
Obama and Trump regimes, the rest of the world, especially Russia and China, the nations of
this planet have been very patient with the U$ and its coalition of whatever, including
Australia, but especially the U.K.
One does wonder how much longer such patience might last as The Empire lashes out,
evermore recklessly, relentlessly, and foolishly?
Yes, a great mutual educational outreach is required.
However, it must entail listening and building bridges of shared interests and common
plight and not much admonition, signaling, or preening.
What common vision may members of the human family, those not caught up in the "Great
Game", develop that will permit our species, indeed, all of terrestrial life, a future worth
having?
Say, even another ten or twenty thousand years, that we, collectively, might gain a wee
bit more understanding and a great deal more compassion.
What would that look like?
How would it feel?
Might that be worth thinking about?
Beyond deceit and diversion
AnneR , May 27, 2020 at 11:44
Yes, D Bartoo.
And if you include NPR and the BBC World Service in your "legacy media" then today there
have been examples a-plenty:
NPR: In a piece on the forthcoming election and the states trying to prepare for managing
polling stations, voters while trying to prevent any potential spread of COVID-19, the
"reporter" raised – guess what? – the need for states to "prevent a repeat of
Russian [i.e. the Kremlin] hacking" and thus, I presume, altering/affecting the results. This
statement provided no evidence, but as declared as if it were unassailable fact. (As I recall
this claim had been debunked within a short time of the Blue Faces and their media supporters
raising it.)
BBC: They broadcast a ten minute "History" piece – repeated at least once within two
hours. The subject of this segment often seems to coincide with some act that the
US/UK/IS/NATO (you name the western grouping) wants the listener to ignore, be ignorant of;
the intention seems, as today, to be to deflect attention from here to there. Or to support
whatever it is that the western world wants to happen. So today's piece was all about the
South Korean protests against the military government, in the late 1980s, and the violence,
largely, according to the broadcast, committed by the government's forces against the
protestors who were demonstrating for: democracy. Hint, Hint.
Both BBC and NPR: They both made much of the Hong Kong police's use, this time, of tear
gas and pepperballs (never have either broadcasters, throughout last year's demos, mentioned
the violence done by the demonstrators: the killing and beating up of those Hong Kong people
who dared to disagree openly with them, the brick throwing, the attacks on buildings and so
on; just as they rarely if ever, and then without ever mentioning the brutal violence of the
French cops, reported the peaceful weekly protests by the Gilets Jaunes) against the
demonstrators.
Even as they basically criticized the HK police their reportage on the completely brutal,
unwarranted murder of George Floyd and the follow up demonstrations, they mentioned the tear
gas used by the police to stop the protests but not any other means that the police may have
used (rubber bullets, possibly stun grenades – these latter caused many serious
injuries among the Gilets Jaunes).
Dave , May 26, 2020 at 15:30
A polemic of sorts, but much needed in these days of rabid running amok by some of the
most despicable and vicious politicians and economic oligarchs in the sad history of the
human species. Let's hope these perverse creatures disappear quietly into the sunset in the
next month or two, or maybe some encouragement is needed to accomplish that much desired
end.
JOHN CHUCKMAN , May 26, 2020 at 15:09
And I'd like to add the thought: when have the people ever consented to any of
Washington's many wars, cold or hot?
From the holocaust in Vietnam to the holocaust in the Middle East?
The power establishment does what it wants and drags you along.
DH Fabian , May 26, 2020 at 16:57
That's the key point. It honestly doesn't matter what the "masses" think. The ruling
duopoly have their own agenda, and one way or another, we must obey.
JOHN CHUCKMAN , May 26, 2020 at 15:01
"New Cold War?"
Given the remarkably hostile words and acts coming from Washington, I'm more concerned
about a hot war.
Withdrawing from treaties is certainly threatening, and the US has done a lot of that
recently, but it has done so much more, too.
The words and acts go beyond anything I recall during the Cold War.
Openly assassinating another country's national hero? Almost bragging about it?
Placing a bounty on the head of a twice-elected national leader?
Declaring the threatening phrase, "full-spectrum dominance," as a national purpose in the
world?
Trying to impose American law on everyone who is not American through a vast network of
illegal sanctions?
Displaying contempt for many important international institutions and organizations?
Quitting some of them? Threatening some? Demanding others serve its own purposes? UN. WHO.
ICC. WTO. UNESCO. OPCW. UNRWA.
Ignoring the rule of law openly throughout the Middle East, on the high seas, and in Latin
America?
Displaying no spirit of international cooperation, even during a medical emergency. At
least in the days of the Cold War, the US always tried to appear cooperative about disasters
and about international organizations. It was often the first to offer some assistance. Now,
it does not bother.
Relentlessly attacking the world's other great power, China, with genuine slander and
lies. Doing so daily with no pretence to science or legality.
Jeff Harrison , May 27, 2020 at 10:42
Unfortunately, we will continue to do everything you describe until other countries of the
world make it clear that the US is no longer welcome there.
I know a bipolar world when I see one. I spent my first 45 years in one: the
world of the Cold War, dominated
by the USA and the USSR
.
That bipolar
world ended twenty-nine years ago. For a while
thereafter the USA stood supreme, economically and militarily.
We still do, actually, on indices like per capita GDP and forces deployed overseas.
Communist China's been coming up fast, though. It's plain they are aiming for parity with us,
regional -- I mean, in Asia -- if not global .
Perhaps they are aiming for global dominance.
Whether they are or not, we are heading into a bipolar world once again. People are waking
up fast to this. The coronavirus
pandemic has us thinking and
talking about
China in a way that we weren't before, not in the public realm at any rate. Some sour-faced
skeptics and grouches on the commentarial fringes, like your acerbically genial
Radio Derb host , were talking that way; now it's well-nigh universal.
As I write this, China's national legislature, the National People's Congress,
has just completed the first day of its 2020 annual session. Here are a couple of
headliners from this first day:
For the first time in thirty years, there will be no
announced target for GDP growth this year -- that's Gross Domestic Product, a key economic
indicator. There will be revisions to the Basic Law that defines the status of Hong Kong. The
point of the revisions will be to "safeguard national security in Hong Kong." [ NPC: China's congress will be
about Hong Kong, the virus and the economy , BBC, May 24, 2020]
What does any of this mean. And why should Americans care?
To take the first part of that question first: What it means is that these are some
of the decisions worked out by the ChiCom Party bosses in secret meetings these past
weeks.
I italicized the words "some of" in that last sentence to emphasize that these are decisions
the Party bosses want to make public. For sure there are many more they don't want made
public.
The NPC is not really a legislature in any dictionary sense. It's Totalitarian Theater.
There is very occasionally -- two or three times per decade -- some muffled resistance to
edicts from the Politburo; but even those have had a staged quality about them, and were
probably just a theatrical way of settling some minor power struggle at the top.
Still, the NPC is not without value for outside observers. The things that are announced,
like the two items I have noted, give clues as to what the Party bosses are thinking. Carefully
scrutinized and sensibly interpreted, they can give us the lie of the land.
China's economic pincer.
From my first point about the NPC announcements -- about there being no GDP growth target
this year–we can deduce that the ChiComs are seriously worried about China's economy.
Like our economy and everyone else's, China's economy has taken a big hit from the pandemic
and the measures taken to slow or contain it. There have been huge employment losses in both
manufacturing and services, in a nation with much less of a social safety net than ours [
A
slump exposes holes in China's welfare state , Economist, May 7 2020].
"There are, in other words, upwards of 78m people who are out of a job and are receiving
no benefits." https://t.co/5sJSMNNCcy
The thought of a couple hundred million hungry, angry, unemployed workers gives ChiCom
bosses the heebie-jeebies.
And this couldn't be happening at a worse time for China's economy, which is looking at a
pincer trap. I'll describe the two arms of the pincer in turn as 1) the Past Arm and 2) the
Future Arm.
The past thirty years have been a sensational boom time for China, with living standards
rising faster, I think, than anywhere else, ever, in modern history. By the end of the 2010s,
though, the low-hanging fruit had all been picked, and the rate of improvement was slowing.
That is one arm of the economic pincer -- call it the Past Arm.
And now there is widespread anger and suspicion towards China among its former trading
partners -- the countries that, by opening their markets and exporting their factories, made
the Chinese economic miracle possible. The developed countries of North America, Western
Europe, and Australasia are waking to the fact that we have sold the Chinese Communist Party a
whole lot of rope
with a gift card attached saying " Please Hang Us ." They are
backing off from China.
There is even talk of boycotts. In a poll done mid-May, forty percent of Americans said they
won't buy products made in China. [
Americans Are Giving Made-in-China the Cold Shoulder, by Brendan Murray, Bloomberg, May
17, 2020 ]
So, looking forward, the era of Western countries blithely helping the ChiComs to
consolidate their power, domestic popularity, and international influence by jacking up their
economy, are over.
That's the other arm of the pincer -- call it the Future Arm.
The Past Arm: no more low-hanging fruit.
The Future Arm: no more illusions about the regime we've been enabling this past thirty
years.
What the status of Hong Kong means
What the ChiComs are proposing for Hong Kong reinforces the Future Arm of the economic
pincer.
Under the agreement with Britain that handed the city back to China 23 years ago, the
ChiComs promised that Hong Kongers would enjoy British levels of social and political freedom,
or at least something closer to them than the mainland dictatorship, until 2047.
Well, that promise will no longer be operative. It was just a convenient lie assented to by
the ChiComs while they pumped up their economy.
I spoke of the NPC giving us clues about the lie of the land behind the closed doors of
ChiCom deliberating. Lie of the land? Politically, China is the
Land of the Lie . Strategic lying is not just an occasional aberration in their diplomacy,
it is all of it.
ORDER IT NOW
The Hong Kong demonstrators this past year have shown feisty spirit
[ Rally against
HK national security law on Sunday , by Jeff Pao, Asia Times, May 22, 2020].
It's not likely that bringing the city back into the warm embrace of the Motherland can be
accomplished without highly visible repression, possibly on the scale of Tiananmen Square in
1989, but much more amply recorded in this age of the cellphone camera. [ Hong Kong
Protest Movement Left Reeling by China's Power Grab , by Vivian Wang and Austin Ramzy,
NYT , May 24, 2020]
That will just further reinforce the ChiComs' image as a thuggish gangster clique,
fortifying the Future Arm of the pincer, shredding any illusions Western populations still have
about the nature of the ChiCom regime.
Did I mention Tiananmen Square? Eh: just a few antisocial troublemakers in need of stern law
enforcement. Tibet, Taiwan, and Eastern
Turkestan ? Integral parts of China since ancient times. Fifty years of autonomy for Hong
Kong? Absolutely! -- where do we sign? If we are admitted to the World Trade Organization,
shall we observe the rules? Of course we shall! COVID-19 originated in China? Certainly not; it
was brought in by visiting U.S. soldiers. [ China
Spins Tale That the U.S. Army Started the Coronavirus Epidemic, by Steven Lee Myers,
NYT, March 13, 2020]
The world is awakening from its dream of China as a trustworthy commercial nation whose
public declarations mean what they say. Communist China is the Land of the Lie.
So this coming new bipolar world is nothing to worry about, right? The ChiComs are going to
get crushed in that economic pincer I've been describing, right? And Uncle Sam will sail on
forward into the middle 21st century as the dominant world power, right?
Well, there are many possible futures, and that is one of them. It's by no means the
most probable one, though. China has advantages, and we have dis -advantages, that could
shape the future in a Chinese direction.
I'd list China's main advantages as three:
Despotism, which makes it easier to get some
things done. A big Smart Fraction. Smart Fraction
Theory argues that "national wealth is determined by the fraction of workers with IQ equal
to or greater than some minimum value." [ The Smart Fraction Theory of IQ and the Wealth of
Nations , La Griffe Du Lion, March 2002] Demographic homogeneity; low levels of ethnic
diversity and ethnomasochism
.
To the first point there, the one about despotism: Look, I really don't want to live
under the ChiComs; and I speak as a person who
did live under them for a year . There is no denying, though, that despotism has its
advantages, especially in technological development. Exhibit A : China's high-speed
rail system . Where is ours?
The second point, about a big Smart Fraction, has a link with the first. The name of the
link is "
eugenics ," both positive and negative.
Positive eugenics means
encouraging people with positive heritable traits to
breed; negative eugenics means dis -couraging -- or actually
forbidding -- people with negative traits to do so. The despotic power of course gets to
decide the definitions of "positive" and "negative" and the degree of coercion.
Are the ChiComs interested in eugenics? Oh yeah. I had things to say about this
in my November Diary last year , to which I refer you.
It's the third point that most powerfully addresses American weakness. China has some ethnic
diversity, but it's mostly out at the territorial fringes, in occupied Tibet, Mongolia, and
Eastern Turkestan. The great
majority of China's population -- and an overwhelming supermajority in metropolitan
China, away from those fringes -- is of a single
ethny . If the Chinese withdrew from those occupied fringes, China would be the world's
most homogenous big nation.
This spares China from all the rancors and disorders that sap so much of our social
and political energy.
China diplomacy is trying to thread very carefully to avoid the fallout. The answer of RIA
Novosti is good example here. Counterattacks are few (see the answer to CC question with the
following money quote: "I respect your right to ask the question, but I'm afraid you're not
framing the question in the right way. One has to have a sense of right and wrong. Without it, a
person cannot be trusted, and a country cannot hold its own in the family of nations. " This is
implicit slap in the face for the USA.
RIA Novosti: How do you assess China-Russia relations in the context of COVID-19? Do you
agree with some people's characterization that China and Russia may join force to challenge US
predominance?
Wang Yi: While closely following the COVID-19 response in Russia, we have done and will
continue to do everything we can to support it. I believe under the leadership of President
Vladimir Putin, the indomitable Russian people will defeat the virus and the great Russian
nation will emerge from the challenge with renewed vigor and vitality.
Since the start of COVID-19, President Xi Jinping and President Putin have had several phone
calls and kept the closest contact between two world leaders. Russia is the first country to
have sent medical experts to China, and China has provided the most anti-epidemic assistance to
Russia. Two-way trade has gone up despite COVID-19. Chinese imports from Russia have grown
faster than imports from China's other major trading partners. The two countries have supported
and defended each other against slanders and attacks coming from certain countries. Together,
China and Russia have forged an impregnable fortress against the "political virus" and
demonstrated the strength of China-Russia strategic coordination.
I have no doubt that the two countries' joint response to the virus will give a strong boost
to China-Russia relations after COVID-19. China is working with Russia to turn the crisis into
an opportunity. We will do so by maintaining stable cooperation in energy and other traditional
fields, holding a China-Russia year of scientific and technological innovation, and
accelerating collaboration in e-commerce, bio-medicine and the cloud economy to make them new
engines of growth in our post-COVID-19 economic recovery. China and Russia will also enhance
strategic coordination. By marking the 75th anniversary of the UN, we stand ready to firmly
protect our victory in WWII, uphold the UN Charter and basic norms of international relations,
and oppose any form of unilateralism and bullying. We will enhance cooperation and coordination
in the UN, SCO, BRICS and G20 to prepare ourselves for a new round of the once-in-a-century
change shaping today's world.
I believe that with China and Russia standing shoulder-to-shoulder and working back-to-back,
the world will be a safer and more stable place where justice and fairness are truly
upheld.
Cable News Network: We've seen an increasingly heated "war of words" between China and the
US. Is "wolf warrior" diplomacy the new norm of China's diplomacy?
Wang Yi: I respect your right to ask the question, but I'm afraid you're not framing the
question in the right way. One has to have a sense of right and wrong. Without it, a person
cannot be trusted, and a country cannot hold its own in the family of nations.
There may be all kinds of interpretations and commentary about Chinese diplomacy. As
China's Foreign Minister, let me state for the record that China always follows an
independent foreign policy of peace. No matter how the international situation may change, we
will always stand for peace, development and mutually beneficial cooperation, stay committed
to upholding world peace and promoting common development, and seek friendship and
cooperation with all countries. We see it as our mission to make new and greater
contributions to humanity.
China's foreign policy tradition is rooted in its 5,000-year civilization. Since ancient
times, China has been widely recognized as a nation of moderation. We Chinese value peace,
harmony, sincerity and integrity. We never pick a fight or bully others, but we have
principles and guts. We will push back against any deliberate insult to resolutely defend our
national honor and dignity. And we will refute all groundless slander with facts to
resolutely uphold fairness, justice and human conscience.
The future of China's diplomacy is premised on our commitment to working with all
countries to build a community with a shared future for mankind. Since we live in the same
global village, countries should get along peacefully and treat each other as equals.
Decisions on global affairs should be made through consultation, not because one or two
countries say so. That's why China advocates for a multi-polar world and greater democracy in
international relations. This position is fully aligned with the direction of human progress
and the shared aspiration of most countries. No matter what stage of development it reaches,
China will never seek hegemony. We will always stand with the common interests of all
countries. And we will always stand on the right side of history. Those who go out of their
way to label China as a hegemon are precisely the ones who refuse to let go of their
hegemonic status.
The world is undergoing changes of a kind unseen in a century and full of instability and
turbulence. Confronted by a growing set of global challenges, we hope all countries will
realize that humanity is a community with a shared future. We must render each other more
support and cooperation, and there should be less finger-pointing and confrontation. We call
on all nations to come together and build a better world for all.
After the Soviet collapse thirty years ago, that order expanded its jurisdiction. Proponents sought to subsume the old Eastern
Bloc, including perhaps Russia itself, into the American sphere. And they wanted to do so firmly on Washington's terms. Even as the
country began to deindustrialize and growth slowed, American leadership developed a taste for fresh crusades in the Middle East;
exotic savagery, went the subtext, had to be brought finally to heel. China was a rising force, but its regime would inevitably crater
or democratize. Besides, Beijing was a peaceful trading partner of the United States.
2008, 2016 and 2020 -- the financial crisis, Trump's election and now the Coronavirus and its reaction -- have been successive
gut punches to this project, a hat trick which may seal its demise. Ask anyone attempting to board an international flight, or open
a new factory in China, or get anything done at the United Nations: the world is de-globalizing at a speed almost as astonishing
as it integrated. Post-Covid, U.S.-China confrontation is not a choice. It's a reality. The liberal international order is not lamentable.
It's already dead.
This was the argument made by Bannon. It had other backers, of course, within both the academy and an emerging foreign policy
counter-establishment loathe to repeat the mistakes of the past thirty years. But coming from the former top political advisor to
the sitting president of the United States, it was provocative stuff. Bannon articulated a perspective which seemed to be on the
tip of the foreign policy world's tongue. And it riled people up. The most fulsome rebuttal to the zeitgeist was perhaps The Jungle
Grows Back , tellingly written by Robert Kagan, an Iraq War architect. The peripheral world was dangerous brush; the United States
was the machete.
Trumpian nationalism has chugged along for nearly three years since -- stripped, some might say, of its Bannonite flair and intelligence.
The most hysterical prophecies of what the president might do -- that he might withdraw from the geriatric North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, for instance -- have not come to pass. Trump has howled and roared, true: but so far, his most disruptive foreign policy
maneuver has been escalation against Iran.
It's very good to hear the right getting a little humility in them now and talking less empire, more multilateralism. Trump has
been way too concerned with his MAGA personality cult to understand the value of humility.
The world's a big place. The reality is, America first will more and more mean working together with other nations for mutual
benefit, and often their gain will indirectly be to our own also.
Working more and more, yes. This is why US is undercutting Germany's competitiveness, by blocking a cheap source of energy via
NS2...
As Bush said, you are either with us or against us. Nothing has changed and nothing will change, but it will become uglier.
If it were to desire multi-polarity, the US would tolerate not only states, like KSA, where the Royals own everything, but also
states, like Iran, or Cuba, where the people (through the government/state) owns assets (land and productive facilities). But
the US does not tolerate such type of multi-polarity, not open to US "investment" and ownership (bought with fiat money).
Cold War II started in 2007, with Putin. Popcorn & beer lads!
It does seem like there's a creeping idea, not just on dissident internet sites now like before, that the Russian rivalry is a
luxury of the past. Even the liberals are going to have to reconcile with liberal hegemony not being workable and settle for something
less. Owing to distance and mutual interest (common rivals Britain and Germany) Russia and America had a long history of friendship
before the Cold war.
I sadly agree about the predatory nature of much of America does. I think it really is a reflection of partially, imperial
arrogance, but even moreso a matter of who runs the country. Oligarchy is poorly checked in modern America. Maybe we can hope
for a humbled oligarchy, at least.
Trump is indeed an empty suit and a demagogue, but he ran on a decent nationalist platform (probably thanks to Bannon, who is
almost certainly a closeted gay. No joke... a deep-in-the-closet, self-hating gay. The navy can change a man, and he's a fraud
in other ways: see Eric Striker's article "International Finance's Anti-China Crusade"). Trump does have an absurd ego, and he
probably figured becoming president would impress Ivanka too.
Also, the Uyghurs are not totally innocent victims... Some of them are US-financed revolutionaries and some of them have committed
terrorism: see Godfree Roberts at Unz Review: "China and the Uyghurs" (January 10, 2019) and Ajit Singh at The Grayzone: "Inside
the World Uyghur Congress: The US-backed right-wing regime change network seeking the 'fall of China'" (March 5, 2020). Some of
our pathetic propagandists make it seem like they're in concentration camps, but there is objective reporting that suggests it's
more like job training programs and anti-jihad classes. Absurd lies have certainly been told about North Korea and many other
countries, so be skeptical.
Yeah, let's get that hate on for China - why they're as bad as Russia, Iran and Venezuela put together and there are so many more
of them. Especially a lot are available right here in the US and have lots of restaurants that can be boycotted. Not that many
Venezuelan restaurants around. Seriously, can Americans get over this childishness? When the US closes down its 800+ overseas
bases and withdraws its fleet to its own shores instead of Iran's and China's, then maybe Americans will be entitled to complain
about someone else's imperialism.
Most of anti-China stuff Hawley, much like Trump, claims always feels empty populism for WWC voters.
1) It is reasonable to be against our Middle East endeavors and not be so anti-China.
2) I still don't understand how it is China fault for stealing manufacturing jobs when it is the US private sector that does it.
(And Vietnam exist, etc.) So without Charles Koch and Tim Cook behind this trade stuff, it feels like empty populism.
3) The most obvious point on China to me is how little they do use military measures for their 'imperialism.'
One problem with all this populism emptiness, is there is a lot issues with China to work on:
1) This virus could have impact economies in Africa and South America a lot where the nations have to renegotiate their loans
to China. I have no idea how this goes but there will be tensions here. Imperialism is tough in the long run.
2) There are nations banding together on China's reaction to the virus and it seems reasonable that US joining them would be more
effective than Trump's taunting.
3) To prove Trump administration incompetence, I have no idea how he is not turning this crisis into more medical equipment and
drugs manufacturing. (My guess is this both takes a lot of work and frankly a lot of manufacturing plants have risks of spreads
so noone wants to invest.)
Hawley is a "fake populist" according to Eric Striker's article "International Finance's Anti-China Crusade" and I just saw fake-patriot
airhead Pete Hegseth claim China wants to destroy our civilization, on fake populist Tucker Carlson's show. It's well-established
that Fox News and the GOP are still neocons and fake patriots... after all, the Trump administration is run by Jared Kushner,
a protégé of Rupert Murdoch and Bibi Netanyahu.
Hawley's speech on the Senate floor yesterday deserves much more criticism than it gets here. This article from Reason
does a good job breaking down the speech and pointing out what's right AND wrong about it:
What if there is reduced wars and civil wars n the world today than ever. (So say anytime before 1991?) I get all the Middle East
& African Wars but look at the rest of the world. When in history have the major West Europe powers not had a major war in 75
years. After issues of post Cold War East Europe is probably more peaceful than ever. Look at South America. In the 1970s the
Civil Wars raged in all those nations. Or the Pacific Rim? Japan, China, and other nations are fighting with Military right now.
This is certainly less than perfect but the number of people (per million) dieing in wars and civil wars are at historic lows.
The fall of Soviet Union and weakening of Russia allowed US and Western Europe to attack Serbia in 1990s. A stronger Russia wouldn't
have allowed that to happen (who's trying to get Crimea from Russia's control now?). But with US aggressiveness and bellicosity
(including nuclear posture) at Russia's borders do not bode well.
But it is true, less important people are dying now...
Chinese imperialism? Uh ... other than shaking trees and drumming up fear can I get like one example of that.
Taiwan, part of China since the 1500's and they are have not issued any new threats since 1949.
Hong Kong - stolen from China and now reluctantly given back with lots of conditions. If they deserve the right of independence
through referendum I'm all for it as long as we apply this standard uniformly including parts of Texas, San Diego, New Mexico,
Arizona, any place that has a large foreign population will do.
Yeah, "Chinese imperialism" is complete nonsense, just like the claim that they definitely originated the coronavirus, caused
Americans to be under house arrest, and caused a depression. In fact, the origin of the virus is far from clear, and it wasn't
China who hyped up and exaggerated the danger and wrecked the economy. It was our superficial corporate media and government that
did that (perhaps deliberately)... the same people who are desperately trying to deflect blame onto the CCP. The same people who
have been mismanaging and ruining America for decades in order to enrich themselves.
"Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The
net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless."
Most people would be well served to read Chomsky a first time.
However, it should be noted, Chomsky's critiques of neoliberalism aren't grounded in nationalism, xenophobia, and racism. So a
lot of TAC readers (and especially writers) may be disappointed.
Hawley seems like the natural choice for the potential future of the GOP, that is a post-fusionist or post-liberal GOP. However
the one thing that worries me is his foreign policy. He talks the talk, but I'm having trouble to see if he walks the walk. As
Mills noted he didn't vote to end support for the genocidal war in Yemen, a war that serves purely the interests of Saudi Arabia
and not our own. He has criticized David Petraeus before, but its important not to be fooled by just rhetoric. While accepting
he'll be better than any Tom Cotton or (god forbid) Nikki Haley in 2024, his foreign policy needs to be examined more until then.
Our response to the epidemic was 100% 'made in China'. The entire 'Western World' decided to copy Beijing. If that doesn't establish
a new level of leadership for China, I don't know what would. I'm surprised this is not more widely recognized. You can run down
the many parallels, including the pathetic photo-op attempt by the West to build those emergency hospitals (Nightingale in the
UK, Javits Center, etc. all across the US), which were just to show 'hey we can build hospitals in a few weeks also' ... never
mind they could never, and were never used for anything at all.
At this point, Hawley is all talk. Further, much of his talking amounts to little more than expressing resentment. I agree that
the US needs to follow a more nationalist pathway, which involved making itself less dependent on its chief geopolitical rival.
But accomplishing this is going to require more than bashing China and asserting that cosmopolitan Americans are traitors. At
this point, Hawley has no positive program to offer. Giving paid speeches that vilify coastal elites and China is not a political
plan.
Further, I agree that we're probably moving away from the universalist order that's guided much of our thinking since the 1990s.
But isolationism is not the answer. We need to begin building a multilateral order that takes full account of China's rise as
a worthy rival. This means that we need to develop a series of smaller-scale agreements with strategic partners. The TPP is a
good example of such an agreement. But where is the call to revive it?
Lastly, I find the article's reference to China's treatment of gays and lesbians to be curious. I'd first note that using the
term "homosexual" in reference to people is generally viewed as an offensive slur. Further, China's treatment of gay people isn't
so bad, and tends to be better than what Hawley's evangelical supporters would afford. Moreover, China is a multi-ethnic country.
It's program in Xinjiang has more to do with maintaining political order than a desire to repress non-Han people.
The general chest puffing nature of the American right makes it hard for them to understand that America might need to work with
other countries at a deep level, and not as vassals either.
". We need to begin building a multilateral order that takes full account
of China's rise as a worthy rival. This means that we need to develop a
series of smaller-scale agreements with strategic partners. The TPP is a
good example of such an agreement. But where is the call to revive it?"
The thing is that the post-WWII liberal international order was good for things like that.
Trump and the GOP quite deliberately destroyed it. Before that, the US would have the trust of many other governments; now they
don't trust the US - even if Biden is elected, the next Trump is on the way.
"We benefit if countries that share our opposition to Chinese imperialism -- countries like India and Japan, Vietnam, Australia
and Taiwan -- are economically independent of China, and standing shoulder to shoulder with us,"
OK....then can someone explain why Hawley opposed the TPP, which was designed to accomplish just this. The TPP was supposed
to create trading relationships between these countries and the United States in the context of an agreement that excluded China.
In this instance people like Hawley were advancing China's position and interests (I suspect simply because it was a treaty negotiated
under Obama, which apparently was enough to make it bad).
Probably because Hawley seems more interested in demagoguery than accomplishing anything productive. Never mind that 95% of the
people who voted for him probably couldn't find Japan or Vietnam on a map.
TPP was not geared against China as a blanket thing, as an entire exclusion of China. The perfidy of TPP was that it was against
any economic interactions with State Owned Enterprises (didn't mention the origin, didn't have to). The ultimate goal wasn't to
isolate China but to force privatization of said SOEs, preferably run from Wall Street.
Private property good and = Democracy; State property bad = Authoritarianism, dictatorship, etc. It is a fallacy here somewhere,
cannot really put my finger on it...
Except this is all lies. On each chance to actually do something Hawley has sided with international corporations, as a good conservative
will always do. Fixing globalism will never come form the right, this is all smoke and mirrors for the religious right, aka the
rubes. And they are perpetual suckers and will keep buying into this crap as our nation is hollowed out and raided by the rich.
And that, is TRUE conservatism.
"Now we must recognize that the economic system designed by Western policy makers at the end of the Cold War does not serve
our purposes in this new era," proclaimed Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri. "And it does not meet our needs for this new day." He
continued, perhaps too politely: "And we should admit that multiple of its founding premises were in error."
The "error" in the founding premises of the post-WWII economic system was that it assumed that the US would act in a responsible
manner. Instead we have run huge budget deficits and borrowed the difference from foreigners, randomly invading other countries,
undermined the institutions we set up, bullied smaller countries rather than working with them, and abused our control of the
financial system.
No, that old economic system served our interests very well, as long as we respected the institutions we set up and kept our
own house in order. We haven't been doing any of that for at least 20 years.
Let's bear in mind that the Republican leader of the Senate married into a wealthy Chinese family that makes its money from hauling
Chinese exports to our shores and the shores of other developed nations.
This is all just hollow bravado meant to appeal to the right's nativist base.
I am not into the thinking that everyone whose politics I don't support is acting in bad faith. We are talking about the actions
of literally millions of people. Accusing this or that person of acting in bad faith because of personal interest is just dirty
politics dressed up as perceptiveness. I am not accusing any specific person of acting in bad faith, although some of the people
who pushed opening up to China because more business in China would create a class of people who would eventually push for Democracy
there, were indeed acting in bad faith. They wanted access to cheap labor with no rights.
Yet, no doubt many of them actually believed the propaganda, because it supposedly happened in South Korea, Taiwan and other
places. And especially the ones who switched the line to "globalism" when it was clear that the supposed indigenous pressures
for Democracy did not materialize also acted in bad faith. I only assume that some of were because once I understood the rationale
of the CCCP it was clear to me that China was radically different, and there is no way that so many of those guys who are smarter
and more knowledgeable about political systems than me, did not figure it out. But I am not going to behave as if it the Republicans
alone who were pushing either of these two false messages.
Criticizing China for "imperialism" is the height of hypocrisy on multiple levels. First, the United States has engaged in economic
imperialism, sometimes enforced with military intervention, for a hundred years. Read Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket" if you
doubt that. Second, this is the same guy who voted against our proxy war in Yemen. Third, one could very reasonably argue that
China is simply applying the lessons it learned at the hands of Western imperialists since 1800s..
It's good that SOME Republicans are at least giving lip service to the idea of bringing back manufacturing in this country.
But you have to thank Trump for that, not the GOP establishment. The offshoring of American manufacturing as part of "free trade"
was strongly supported (if not led) by the GOP going back to the 1980s.
And check out John Perkins's books ("Confessions of an Economic Hit Man", etc.) for up-to-date information. It's obviously true
that criticizing China for "imperialism" is ridiculously hypocritical but people like Senator Hawley know they can get away with
it because they understand how propaganda works on the dumbed-down masses.
They understand doublethink, repetition, appeal to patriotism, appeal to racism, appeal to fear, etc. People like Rupert Murdoch
do this every day... poorly, but well enough to be effective on a lot of people.
Incidentally, the Republicans may talk about bringing manufacturing back to the US but they're actually planning on shifting
it to India (see Eric Striker's article "International Finance's Anti-China Crusade").
If Washington lured the Soviet Union into it's demise in Afghanistan, which left that minor
empire in shambles - socially, militarily, economically - it was the nuclear conflagration at
Chernobyl that put the corpse in the ground.....
(Watch the GREAT HBO five-part tragedy on it and you will see that the brutally heroic
response of the Soviets, that saved the Western World at least temporarily, but is the
portrait of self-sacrifice)
What was lost in the Soviets fumbling immediate post-explosion cover-up was the trust of
their Eastern European satellite countries. That doomed that empire. So much military might
was given up in Afghanistan, then on Chernobyl, it was not clear if the Soviets had the
wherewithal to put down the rebellions that spread from Czechoslovakia to East Germany and
beyond.
Covid-19 will do the same to the American Empire.
As its own infrastructure has been laid waste by the COLLASSAL MONEY PIT that is the
Pentagon, its flagrant use of the most valuable energy commodity, oil, to maintain some 4000
bases worldwide, this rickety over-extended upside down version of old Anglo-Dutch trading
empires, will finally collapse.
Loss of trust by the many craven satellites, in America's fractured response, to Covid-19
will put the final nail in its coffin.
A hot-shooting War may come next, but the empire cannot win it.
It would be nice if that were so, but it is very unlikely.
"So tired of reading propaganda."
Is that why you regurgitate it onto forums? Kinda like purging the system, eh?
If you are going to be judging China's economic health by their pollution levels then in
the future you will find yourself convinced that they have never recovered, even when it
becomes inescapably obvious that they have. The fact is that China's pollution levels are
never going back to 2019 levels, but that has nothing to do with their economic
health.
It really never ceases to amaze me how deeply rooted and pervasive the delusions and sense
of exceptionality is in America. It is woven into the thinking, from the lowest levels to the
very top of their thoughts, of even the very most intelligent Americans. It is apparently a
phenomenon that operates at an even deeper level than mass media brainwashing, as it seems it
was just as much a problem in every empire in history. That is, I am sure citizens of the
Roman Empire had the same blinding biases embedded deep below their consciousness. I guess
Marx was entirely correct to say that consciousness arises from material conditions, and
being citizen of an empire must be one of those material conditions that gives rise to this
all-pervasive and unconscious sense of exceptionality.
Go over to EOSDIS Worldview and take a look at satellite photos of China. Simple toggle in
lower left hand corner will take you to photos of same day, earlier years. Or any day in
satellite record.
The skies over China are clear. Chinese industry is not back at work. It may be that China
at 50% or even at 20% is a manufacturing powerhouse compared to a crumbling US. But until
China is back at work the thread so far is about the historical situation six months ago.
Xi used to do elaborately staged state appearances with well planned camera angles,
fabulous lighting, pomp and circumstance. He enjoyed the trappings of power and knew how to
use the trappings of power. Hasn't done that kind of state appearance since January.
China and the US are so different. The citizens of China cannot vote. The population's
movements are micromanaged by the government. This is not the case here (yet). And I hope it
is never the case. I agree with the premise that there are those in our government who are
living in a dream of the past and that is over, unless we want to destroy the world. But
China's government is so repressive. The rules must be obeyed. We seem to be compliant so far
of some of our government officials stepping over the bounds allowed by our Constitution, due
to the fear of C-19 engendered by the deep state (aka the bsmsm). But we will not do that
forever and our government cannot just start shooting big crowds of us as they can and have
done in China. Theirs is all top down rule, which is not the case here. Also, although it is
probably heretical to say this I am glad that the US has many cases of C-19. We will
eventually get herd immunity. IMO, China can lock down as many millions of citizens as they
wish; they cannot stop this virus and as time goes by they will have as many deaths and as
many cases as everybody else. Well, that is off the topic of the article. In the end I agree
that we are fighting weird battles we can never win and we citizens need to keep informing
our government employees that we just want to trade and make money, not threaten companies
and countries and lose money.
There are many influential supporters of nuclear war, and some of these contend that the use
of "low-yield" and/or short-range weapons is practicable without the possibility of escalation
to all-out Armageddon. In a way their argument is comparable to that of the band of starry-eyed
optimists who thought, apparently seriously, that there could be such a beast as a "moderate
rebel."
In October 2013 the Washington Post
reported that "The CIA is expanding a clandestine effort to train opposition fighters in
Syria amid concern that moderate, US-backed militias are rapidly losing ground in the country's
civil war," and the US Congress gave approval
to then President Barack Obama's plan for training and arming moderate Syrian rebels to fight
against Islamic State extremists. The belief that there could be any grouping of insurgents
that could be described as "moderate rebels" is bizarre and it would be fascinating to know how
Washington's planners classify such people. It obviously didn't dawn on them that any person
who uses weapons illegally in a rebellion could not be defined as being moderate. And how
moderate is moderate? Perhaps a moderate rebel could be equipped with US weapons that kill only
extremists? Or are they allowed to kill only five children a month? The entire notion was
absurd, and predictably the scheme collapsed, after expenditure of vast amounts of US
taxpayers' money.
And even vaster amounts of money are being spent on developing and producing what might be
classed as moderate nuclear weapons, in that they don't have the zillion-bang punch of most of
its existing 4,000 plus warheads. It is apparently widely believed in Washington that if a
nuclear weapon is (comparatively) small, then it's less dangerous than a big nuclear
weapon.
In January 2019 the Guardian reported that "the Trump
administration has argued the development of a low-yield weapon would make nuclear war less
likely, by giving the US a more flexible deterrent. It would counter any enemy (particularly
Russian) perception that the US would balk at using its own fearsome arsenal in response to a
limited nuclear attack because its missiles were all in the hundreds of kilotons range and 'too
big to use', because they would cause untold civilian casualties."
In fact, the nuclear war envisaged in that scenario would be a global catastrophe -- as
would all nuclear wars, because there's no way, no means whatever, of limiting escalation. Once
a nuclear weapon has exploded and killed people, the nuclear-armed nation to which these people
belonged is going to take massive action. There is no alternative, because no government is
just going to sit there and try to start talking with an enemy that has taken the ultimate leap
in warfare.
It is widely imagined -- by many nuclear planners in the sub-continent, for example -- that
use of a tactical, a battlefield-deployed, nuclear weapon will in some fashion persuade the
opponent (India or Pakistan) that there is no need to employ higher-capability weapons, or, in
other words, longer range missiles delivering massive warheads. These people think that the
other side will evaluate the situation calmly and dispassionately and come to the conclusion
that at most it should itself reply with a similar weapon. But such a scenario supposes that
there is good intelligence about the effects of the weapon that has exploded, most probably
within the opponent's sovereign territory. This is verging on the impossible.
War is confusing in the extreme, and tactical planning can be extremely complex. But there
is no precedent for nuclear war, and nobody -- nobody -- knows for certain what reactions will
be to such a situation in or near any nation. The US 2018 Nuclear Posture Review stated that
low-yield weapons "help ensure that potential adversaries perceive no possible advantage in
limited nuclear escalation, making nuclear employment less likely." But do the possible
opponents of the United States agree with that? How could they do so?
The reaction by any nuclear-armed state to what is confirmed as a nuclear attack will have
to be swift. It cannot be guaranteed, for example, that the first attack will not represent a
series. It will, by definition, be decisive, because the world will then be a tiny step from
doomsday. The US nuclear review is optimistic that "flexibility" will by some means limit a
nuclear exchange, or even persuade the nuked-nation that there should be no riposte, which is
an intriguing hypothesis.
...the review calls for modification to 'a small number of existing submarine-launched
ballistic missile (SLBM) warheads' to provide a low-yield option.
It also calls for further exploration of low-yield options, arguing that expanding these
options will 'help ensure that potential adversaries perceive no possible advantage in
limited nuclear escalation, making nuclear employment less likely.' This is intended to
address the argument that adversaries might think the United States, out of concern for
collateral damage, would hesitate to employ a high-yield nuclear weapon in response to a
'lower level' conflict, in which an adversary used a low-yield nuclear device. The review
argues that expanding low-yield options is 'important for the preservation of credible
deterrence,' especially when it comes to smaller-scale regional conflicts.
"Credible deterrence" is a favourite catch-phrase of the believers in limited
nuclear war, but its credibility is suspect. Former US defence secretary William Perry
said last year that he wasn't so much worried about the vast number of warheads in the
world as he was by open proposals that these weapons are "usable". It's right back to the Cold
War and he emphasises that "The belief that there might be tactical advantage using nuclear
weapons – which I haven't heard being openly discussed in the United States or in Russia
for a good many years – is happening now in those countries which I think is extremely
distressing." But the perturbing thing is that while it is certainly being discussed in Moscow,
it's verging on doctrine in Washington.
In late February US Defence Secretary Esper was
reported as having taken part in a "classified military drill in which Russia and the
United States traded nuclear strikes." The Pentagon stated that "The scenario included a
European contingency where you're conducting a war with Russia and Russia decides to use a
low-yield, limited nuclear weapon against a site on NATO territory." The US response was to
fire back with what was called a "limited response."
First of all, the notion that Russia would take the first step to nuclear war is completely
baseless, and there is no evidence that this could ever be contemplated. But ever if it were to
be so, it cannot be imagined for an instant that Washington would indulge in moderate nuclear
warfare in riposte. These self-justifying wargames are dangerous. And they bring Armageddon
ever closer.
Moscow has transferred more than five hundred aircraft -- large military transports, early warning
aircraft, refueling aircraft, attack jets, and fighter interceptors -- to Beijing since 1990.
Chinese air power these days is something to behold. In the course of just about thirty years, Beijing's
aerial inventory has gone from quite obsolete to cutting edge. It's worth noting, moreover, that Chinese airpower is but
one tool that Beijing can wield in the skies. If its massive missile forces perform as expected, destroying adversary
runways, then there will be few enemy aircraft getting into the air to contest the supremacy of China's fighters and
bombers -- or at least very few of them will be able to gain access to much of the western Pacific.
Russia has closed major border crossings with China across the Far East due to the rapid spread of coronavirus. That constitutes
a significant blow to a trading relationship that had only just begun to fully blossom. The closures come just as new auto and rail
bridges spanning the Amur River are finally
reaching
completion.
The primary line of debate among Russia-China relations analysts is whether the "rapprochement" is robust and tending toward even
a genuine alliance or whether it is weak and has little to show for decades of cooperation other than a few rhetorical flourishes.
After all, the skeptics note, if this bilateral relationship is so robust, then why did it take so long to get those bridges built?
The China-Russia trading relationship does indeed remain underdeveloped and will evidently face additional headwinds in the near
future (along with all of China's trading relationships, so it seems). But
the importance of security ties
can hardly be disputed, especially if one takes the long view. Could China have fought the United States to a stalemate in the Korean
War without Soviet military assistance? Not a chance. More recently, Russia's sale of high-tech air and naval weaponry during the
1990s and 2000s created a solid foundation for today's muscle-bound dragon with both claws (DF-26) and sharp fangs (e.g. YJ-18).
But will it go further?
A tantalizing hint was offered by Russian president Vladimir Putin at the Valdai Conference in early October 2019. During his
remarks, he dropped the following bombshell: "I probably won't open a big secret. It'll become clear anyhow. We are now helping our
Chinese partners to create a missile attack warning system. This is a very serious thing, which will increase the defense capability
of the People's Republic of China in a fundamental way. Because now only the USA and Russia have such a system [Большой тайны, наверно,
не открою. Все равно это станет ясно. Мы сейчас помогаем нашим китайским партнерам создать систему СПРН – систему предупреждения
о ракетном нападении. Это очень серьезная вещь, которая капитальным, кардинальным образом повысит обороноспособность Китайской Народной
Республики. Потому что сейчас такую систему имеют только США и Россия]." This seemingly major step forward in Russia-China military
cooperation demands greater scrutiny. It also provides an interesting opportunity to gauge opinion among Russian strategists regarding
the long-term viability of a close military partnership with the Middle Kingdom.
One impressively comprehensive Russian appraisal begins
by stating that "Russia had to look for various options for answering Washington's actions" to withdraw from the INF Treaty. The
same article notes somewhat ominously that the United States is preparing in case of "accidental nuclear war with Russia." Employing
the Russian acronym "SPRN" literally "warning systems against rocket attack [системы предупреждения о ракетном нападении]" for early
warning system, this assessment also makes the important point that Russia's SPRN has only recently completed a long process of upgrades
meant to fill "gaps [разрывы]" caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union, when key facilities for early warning were located in
non-Russian parts of the USSR.
The article quotes one Moscow defense expert, Igor Korotchenko [Игор Коротченко], as offering the following assessment: "This
is really a huge contribution of Russia to strategic stability, since China receives a powerful tool in order not to become a victim
of the first disarming blow from the United States." Another Russian expert, Konstantin Sivkov [Константин Сивков], maintained that
this move would enhance "global stability" but also articulated some concern with respect to Russia's long-term interests. "When
China has at its disposal all the technologies that Russia has at its disposal, or creates similar ones, it will cease to need Russia
as a defender," Sivkov said. "And this could adversely affect Russian-Chinese relations." Korotchenko, however, is more bullish on
the long-term prospects for the defense relationship with Beijing. He underlined the commercial prospects for Russian companies,
and added that the early warning initiative will "contribute to the further rapprochement of Russia and China, building a common
security policy [поспособствует дальнейшему сближению России и Китая, выстраиванию общей политики в области безопасности]."
That's an interesting disagreement among Russian security specialists, for sure, but another rather significant observation regarding
these developments was offered in this same article by the former deputy commander of Russia's air defense command, Alexander Luzan
[Александр Лузан]. He contends that Russia will benefit from the enhanced cooperation with Beijing on an early warning. Luzan explains
that the ground components of Russia's SPRN are comprised of []long range "Voronezh" [Воронеж] radars that can see out four thousand
to six thousand kilometers to detect ICBM launches. Short-range "Sunflower [Подсолнухи]" radars are more suitable for warning of
short-range launches, but also offer ship-detection capabilities. Directly reflecting on operational advantages for the Russian military,
Luzan observes: "Vladivostok and Primorye are protected here, but there is nothing 'in depth.' We once tried to deploy our facilities
in Mongolia, but it didn't work out very well. Therefore, if the Chinese close this 'tongue,' it will be very important for Russia
[Владивосток и Приморье у нас защищены, а 'в глубину' там ничего нет. Мы когда-то в Монголии пытались разместить свои комплексы,
но не очень получилось. Потому если китайцы этот 'язычок' закроют, то для России это будет очень важно]." Again citing this Russian
general, the article states that "a unified information space is created and data is exchanged with Chinese radars, [and therefore]
'the security of our country from the east will be even better.'"
Such interpretations are generally in accord with the analysis
of Vladimir Petrovsky [Владимир Петровский,], a senior fellow and military specialist at Moscow's Institute of the Far East of the
Russian Academy of Sciences. This analyst writes that many believe that Putin's announcement of this strategic cooperation initiative
at Valdai signals that "the military alliance between Russia and China . . . has finally become real." Petrovsky also notes that
other specialists have begun to speculate on the meaning of a "retaliatory strike" under such circumstances, wherein the early warning
is relayed by a third country. He quotes the Russian president (speaking at Valdai) further on the matter of motives for new missile
deployments in the Asia-Pacific region: "we suddenly heard from the American military that the first step in this direction would
be taken just in Asia. But that step also impacts on us, because we need to understand: where in Asia, will Russian territory be
endangered or not? By the way, it's immediately clear what was the root cause of the exit: not Russia and not mythical violations
of the [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] Treaty by us. If they are going to put [U.S. missiles] in Asia, then Asia is the primary
reason for withdrawing from this Treaty [вдруг услышали от американских военных, что первый шаг в этом направлении будет сделан как
раз в Азии. Но он и нас затрагивает, потому что надо понять: где в Азии, будет доставать это российскую территорию или нет? Кстати
говоря, сразу понятно, что было первопричиной выхода: не Россия и не мифические нарушения нами Договора. Если они собираются ставить
в Азии, то Азия и является первопричиной выхода из этого Договора]." In other words, Putin's announcement of this initiative to accelerate
military cooperation with China is intended, in part, as a response to the United States' move to exit the INF accord.
Strongly hinting that Beijing might well gain access to Russian early-warning radars based in the Arctic, Petrovsky observes,
"Taking into account geography, it is quite possible to develop protocols for the exchange of data between national SPRN." He further
contends that this early warning cooperation will be "mutually beneficial and not without compensation [эта помощь -- взаимовыгодная
и небезвозмездная]." This military expert explains that China still can learn from Russian radar proficiency, but also implies that
the Russian side may gain some advantages from China's evident prowess in microelectronics, for example. Moreover, he suggests, "a
possible Chinese satellite constellation could be a good addition to Russian orbital facilities." Still, Petrovsky concludes that
Russia and China "are not creating a military-political alliance. It is rather a matter of coordinating the military policies." Playing
down the significance of this new initiative, this specialist also notes that Russia and China have been holding annual ballistic
missile defense command and staff exercises for about a decade already.
The first alteration in the global balance of power enabled by Russia-China cooperation
took place during the 1950s, of course. In that period, the PRC went from being a military
"basket case," with no defense industry to speak of, to possessing a reasonably modern force
within a span of just a decade. That super-energized process was inspired by the hard school
of war against a vastly better-armed opponent in the bloody Korean conflict, as is well
known. But the massive progress in Chinese military capabilities also could not have taken
place without enormous Soviet assistance. With respect to naval-related arms transfers,
Moscow had already given ten torpedo boats and eighty-three aircraft by the beginning of
1953, according to the scholarly journal. The process accelerated during 1953–55 with a
total of eight-one additional vessels transferred (amounting to 27,234 tons) and 148
aircraft. Among these ships were four destroyers, four frigates, and thirteen submarines.
Additionally, the Russians provided the Chinese with more than five hundred torpedoes and
over fifteen hundred sea mines, as well as coastal artillery pieces, radar and communications
equipment. A third batch of naval transfers was comprised of sixty-three vessels and
seventy-eight aircraft. Added to these very substantial allocations, five Chinese shipyards
apparently produced another 116 naval vessels, relying heavily on advisors, designs and
technology purchased from the USSR, during the period up until 1957. Finally, several
transfers agreed to in early 1959 "caused China's Navy to enter into the missile age."
Notably, these transfers included the R-11 , a primitive submarine-launched
ballistic missile (SLBM), and also the P-15 , one of the
earliest anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM). Yes, these are the earliest progenitors of today's
JL-3 and YJ-12 missiles that now present quite credible threats.
In keeping with the presently jovial mood surrounding current Russia-China relations, very
little is said in this Chinese article regarding the Sino-Soviet conflict that brought the
two Eurasian giants to the brink of war in the late 1960s. The authors imply that the break
was really between the two respective Communist parties, rather than between the two navies,
but it is noted that the Kremlin's stated objective to form a "joint fleet" was viewed in
China as an encroachment on Chinese sovereignty. Nevertheless, this substantial military
cooperation between Moscow and Beijing during the 1950s is evaluated in this Chinese
appraisal to have had "major historical impact
[重要历史作用]." These authors contend that it
"effectively decreased the threat of American imperialism
[有效抵制美帝国主义的军事威胁].
They additionally conclude regarding this period: "The achievements of building up the
Chinese Navy cannot be separated from the assistance of Soviet experts
[中国海军建设的成绩是与苏联专家的帮助分不开的]."
For a long time, "Soviet revisionists" were not given such favorable treatment by Chinese
scholars, but now evidently the "east wind" is blowing once more. If the USSR very
substantially helped boost PRC military prospects during the 1950s, this paper by two Chinese
naval analysts argues cogently that a similarly ambitious and fateful program of Russia-China
military cooperation has had an analogous effect, starting in 1991. When seen in aggregate,
the numbers are indeed quite impressive. Russia has sold China, according to this Chinese
accounting, more than five hundred military aircraft, including Su-27, Su-30, Su-35, and
Il-76 variants. Almost as significant, Russia provided China with more than two hundred
Mi-171 helicopters. Just as these pivotal purchases launched China's air and land forces into
a new era, so the Chinese acquisition of four Sovremeny destroyers, along with twelve
Kilo -class submarines helped to provide the PLA Navy with the technological
wherewithal to enter the twenty-first century on a robust footing. That shortlist here,
moreover, does not even catalog other vital systems transferred, such as advanced air defense
systems, which have formed a bedrock of Chinese purchases from Russia.
Citing a Russian source, these Chinese authors claim that China spent $13 billion on
Russian weapons between 2000–05. That amounts to a decently hefty sum of cash,
especially by rather penurious post-Soviet standards. In fact, this raft of deals was not
only intended to rescue the PLA from obsolescence but simultaneously aimed to "resolve . . .
the survival and development problems [解决 . . .
生存和发展问题]"of the post-Soviet Russian
military-industrial complex too. Just as important as these technical transfers, however,
have been the human capital investments in cooperation. Here, this study points out that two
thousand intermediate and high-level Chinese officers have already graduated from Russian
military academies. The upper ranks of the PLA Navy, in particular, are said to be full of
these graduates, as reported in this study. Perhaps most critically for the future of the
Chinese armed forces, cooperation with Russia has entailed "in particular, promoting the
development of domestic weapons development levels and concepts.
[尤其带动了国内武器研制水平和理念的提升]."
Take, for example, the YJ-18 ASCM, which seems to be superior to any U.S. variants, is a
derivative of the Russian SSN-27 missile and is now becoming pervasive throughout the Chinese
fleet, with both surface and sub-launched variants.
For all the major results on the regional balance of power wrought by these two major
periods of Russian-Chinese security collaboration, however, there are very real reasons to
doubt that such a partnership will truly alter global politics. After all, the Chinese
analysis points out that arms sales from Russia to China have declined substantially from the
peak in 2005. Joint military exercises, moreover, are now quite regular, but they actually do
not seem to exhibit a bellicose trend toward larger and larger demonstrations of military
might. These tendencies may reflect new confidence in Beijing regarding its own abilities to
produce advanced weapons, of course, but also might reflect a certain degree of restraint --
a realization that too close a Russia-China military alignment could provide ample fuel for a
new Cold War that might be in the offing.
Still, American defense analysts must evaluate the possible results of a significantly
closer Russia-China security relationship, whether it is formalized into an actual "alliance"
or not. China and Russia currently have numerous joint development projects underway,
including both a large commercial airliner, as well as a heavy-lift helicopter. In the
future, will cooperative endeavors encompass frigates and VSTOL fighters, or nuclear
submarines and stealth bombers, or even aircraft carriers? Will Moscow and Beijing begin to
launch joint exercises of a large scale that have major strategic implications in highly
sensitive areas? Are third countries, such as Iran, set for "junior associate" status in the
so-called "quasi-alliance? And will China and Russia strive to coordinate strategic
initiatives to bring about common favorable strategic circumstances in the coming
decades?
Such a future is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. The combination of Russian
weapons design genius with Chinese organizational and production prowess could be formidable,
indeed. That will be another reason for states comprising the West to now exercise restraint,
embrace multi-polarity, and seek to avoid a return to the 1950s "with Chinese
characteristics."
Lyle
J. Goldsteinis Associate Professor at theChina
Maritime Studies Institute(CMSI) at theU.S. Naval War Collegein Newport, RI. The opinions expressed
in this analysis are his own and do not represent the official assessments of the U.S. Navy
or any other agency of the U.S. Government.
In this issue's correspondence section, Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long offer up an
alternative way to code nuclear crises in response to Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald's article in the February
2019 issue of TNSR. Bell and Macdonald, in turn, offer a response to Green and Long's critique.
In their article in the February 2019 issue of the
Texas National Security Review
, Mark S. Bell and
Julia Macdonald make a cogent argument that all nuclear crises are not created equal.
1
We agree with their basic thesis: There really are different sorts of nuclear crises, which have different risk
and signaling profiles. We also concur that the existence of a variety of political and military dynamics
within nuclear crises implies that we should exercise caution when interpreting the results of cross-sectional
statistical analysis. If crises are not in fact all the same, then quantitative estimates of variable effects
have a murkier meaning.
2
We should not be surprised that, to date, multiple studies have produced different results.
Nevertheless, the article also highlights an alternate hypothesis for nuclear scholarship's inconsistent
findings about crisis outcomes and dynamics: Nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret. The balance of
resolve between adversaries -- one of the most important variables in any crisis -- is influenced by many factors
and is basically impossible to code
ex ante
. The two variables identified as critical by Bell and
Macdonald for determining the shape of a crisis -- the nuclear balance and the controllability of escalation --
are only somewhat more tractable to interpretation. The consequence is that nuclear crises are prone to
ambiguity, with coding challenges and case interpretations often resolved in favor of the analyst's
pre-existing models of the world. In short, nuclear crises suffer from an especially pernicious interdependence
between fact and theory.
3
To the extent that this problem can be ameliorated -- although it cannot be resolved entirely -- the solution
is to employ the best possible conceptual and measurement standards for each key variable. Below we provide
best practices for coding the nuclear balance, with particular focus on Bell and Macdonald's interpretation of
the Cuban Missile Crisis. We argue that, following much of the extant literature, Bell and Macdonald make
interpretive choices that unintentionally truncate the history that underlies their coding of the nuclear
balance in this case. In our view, they incorrectly conclude that the United States had no military incentives
to use nuclear weapons first in 1962.
Below, we analyze their interpretation of the Cuba crisis by examining two indicators that might be used to
establish the nuclear balance: the operational capabilities of both sides and the perceptions of key U.S.
policymakers. We conclude by drawing out some broader implications of the crisis for their conceptual
framework, offering a friendly amendment.
What Were the Operational Capabilities on Both Sides in 1962?
Bell and Macdonald's characterization of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis is a central part
of their argument, as it is their sole empirical example of a crisis that "was not characterized by incentives
for deliberate first nuclear use." They base this assertion on a brief overview of the balance of U.S. and
Soviet strategic forces in 1962, followed by a claim that "[t]he U.S. government did not know where all of the
Soviet warheads were located, and there were concerns that U.S. forces were too inaccurate to successfully
target the Soviet arsenal."
4
Yet, any calculation of the incentives for deliberate first use must be based on the full context of the
military balance. This hinges on the operational capabilities of both sides in the crisis, which includes a
concept of operations of a first strike as well as the ability of both sides to execute nuclear operations. The
available evidence on operational capabilities suggests that a U.S. first strike would have been likely to
eliminate much, if not all, of the Soviet nuclear forces capable of striking the United States, as we summarize
briefly below.
Any concept of operations for a U.S. first strike would have been unlikely to rely solely, or even
primarily, on relatively inaccurate ballistic missiles, as Bell and Macdonald imply. In a sketch of such an
attack drafted by National Security Council staffer Carl Kaysen and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Harry
Rowen during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the strike would have been delivered by a U.S. bomber force rather than
with missiles. As Kaysen and Rowen describe, all Soviet nuclear forces of the time were "soft" targets, so U.S.
nuclear bombers would have been more than accurate enough to destroy them. Moreover, a carefully planned bomber
attack could have exploited the limitations of Soviet air defense in detecting low flying aircraft, enabling a
successful surprise attack.
5
Kaysen would retrospectively note that U.S. missiles, which were inaccurate but armed with multi-megaton
warheads, could also have been included in an attack, concluding, "we had a highly confident first strike."
6
Kaysen's confidence was based on his understanding of the relative ability of both sides to conduct nuclear
operations. In terms of targeting intelligence, while the United States may not have known where all Soviet
nuclear warheads were, it had detailed knowledge of the location of Soviet long-range delivery systems. This
intelligence came from a host of sources, including satellite reconnaissance and human sources. U.S.
intelligence also understood the low readiness of Soviet nuclear forces.
7
As Kaysen would later note, "By this time we knew that there were no goddamn missiles to speak of, we knew that
there were only 6 or 7 operational ones and 3 or 4 more in the test sites and so on. As for the Soviet bombers,
they were in a very low state of alert."
8
Of course, Kaysen's assessment of the balance of forces in 1961 might have been overly optimistic or no
longer true a year later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet, other contemporary analysts concurred. Andrew
Marshall, who had access to the closely held targeting intelligence of this period, subsequently described the
Soviet nuclear force, particularly its bombers, as "sitting ducks."
9
James Schlesinger, writing about four months before the crisis, noted, "During the next four or five years,
because of nuclear dominance, the credibility of an American first-strike remains high."
10
The authors of the comprehensive
History of the Strategic Arms Competition
, drawing on a variety of
highly classified U.S. sources, reach a similar conclusion:
[T]he Soviet strategic situation in 1962 might thus have been judged little short of desperate. A
well-timed U.S. first strike, employing then-available ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] and SLBM
[submarine-launched ballistic missile] forces as well as bombers, could have seemed threatening to the
survival of most of the Soviet Union's own intercontinental strategic forces. Furthermore, there was the
distinct, if small, probability that such an attack could have denied the Soviet Union the ability to
inflict any significant retaliatory damage upon the United States.
11
The Soviet nuclear-armed submarines of 1962 were likewise vulnerable to U.S. anti-submarine warfare, as they
would have had to approach within a few hundred miles of the U.S. coast to launch their missiles. As early as
1959, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Nathan Twining testified that while "one or two isolated
submarines" might reach the U.S. coast, in general, the United States had high confidence in its anti-submarine
warfare capabilities.
12
The performance of these capabilities during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when multiple Soviet submarines were
detected and some forced to surface, confirms their efficacy, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in their
description of an attack on a Soviet submarine during the crisis.
13
How Was the Nuclear Balance Perceived in 1962?
Bell and Macdonald offer three data points for their argument that U.S. policymakers did not perceive
meaningful American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis. First, Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara and other veterans of the Kennedy administration attested retrospectively that nuclear superiority did
not play an important role in the Cuba crisis.
14
Second, President John F. Kennedy received a Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing on the Single Integrated
Operational Plan (SIOP) -- the U.S plan for strategic nuclear weapons employment -- in 1961, which reported that
Soviet retaliation should be expected under all circumstances, even after an American pre-emptive strike.
15
Third, the president expressed ambivalence about the nuclear balance on the first day of the Cuba crisis.
16
But this evidence is a combination of truncated, biased, and weak. The retrospective testimony of Kennedy
administration alumni is highly dubious. McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and others were
all highly motivated political actors, speaking two decades after the fact in the context of fierce nuclear
policy debates on which they had taken highly public positions, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in a
footnote.
17
The problems with giving much weight to such statements are especially evident given the fact that, as Bell and
Macdonald acknowledge,
18
these very same advisers made remarks during the Cuba crisis that were much more favorably disposed to the idea
of American nuclear superiority.
19
The Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing to Kennedy on SIOP-62 is evidence, contrary to Bell and Macdonald's
interpretation, of American nuclear superiority in 1962. Bell and Macdonald make much of the briefing's caution
that "Under any circumstances -- even a preemptive attack by the US -- it would be expected that some portion of the
Soviet long-range nuclear force would strike the United States."
20
But interpreting this comment as evidence that the United States did not possess "politically meaningful damage
limitation" capabilities makes sense only if one has already decided that the relevant standard for political
meaning is a perfectly disarming strike.
21
Scott Sagan, in commenting on the briefing, underscores that "although the United States could expect to suffer
some unspecified nuclear damage under any condition of war initiation, the Soviet Union would confront
absolutely massive destruction regardless of whether it struck first or retaliated."
22
Crucially, the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for maintaining a U.S. first-strike capability in a memorandum
to McNamara commenting on his plans for strategic nuclear forces for fiscal years 1964–68. This memorandum,
sent shortly after the crisis, argues that the United States could not, in the future, entirely eliminate
Soviet strategic forces. Yet, the memorandum continues: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike
capability is both feasible and desirable, although the degree or level of attainment is a matter of judgment
and depends upon the US reaction to a changing Soviet capability."
23
In short, not only did the Joint Chiefs of Staff conclude the United States had a meaningful first-strike
capability in 1962, they believed such a capability could and should be maintained in the future.
As for Kennedy's personal views, it is important not just to consider isolated quotes during the Cuban
crisis -- after all, he made several comments that point in opposite directions.
24
One has to consider the political context of the Cuban affair writ large: the multi-year contest with the
Soviets over the future of Berlin, and effectively, the NATO alliance. Moreover, Kennedy had deliberately built
Western policy during the Berlin crisis on a foundation of nuclear superiority. NATO planning assumed that
nuclear weapons would ultimately be used, and probably on a massive scale.
25
As Kennedy put it to French President Charles de Gaulle in June of 1961, "the advantage of striking first
with nuclear weapons is so great that if [the] Soviets were to attack even without using such weapons, the U.S.
could not afford to wait to use them." In July, he told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that "he felt the critical
point is to be able to use nuclear weapons at a crucial point before they use them." In January of 1962,
expecting the Berlin Crisis to heat up in the near future, he stressed the importance of operational military
planning, and of thinking "hard about the ways and means of making decisions that might lead to nuclear war."
As he put it at that meeting, "the credibility of our nuclear deterrent is sufficient to hold our present
positions throughout the world" even if American conventional military power "on the ground does not match what
the communists can bring to bear."
26
But the president recognized that this military strength was a wasting asset: The development of Soviet
nuclear forces meant that the window of American nuclear superiority was closing. For this reason, Kennedy
thought it important to bring the Berlin Crisis to a head as soon as possible, while the United States still
possessed an edge. "It might be better to let a confrontation to develop over Berlin now rather than later," he
argued just two weeks before the Cuba crisis. After all, "the military balance was more favorable to us than it
would be later on."
27
Two months after the crisis, his views were little different. Reporting on a presidential trip to Strategic Air
Command during which Kennedy was advised that "the really neat and clean way to get around all these
complexities [about the precise state of the nuclear balance] was to strike first," Bundy "said that of course
the President had not reacted with any such comments, but Bundy's clear implication was that the President felt
that way."
28
Broader Implications
Our argument about the nuclear balance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, if correct, requires some friendly
amendments to Bell and Macdonald's framework for delineating types of nuclear crisis.
Our discussion of the operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions during the Cuba crisis
underscores that Bell and Macdonald's first variable -- "the strength of incentives to use nuclear weapons first
in a crisis"
29
-- probably ought to be unpacked into two separate variables: military incentives for a first strike, and
political bargaining incentives for selective use. After all, whatever the exact nuclear balance was during
1962, the United States was certainly postured for asymmetric escalation. The salience of America's posture is
thrown into especially bold relief once the political context of the crisis is recognized: The Cuban affair was
basically the climax of the superpower confrontation over Berlin, in which American force structure and
planning was built around nuclear escalation. Indeed, this is how policymakers saw the Cuba crisis, where the
fear of Soviet countermoves in Berlin hung as an ever-present cloud over discussions within the Executive
Committee of the National Security Council.
30
According to Bell and Macdonald, either kind of incentive is sufficient to put a case into the "high" risk
category for deliberate use. But in truth, political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively -- even if
only against military targets -- are ever present. They are just seldom triggered until matters have gone
seriously awry on the battlefield. In short, we believe Bell and Macdonald were right to expend extra effort
looking for military first-strike incentives, which add genuinely different sorts of risk to a crisis. We argue
that operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions in the Cuba crisis show that such incentives are more
common than generally credited.
So, we would build on Bell and Macdonald's central insight that different types of nuclear crisis have
different signaling and risk profiles by modestly amending their framework. We suggest that there are three
types of nuclear crisis: those with political bargaining incentives for selective nuclear use (Type A); those
with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those with political
risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C).
Type A crises essentially collapse Bell and Macdonald's "staircase" and "stability-instability" models, and
are relatively low risk.
31
Any proposed nuclear escalation amounts to a "threat to launch a disastrous war coolly and deliberately in
response to some enemy transgression."
32
Such threats are hard to make credible until military collapse has put a state's entire international position
at stake. Outcomes of Type A crises will be decided solely by the balance of resolve. We disagree with Bell and
Macdonald's argument that the conventional military balance can ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis,
since any conventional victory stands only by dint of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate. But the
lower risks of a Type A crisis mean that signals of resolve are harder to send, and must occur through large
and not particularly selective or subtle means -- essentially, larger conventional and nuclear operations.
Type B crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "brinksmanship" model.
33
These have a significantly greater risk profile, since they also contain genuine risks of uncontrolled
escalation in addition to political risks. Crisis outcomes remain dependent on the balance of resolve, but
signaling is easier and can be much finer-grained than in Type A crises. The multiple opportunities for
uncontrolled escalation mean that there are simply many more things a state can do at much lower levels of
actual violence to manipulate the level of risk in a crisis. For instance, alerting nuclear forces will often
not mean much in a Type A crisis (at least before the moment of conventional collapse), since there is no way
things can get out of control. But alerting forces in a Type B crisis could set off a chain of events where
states clash due to the interaction between each other's rules of nuclear engagement, incentivize forces
inadvertently threatened by conventional operations to fire, or misperceive each other's actions. Any given
military move will have more political meaning and will also be more dangerous.
Type C crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "firestorm" model.
34
These are the riskiest sorts of nuclear crisis, since there are military reasons for escalation as well as
political and non-rational risks. Outcomes will be influenced both by the balance of resolve and the nuclear
balance: either could give states incentives to manipulate risk. Such signals will be the easiest to send, and
the finest-grained of any type of crisis. But because the risk level jumps so much with any given signal, the
time in which states can bargain may be short.
35
In sum, Bell and Macdonald have made an important contribution to the study of nuclear escalation by
delineating different types of crisis with different risk and signaling profiles. We believe they understate
the importance of American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that these coding problems
highlight some conceptual issues with their framework. In the end, though, our amendments appear to us
relatively minor, further underscoring the importance of Bell and Macdonald's research. We hope that they, and
other scholars, will continue to build on these findings.
Brendan R. Green,
Cincinnati, Ohio
Austin Long,
Arlington, Virginia
In Response to a Critique
Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald
We thank Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long for their positive assessment of our work and for
engaging with our argument so constructively.
36
Their contribution represents exactly the sort of productive scholarly debate we were hoping to provoke. As we
stated in our article, we intended our work to be only an initial effort to think through the heterogeneity of
nuclear crises, and we are delighted that Green and Long have taken seriously our suggestion for scholars to
continue to think in more detail about the ways in which nuclear crises differ from one another. Their
arguments are characteristically insightful, offer a range of interesting and important arguments and
suggestions, and have forced us to think harder about a number of aspects of our argument.
In this reply, we briefly lay out the argument we made in our article before responding to Green and Long's
suggestion that we underestimate the incentives to launch a nuclear first-strike during the Cuban Missile
Crisis and their proposal of an alternative typology for understanding nuclear crises.
Our Argument
In our article, we offer a framework for thinking through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises.
37
While the existing literature on such crises assumes that they all follow a certain logic (although there is
disagreement on what that logic is), we identify factors that might lead nuclear crises to differ from one
another in consequential ways. In particular, we argue that two factors -- whether incentives are present for
nuclear first use and the extent to which escalation is controllable by the leaders involved -- lead to
fundamentally different sorts of crises. These two variables generate four possible "ideal type" models of
nuclear crises: "staircase" crises (characterized by high first-use incentives and high controllability),
"brinkmanship" crises (low first-use incentives and low controllability), "stability-instability" crises (low
first-use incentives and high controllability), and "firestorm" crises (high first-use incentives and low
controllability).
Each of these ideal types exhibits distinctive dynamics and offers different answers to important questions,
such as, how likely is nuclear escalation, and how might it occur? How feasible is signaling within a crisis?
What factors determine success? For example, crises exhibiting high incentives for nuclear first use combined
with low crisis controllability -- firestorm crises -- are particularly volatile, and the most dangerous of all
four models in terms of likelihood of nuclear war. These are the crises that statesmen should avoid except
under the direst circumstances or for the highest stakes. By contrast, where incentives for the first use of
nuclear weapons are low and there is high crisis controllability -- the stability-instability model -- the risk
of nuclear use is lowest. When incentives for nuclear first use are low and crisis controllability is also low
-- brinkmanship crises -- or when incentives for first use are high and crisis controllability is also high -- the
staircase model -- there is a moderate risk of nuclear use, although through two quite different processes. For
the brinkmanship model, low levels of crisis controllability combined with few incentives for nuclear first use
mean that escalation to the nuclear level would likely only happen inadvertently and through a process of
uncontrolled, rather than deliberate, escalation. On the other hand, high levels of crisis controllability
combined with high incentives for nuclear first use -- characteristic of the staircase model -- mean that
escalation would more likely occur through a careful, deliberate process.
First-Use Incentives in the Cuban Missile Crisis
First, Green and Long address the extent of incentives for launching a nuclear first strike during the Cuban
Missile Crisis. In short, they argue that there were substantial military incentives for America to strike
first during the crisis and that these were understood and appreciated by American leaders.
38
While space constraints meant that our analysis of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis was
briefer than we would have liked, we certainly agree that the United States possessed nuclear superiority over
the Soviet Union during the crisis.
39
The debate between us and Green and Long is, therefore, primarily over whether the nuclear balance that we
(more or less) agree existed in 1962 was sufficiently lopsided as to offer meaningful incentives for nuclear
first use, and whether it was perceived as such by the leaders involved. In this, we do have somewhat different
interpretations of how much weight to assign to particular pieces of evidence. For example, we believe that the
retrospective assessment of key participants does have evidentiary value, although we acknowledge (as we did in
our article) the biases of such assessments in this case. Given the rapidly shifting nuclear balance, we place
less weight on President John F. Kennedy's statements in years prior to the crisis than on those he made during
the crisis itself,
40
which were more consistently skeptical of the benefits associated with U.S. nuclear superiority at a time when
the stakes were at their highest.
41
We also place somewhat less weight than Green and Long on the 1961 analysis of Carl Kaysen, given doubts about
whether his report had much of an effect on operational planning.
42
And finally, we put less weight on the Joint Chiefs of Staff document from 1962 cited by Green and Long in
support of their argument, given that it acknowledges the U.S. inability to eliminate Soviet strategic nuclear
forces -- thus highlighting the dangers of a U.S. nuclear first strike -- as well as focuses on future force
planning in the aftermath of the crisis.
We would also note that our assessment that U.S. nuclear superiority in the Cuban Missile Crisis did not
obviously translate into politically meaningful incentives for first use is in line with standard
interpretations of this case, including among scholars that Green and Long cite. For Marc Trachtenberg, for
example, "[t]he American ability to 'limit damage' by destroying an enemy's strategic forces did not seem, in
American eyes, to carry much political weight" during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
43
Similarly, the relative lack of incentives for rational first use in the crisis motivated Thomas Schelling's
assessment that only an "unforeseeable and unpredictable" process could have led to nuclear use in the crisis.
44
Regardless of whether participants in the Cuban Missile Crisis understood the advantages (or lack thereof)
associated with nuclear superiority, in some ways, our disagreement with Green and Long is more of a conceptual
one: where to draw the threshold at which a state's level of nuclear superiority (and corresponding ability to
limit retaliatory damage) should be deemed "politically meaningful," i.e., sufficiently lopsided to offer
incentives for first use. This is a topic about which there is certainly room for legitimate disagreement.
"Political relevance" is a tricky concept, which reinforces Green and Long's broader argument that "nuclear
crises are intrinsically hard to interpret" -- a point with which we agree.
45
But Green and Long seem to view
any
ability to limit retaliatory damage as politically meaningful,
since they argue that a nuclear balance that would have likely left a number of American cities destroyed (and
potentially more), even in the aftermath of a U.S. first strike, nonetheless provided strong military
incentives for first use. By contrast, our view is that the threshold should be somewhat higher than this,
though lower than Green and Long's characterization of our position: We do not, in fact, think that the
relevant standard for political meaning "is a perfectly disarming strike."
Part of our motivation in wanting a threshold higher than "any damage limitation capability" is that it
increases the utility of the typology we offer by allowing us to draw the line in such a way that a substantial
number of empirical cases exist on either side of that threshold. Green and Long, by contrast, seem more
satisfied to draw the line in such a way that cases exhibiting very different incentives for first use -- a
crisis with North Korea today compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example -- would both be classified on
the same side of the threshold.
46
Green and Long's approach would ignore the important differences between these cases by treating both crises as
exhibiting strong incentives for nuclear first use. This would be akin to producing a meteorological map that
rarely shows rain because the forecaster judges the relevant threshold to be "catastrophic flooding." There is
nothing fundamentally incorrect about making such a choice, but it is not necessarily the most helpful approach
to shedding light on the empirical variation we observe in the historical record.
An Alternative Typology of Nuclear Crises
Second, Green and Long offer an alternative typology for understanding the heterogeneity of nuclear crises.
Green and Long argue that there are three types of crisis: "those with political bargaining incentives for
selective nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation
(Type B); and those with political risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first
strike (Type C)." This is an interesting proposal and we have no fundamental objections to their typology.
47
After all, one can categorize the same phenomenon in different ways, and different typologies may be useful for
different purposes. Space constraints inevitably prevent Green and Long from offering a full justification for
their typology, and we would certainly encourage them to offer a more fleshed out articulation of it and its
merits. Their initial discussion of the different types of signals that states can send within different types
of crises is especially productive and goes beyond the relatively simple discussion of the feasibility of
signaling that we included in our article. We offer two critiques that might be helpful as they (and others)
continue to consider the relative merits of these two typologies and build upon them.
First, it is not clear how different their proposed typology is from the one we offer. At times, for
example, Green and Long suggest that their typology simply divides up the same conceptual space we identify
using our two variables, but does so differently. For example, they argue that they are essentially collapsing
two of our quadrants (stability-instability crises and staircase crises) into Type A crises, while Type B
crises are similar to our brinkmanship crises and Type C crises are similar to our firestorm crises. If so,
their typology does not really suggest a fundamentally different understanding of how nuclear crises vary, but
merely of where the most interesting variation occurs within the conceptual space we identify. The key
question, then, in determining the relative merits of the two typologies, is whether there is important
variation between the two categories that Green and Long collapse. We continue to think the distinctions
between stability-instability crises and staircase crises are important. Although both types of crises are
relatively controllable and have limited risk of what Green and Long call "non-rational uncontrolled
escalation," they have very different risks when it comes to nuclear use: lower in stability-instability crises
and higher in staircase crises. The factors that determine success in stability-instability crises -- primarily
the conventional military balance due to the very low risk of nuclear escalation -- do not necessarily determine
success in staircase crises, in which the nuclear balance may matter. As a result, we think that collapsing
these two categories is not necessarily a helpful analytical move.
Second, to the extent that their typology differs from our own, it does so in ways that are not necessarily
helpful in shedding light on the variation across nuclear crises that we observe. In particular, separating
incentives for first use into "political bargaining incentives" and "military incentives" is an intriguing
proposal but we are not yet fully persuaded of its merits. Given that one of Green and Long's goals is to
increase the clarity of the typology we offer, and given that they acknowledge the difficulties of coding the
nuclear balance, demanding even more fine-grained assessments in order to divide incentives for first use into
two separate (but conceptually highly connected) components may be a lot to ask of analysts. Moreover, given
Green and Long's assertion that "political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively are ever present,"
their argument in fact implies (as mentioned above) that political incentives for first use are
not
a
source of interesting variation within nuclear crises. We disagree with this conclusion substantively, but it
is worth noting that it also has important conceptual implications for Green and Long's typology: It means that
their three types of crises all exhibit political incentives for nuclear first use. If this is the case, then
political incentives for nuclear first use simply fall out of the analysis. In effect, crises without political
incentives for nuclear first use are simply ruled out by definition. This analytic move renders portions of
their argument tautologous. For example, they argue that the conventional balance cannot "ever determine the
outcome of a nuclear crisis," but this is only because they assume that there are always political incentives
to use nuclear weapons first, and thus, "any conventional victory stands only by dint of the losing side's
unwillingness to escalate." More broadly, this approach seems to us at least somewhat epistemologically
problematic. In our view, it is better to be conceptually open to the existence of certain types of crises and
then discover that such crises do not occur empirically, than it is to rule them out by definition and risk
discovering later that such crises have, in fact, taken place.
In sum, while we are not fully persuaded by Green and Long's critiques, we are extremely grateful for their
insightful, thorough, and constructive engagement with our article and look forward to their future work on
these issues. We hope that they, along with other scholars, will continue to explore the ways in which nuclear
crises differ from one another, and the implications of such differences for crisis dynamics.
Mark S. Bell,
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Julia Macdonald,
Denver, Colorado
Endnotes
1
Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises,"
Texas National Security
Review
2, no. 2 (February 2019): 40–64,
http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/1944
.
2
Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 42, 63.
3
For an excellent treatment of this problem in the international relations context, see Robert Jervis,
Perception and Misperception in International Politics
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1976), 154–72.
4
Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
5
See Memorandum for General Maxwell Taylor from Carl Kaysen, "Strategic Air Planning and Berlin," Sept.
5, 1961, from National Archives, Record Group 218, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB56/BerlinC1.pdf
.
7
Austin Long and Brendan Rittenhouse Green, "Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence,
Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy,"
Journal of Strategic Studies
38, no. 1–2 (2015): 44–46,
https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2014.958150
.
9
Quoted in Long and Green, "Stalking the Secure Second Strike," 46.
10
James R. Schlesinger, "Some Notes on Deterrence in Western Europe," (Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, June 30, 1962), 8.
11
Ernest R. May, John D. Steinbruner, and Thomas M. Wolfe,
History of the Strategic Arms
Competition 1945–1972
, v.1 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981), 475.
12
Quoted in Scott Sagan, "SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy,"
International Security
12, no. 1 (Summer 1987): 34,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538916
.
13
Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 56. See also, May, Steinbruner, and Wolfe,
History of the Strategic Arms Competition
, 475; and Owen Coté,
The Third Battle: Innovation in
the US Navy's Silent Cold War Struggle with Soviet Submarines
(Newport, RI: Naval War College, 2003),
42.
14
Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55, 59.
15
Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
16
Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
24
For example, consider his remark, just after the peak of the crisis, that "My guess is, well,
everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons," before strongly implying
massive U.S. preemption would be preferable to tactical use. See ExComm Meeting, Oct. 29, 1962, in Ernest R.
May and Philip Zelikow, eds.,
The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 657.
25
For excellent accounts of Kennedy's Berlin policy and his views on nuclear superiority, which we draw
upon heavily, see Marc Trachtenberg,
A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement,
1945-1963
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), chap. 8; Francis J. Gavin,
Nuclear
Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012),
chaps. 2–3.
26
Trachtenberg,
A Constructed Peace
, 292, 293, 294, 295.
28
Legere memorandum for the record of the White House daily staff meeting, Dec. 10, 1962, National
Defense University, Taylor Papers, Chairman's Staff Group December 1962-January 1963; quoted in
FRUS
1961-1963
, Vol. 8, 436.
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d118
.
29
Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 43.
30
See, e.g., Trachtenberg,
A Constructed Peace
, 353, n. 3.
31
Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 47–49.
32
Thomas C. Schelling,
Arms and Influence
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 97.
33
Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 49.
34
Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 49–50.
36
This work was supported by U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) and Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)
Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering WMD (PASCC) award FA7000-19-2-0008. The opinions,
findings, views, conclusions or recommendations contained herein are those of the authors and should not be
interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied,
of USAFA, DTRA or the U.S. Government.
38
One minor correction to Green and Long's argument: The Cuban Missile Crisis is not the "sole
empirical example" in our article of a crisis characterized by a lack of incentives for first use. In the
article we also argue that the 2017 Doklam Crisis between India and China lacked strong incentives for first
use, and we suspect there are plenty more crises of this sort in the historical record. Bell and Macdonald,
"How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 60–61.
39
Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
40
The quote from the crisis that Green and Long cite does not really support their argument. Green and
Long state: "consider [Kennedy's] remark, just after the peak of the crisis, that 'My guess is, well,
everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons,' before strongly implying
massive U.S. preemption would be preferable to tactical use." In fact, consider the full quote: "My guess
is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons. The decision to
use any kind of a nuclear weapon, even the tactical ones, presents such a risk of it getting out of control
so quickly." Kennedy then trails off but "appears to agree" with an unidentified participant who states,
"But Cuba's so small compared to the world." This suggests that Kennedy was expressing deep skepticism of
any sort of nuclear use remaining limited, as well as doubts about the merits of taking such risks over
Cuba, rather than making any sort of clear comparison between the merits of tactical use and massive
pre-emption as Green and Long suggest. Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow, eds.,
The Kennedy Tapes: Inside
the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 657.
41
For a recent analysis of Kennedy's behavior during the Cuban Missile Crisis that concludes that he
was deeply skeptical of the benefits of nuclear superiority during the crisis, see James Cameron,
The
Double Game: The Demise of America's First Missile Defense System and the Rise of Strategic Arms Limitation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 29–37.
42
For example, see Francis Gavin's assessment that "little was done with" Kaysen's plan, a claim which
echoes Marc Trachtenberg's earlier assessment that "it is hard to tell, however, what effect [Kaysen's
analysis] had, and in particular whether, by the end of the year, the Air Force was prepared in operational
terms to launch an attack of this sort." Francis J. Gavin,
Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in
America's Atomic Age
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 38; Marc Trachtenberg,
History
and Strategy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 225.
43
Marc Trachtenberg, "The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis,"
International
Security
10, no. 1 (Summer 1985), 162,
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2538793
.
44
Thomas C. Schelling,
Arms and Influence
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 97.
45
Indeed, at the risk of adding even more complexity, the relevant threshold likely varies with the
stakes of the crisis: Leaders are likely to view lesser damage limitation capabilities as politically
relevant when the stakes are higher than they are when the stakes involved are lower.
46
For discussion of the North Korean case, see Bell and Macdonald, "Toward Deterrence," and Bell and
Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 61–62.
Azita Raji
Former ambassador to Sweden, Azita Raji, proposes a way forward for a renewed and sustainable American
foreign policy. This would require a re-examination of America's interests, institutional reforms, and a
revival of American ideals. To wit: reflection,
Top
Hello
From Texas!
In Response to "How to Think About Nuclear Crises"
Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long
In their article in the February 2019 issue of the
Texas National
Security Review
, Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald make a cogent argument that all nuclear crises are not created equal.
[1]
We agree with their basic thesis: There really are different sorts of nuclear crises, which have different risk and
signaling profiles. We also concur that the existence of a variety of political and military dynamics within nuclear crises
implies that we should exercise caution when interpreting the results of cross-sectional statistical analysis. If crises are
not in fact all the same, then quantitative estimates of variable effects have a murkier meaning.
[2]
We should not be surprised that, to date, multiple studies have produced different results. Nevertheless, the article also
highlights an alternate hypothesis for nuclear scholarship's inconsistent findings about crisis outcomes and dynamics:
Nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret. The balance of resolve between adversaries -- one of the most important
variables in any crisis -- is influenced by many factors and is basically impossible to code
ex ante
. The two
variables identified as critical by Bell and Macdonald for determining the shape of a crisis -- the nuclear balance and the
controllability of escalation -- are only somewhat more tractable to interpretation. The consequence is that nuclear crises
are prone to ambiguity, with coding challenges and case interpretations often resolved in favor of the analyst's
pre-existing models of the world. In short, nuclear crises suffer from an especially pernicious interdependence between fact
and theory.
[3]
To the extent that this problem can be ameliorated -- although it cannot be resolved entirely -- the solution is to employ the
best possible conceptual and measurement standards for each key variable. Below we provide best practices for coding the
nuclear balance, with particular focus on Bell and Macdonald's interpretation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We argue that,
following much of the extant literature, Bell and Macdonald make interpretive choices that unintentionally truncate the
history that underlies their coding of the nuclear balance in this case. In our view, they incorrectly conclude that the
United States had no military incentives to use nuclear weapons first in 1962. Below, we analyze their interpretation of the
Cuba crisis by examining two indicators that might be used to establish the nuclear balance: the operational capabilities of
both sides and the perceptions of key U.S. policymakers. We conclude by drawing out some broader implications of the crisis
for their conceptual framework, offering a friendly amendment.
What Were the Operational Capabilities on Both Sides
in 1962?
Bell and Macdonald's characterization of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis is a central part
of their argument, as it is their sole empirical example of a crisis that "was not characterized by incentives for
deliberate first nuclear use." They base this assertion on a brief overview of the balance of U.S. and Soviet strategic
forces in 1962, followed by a claim that "[t]he U.S. government did not know where all of the Soviet warheads were located,
and there were concerns that U.S. forces were too inaccurate to successfully target the Soviet arsenal."
[4]
Yet, any calculation of the incentives for deliberate first use must be based on the full context of the military balance.
This hinges on the operational capabilities of both sides in the crisis, which includes a concept of operations of a first
strike as well as the ability of both sides to execute nuclear operations. The available evidence on operational
capabilities suggests that a U.S. first strike would have been likely to eliminate much, if not all, of the Soviet nuclear
forces capable of striking the United States, as we summarize briefly below. Any concept of operations for a U.S. first
strike would have been unlikely to rely solely, or even primarily, on relatively inaccurate ballistic missiles, as Bell and
Macdonald imply. In a sketch of such an attack drafted by National Security Council staffer Carl Kaysen and Deputy Assistant
Secretary of Defense Harry Rowen during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the strike would have been delivered by a U.S. bomber
force rather than with missiles. As Kaysen and Rowen describe, all Soviet nuclear forces of the time were "soft" targets, so
U.S. nuclear bombers would have been more than accurate enough to destroy them. Moreover, a carefully planned bomber attack
could have exploited the limitations of Soviet air defense in detecting low flying aircraft, enabling a successful surprise
attack.
[5]
Kaysen would retrospectively note that U.S. missiles, which were inaccurate but armed with multi-megaton warheads, could
also have been included in an attack, concluding, "we had a highly confident first strike."
[6]
Kaysen's confidence was based on his understanding of the relative ability of both sides to conduct nuclear operations. In
terms of targeting intelligence, while the United States may not have known where all Soviet nuclear warheads were, it had
detailed knowledge of the location of Soviet long-range delivery systems. This intelligence came from a host of sources,
including satellite reconnaissance and human sources. U.S. intelligence also understood the low readiness of Soviet nuclear
forces.
[7]
As Kaysen would later note, "By this time we knew that there were no goddamn missiles to speak of, we knew that there were
only 6 or 7 operational ones and 3 or 4 more in the test sites and so on. As for the Soviet bombers, they were in a very low
state of alert."
[8]
Of course, Kaysen's assessment of the balance of forces in 1961 might have been overly optimistic or no longer true a year
later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet, other contemporary analysts concurred. Andrew Marshall, who had access to the
closely held targeting intelligence of this period, subsequently described the Soviet nuclear force, particularly its
bombers, as "sitting ducks."
[9]
James Schlesinger, writing about four months before the crisis, noted, "During the next four or five years, because of
nuclear dominance, the credibility of an American first-strike remains high."
[10]
The authors of the comprehensive
History of the Strategic Arms Competition
, drawing on a variety of highly
classified U.S. sources, reach a similar conclusion:
[T]he Soviet strategic situation in 1962 might thus have been judged little short of desperate. A well-timed U.S. first
strike, employing then-available ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] and SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic
missile] forces as well as bombers, could have seemed threatening to the survival of most of the Soviet Union's own
intercontinental strategic forces. Furthermore, there was the distinct, if small, probability that such an attack could
have denied the Soviet Union the ability to inflict any significant retaliatory damage upon the United States.
[11]
The Soviet nuclear-armed submarines of 1962 were likewise vulnerable to U.S. anti-submarine warfare, as they would have had
to approach within a few hundred miles of the U.S. coast to launch their missiles. As early as 1959, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Gen. Nathan Twining testified that while "one or two isolated submarines" might reach the U.S. coast, in
general, the United States had high confidence in its anti-submarine warfare capabilities.
[12]
The performance of these capabilities during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when multiple Soviet submarines were detected and
some forced to surface, confirms their efficacy, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in their description of an attack on a
Soviet submarine during the crisis.
[13]
How Was the Nuclear Balance Perceived in 1962?
Bell and Macdonald offer three data points for their
argument that U.S. policymakers did not perceive meaningful American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
First, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other veterans of the Kennedy administration attested retrospectively that
nuclear superiority did not play an important role in the Cuba crisis.
[14]
Second, President John F. Kennedy received a Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing on the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)
-- the U.S plan for strategic nuclear weapons employment -- in 1961, which reported that Soviet retaliation should be expected
under all circumstances, even after an American pre-emptive strike.
[15]
Third, the president expressed ambivalence about the nuclear balance on the first day of the Cuba crisis.
[16]
But this evidence is a combination of truncated, biased, and weak. The retrospective testimony of Kennedy administration
alumni is highly dubious. McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and others were all highly motivated political
actors, speaking two decades after the fact in the context of fierce nuclear policy debates on which they had taken highly
public positions, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in a footnote.
[17]
The problems with giving much weight to such statements are especially evident given the fact that, as Bell and Macdonald
acknowledge,
[18]
these very same advisers made remarks during the Cuba crisis that were much more favorably disposed to the idea of American
nuclear superiority.
[19]
The Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing to Kennedy on SIOP-62 is evidence, contrary to Bell and Macdonald's interpretation, of
American nuclear superiority in 1962. Bell and Macdonald make much of the briefing's caution that "Under any
circumstances -- even a preemptive attack by the US -- it would be expected that some portion of the Soviet long-range nuclear
force would strike the United States."
[20]
But interpreting this comment as evidence that the United States did not possess "politically meaningful damage limitation"
capabilities makes sense only if one has already decided that the relevant standard for political meaning is a perfectly
disarming strike.
[21]
Scott Sagan, in commenting on the briefing, underscores that "although the United States could expect to suffer some
unspecified nuclear damage under any condition of war initiation, the Soviet Union would confront absolutely massive
destruction regardless of whether it struck first or retaliated."
[22]
Crucially, the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for maintaining a U.S. first-strike capability in a memorandum to McNamara
commenting on his plans for strategic nuclear forces for fiscal years 1964–68. This memorandum, sent shortly after the
crisis, argues that the United States could not, in the future, entirely eliminate Soviet strategic forces. Yet, the
memorandum continues: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable,
although the degree or level of attainment is a matter of judgment and depends upon the US reaction to a changing Soviet
capability."
[23]
In short, not only did the Joint Chiefs of Staff conclude the United States had a meaningful first-strike capability in
1962, they believed such a capability could and should be maintained in the future. As for Kennedy's personal views, it is
important not just to consider isolated quotes during the Cuban crisis -- after all, he made several comments that point in
opposite directions.
[24]
One has to consider the political context of the Cuban affair writ large: the multi-year contest with the Soviets over the
future of Berlin, and effectively, the NATO alliance. Moreover, Kennedy had deliberately built Western policy during the
Berlin crisis on a foundation of nuclear superiority. NATO planning assumed that nuclear weapons would ultimately be used,
and probably on a massive scale.
[25]
As Kennedy put it to French President Charles de Gaulle in June of 1961, "the advantage of striking first with nuclear
weapons is so great that if [the] Soviets were to attack even without using such weapons, the U.S. could not afford to wait
to use them." In July, he told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that "he felt the critical point is to be able to use nuclear
weapons at a crucial point before they use them." In January of 1962, expecting the Berlin Crisis to heat up in the near
future, he stressed the importance of operational military planning, and of thinking "hard about the ways and means of
making decisions that might lead to nuclear war." As he put it at that meeting, "the credibility of our nuclear deterrent is
sufficient to hold our present positions throughout the world" even if American conventional military power "on the ground
does not match what the communists can bring to bear."
[26]
But the president recognized that this military strength was a wasting asset: The development of Soviet nuclear forces meant
that the window of American nuclear superiority was closing. For this reason, Kennedy thought it important to bring the
Berlin Crisis to a head as soon as possible, while the United States still possessed an edge. "It might be better to let a
confrontation to develop over Berlin now rather than later," he argued just two weeks before the Cuba crisis. After all,
"the military balance was more favorable to us than it would be later on."
[27]
Two months after the crisis, his views were little different. Reporting on a presidential trip to Strategic Air Command
during which Kennedy was advised that "the really neat and clean way to get around all these complexities [about the precise
state of the nuclear balance] was to strike first," Bundy "said that of course the President had not reacted with any such
comments, but Bundy's clear implication was that the President felt that way."
[28]
Broader Implications
Our argument about the nuclear balance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, if correct,
requires some friendly amendments to Bell and Macdonald's framework for delineating types of nuclear crisis. Our discussion
of the operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions during the Cuba crisis underscores that Bell and Macdonald's
first variable -- "the strength of incentives to use nuclear weapons first in a crisis"
[29]
-- probably ought to be unpacked into two separate variables: military incentives for a first strike, and political
bargaining incentives for selective use. After all, whatever the exact nuclear balance was during 1962, the United States
was certainly postured for asymmetric escalation. The salience of America's posture is thrown into especially bold relief
once the political context of the crisis is recognized: The Cuban affair was basically the climax of the superpower
confrontation over Berlin, in which American force structure and planning was built around nuclear escalation. Indeed, this
is how policymakers saw the Cuba crisis, where the fear of Soviet countermoves in Berlin hung as an ever-present cloud over
discussions within the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.
[30]
According to Bell and Macdonald, either kind of incentive is sufficient to put a case into the "high" risk category for
deliberate use. But in truth, political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively -- even if only against military
targets -- are ever present. They are just seldom triggered until matters have gone seriously awry on the battlefield. In
short, we believe Bell and Macdonald were right to expend extra effort looking for military first-strike incentives, which
add genuinely different sorts of risk to a crisis. We argue that operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions in the
Cuba crisis show that such incentives are more common than generally credited. So, we would build on Bell and Macdonald's
central insight that different types of nuclear crisis have different signaling and risk profiles by modestly amending their
framework. We suggest that there are three types of nuclear crisis: those with political bargaining incentives for selective
nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those
with political risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C). Type A crises
essentially collapse Bell and Macdonald's "staircase" and "stability-instability" models, and are relatively low risk.
[31]
Any proposed nuclear escalation amounts to a "threat to launch a disastrous war coolly and deliberately in response to some
enemy transgression."
[32]
Such threats are hard to make credible until military collapse has put a state's entire international position at stake.
Outcomes of Type A crises will be decided solely by the balance of resolve. We disagree with Bell and Macdonald's argument
that the conventional military balance can ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis, since any conventional victory
stands only by dint of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate. But the lower risks of a Type A crisis mean that signals
of resolve are harder to send, and must occur through large and not particularly selective or subtle means -- essentially,
larger conventional and nuclear operations. Type B crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "brinksmanship" model.
[33]
These have a significantly greater risk profile, since they also contain genuine risks of uncontrolled escalation in
addition to political risks. Crisis outcomes remain dependent on the balance of resolve, but signaling is easier and can be
much finer-grained than in Type A crises. The multiple opportunities for uncontrolled escalation mean that there are simply
many more things a state can do at much lower levels of actual violence to manipulate the level of risk in a crisis. For
instance, alerting nuclear forces will often not mean much in a Type A crisis (at least before the moment of conventional
collapse), since there is no way things can get out of control. But alerting forces in a Type B crisis could set off a chain
of events where states clash due to the interaction between each other's rules of nuclear engagement, incentivize forces
inadvertently threatened by conventional operations to fire, or misperceive each other's actions. Any given military move
will have more political meaning and will also be more dangerous. Type C crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's
"firestorm" model.
[34]
These are the riskiest sorts of nuclear crisis, since there are military reasons for escalation as well as political and
non-rational risks. Outcomes will be influenced both by the balance of resolve and the nuclear balance: either could give
states incentives to manipulate risk. Such signals will be the easiest to send, and the finest-grained of any type of
crisis. But because the risk level jumps so much with any given signal, the time in which states can bargain may be short.
[35]
In sum, Bell and Macdonald have made an important contribution to the study of nuclear escalation by delineating different
types of crisis with different risk and signaling profiles. We believe they understate the importance of American nuclear
superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that these coding problems highlight some conceptual issues with their
framework. In the end, though, our amendments appear to us relatively minor, further underscoring the importance of Bell and
Macdonald's research. We hope that they, and other scholars, will continue to build on these findings. Brendan R. Green,
Cincinnati, Ohio
Austin Long,
Arlington, Virginia
In Response to a Critique
Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald
We thank Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long for their positive assessment
of our work and for engaging with our argument so constructively.
[36]
Their contribution represents exactly the sort of productive scholarly debate we were hoping to provoke. As we stated in our
article, we intended our work to be only an initial effort to think through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises, and we are
delighted that Green and Long have taken seriously our suggestion for scholars to continue to think in more detail about the
ways in which nuclear crises differ from one another. Their arguments are characteristically insightful, offer a range of
interesting and important arguments and suggestions, and have forced us to think harder about a number of aspects of our
argument. In this reply, we briefly lay out the argument we made in our article before responding to Green and Long's
suggestion that we underestimate the incentives to launch a nuclear first-strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis and their
proposal of an alternative typology for understanding nuclear crises.
Our Argument
In our article, we offer
a framework for thinking through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises.
[37]
While the existing literature on such crises assumes that they all follow a certain logic (although there is disagreement on
what that logic is), we identify factors that might lead nuclear crises to differ from one another in consequential ways. In
particular, we argue that two factors -- whether incentives are present for nuclear first use and the extent to which
escalation is controllable by the leaders involved -- lead to fundamentally different sorts of crises. These two variables
generate four possible "ideal type" models of nuclear crises: "staircase" crises (characterized by high first-use incentives
and high controllability), "brinkmanship" crises (low first-use incentives and low controllability), "stability-instability"
crises (low first-use incentives and high controllability), and "firestorm" crises (high first-use incentives and low
controllability). Each of these ideal types exhibits distinctive dynamics and offers different answers to important
questions, such as, how likely is nuclear escalation, and how might it occur? How feasible is signaling within a crisis?
What factors determine success? For example, crises exhibiting high incentives for nuclear first use combined with low
crisis controllability -- firestorm crises -- are particularly volatile, and the most dangerous of all four models in terms of
likelihood of nuclear war. These are the crises that statesmen should avoid except under the direst circumstances or for the
highest stakes. By contrast, where incentives for the first use of nuclear weapons are low and there is high crisis
controllability -- the stability-instability model -- the risk of nuclear use is lowest. When incentives for nuclear first use
are low and crisis controllability is also low -- brinkmanship crises -- or when incentives for first use are high and crisis
controllability is also high -- the staircase model -- there is a moderate risk of nuclear use, although through two quite
different processes. For the brinkmanship model, low levels of crisis controllability combined with few incentives for
nuclear first use mean that escalation to the nuclear level would likely only happen inadvertently and through a process of
uncontrolled, rather than deliberate, escalation. On the other hand, high levels of crisis controllability combined with
high incentives for nuclear first use -- characteristic of the staircase model -- mean that escalation would more likely occur
through a careful, deliberate process.
First-Use Incentives in the Cuban Missile Crisis
First, Green and
Long address the extent of incentives for launching a nuclear first strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In short, they
argue that there were substantial military incentives for America to strike first during the crisis and that these were
understood and appreciated by American leaders.
[38]
While space constraints meant that our analysis of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis was briefer than we would
have liked, we certainly agree that the United States possessed nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union during the crisis.
[39]
The debate between us and Green and Long is, therefore, primarily over whether the nuclear balance that we (more or less)
agree existed in 1962 was sufficiently lopsided as to offer meaningful incentives for nuclear first use, and whether it was
perceived as such by the leaders involved. In this, we do have somewhat different interpretations of how much weight to
assign to particular pieces of evidence. For example, we believe that the retrospective assessment of key participants does
have evidentiary value, although we acknowledge (as we did in our article) the biases of such assessments in this case.
Given the rapidly shifting nuclear balance, we place less weight on President John F. Kennedy's statements in years prior to
the crisis than on those he made during the crisis itself,
[40]
which were more consistently skeptical of the benefits associated with U.S. nuclear superiority at a time when the stakes
were at their highest.
[41]
We also place somewhat less weight than Green and Long on the 1961 analysis of Carl Kaysen, given doubts about whether his
report had much of an effect on operational planning.
[42]
And finally, we put less weight on the Joint Chiefs of Staff document from 1962 cited by Green and Long in support of their
argument, given that it acknowledges the U.S. inability to eliminate Soviet strategic nuclear forces -- thus highlighting the
dangers of a U.S. nuclear first strike -- as well as focuses on future force planning in the aftermath of the crisis. We
would also note that our assessment that U.S. nuclear superiority in the Cuban Missile Crisis did not obviously translate
into politically meaningful incentives for first use is in line with standard interpretations of this case, including among
scholars that Green and Long cite. For Marc Trachtenberg, for example, "[t]he American ability to 'limit damage' by
destroying an enemy's strategic forces did not seem, in American eyes, to carry much political weight" during the Cuban
Missile Crisis.
[43]
Similarly, the relative lack of incentives for rational first use in the crisis motivated Thomas Schelling's assessment that
only an "unforeseeable and unpredictable" process could have led to nuclear use in the crisis.
[44]
Regardless of whether participants in the Cuban Missile Crisis understood the advantages (or lack thereof) associated with
nuclear superiority, in some ways, our disagreement with Green and Long is more of a conceptual one: where to draw the
threshold at which a state's level of nuclear superiority (and corresponding ability to limit retaliatory damage) should be
deemed "politically meaningful," i.e., sufficiently lopsided to offer incentives for first use. This is a topic about which
there is certainly room for legitimate disagreement. "Political relevance" is a tricky concept, which reinforces Green and
Long's broader argument that "nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret" -- a point with which we agree.
[45]
But Green and Long seem to view
any
ability to limit retaliatory damage as politically meaningful, since they argue
that a nuclear balance that would have likely left a number of American cities destroyed (and potentially more), even in the
aftermath of a U.S. first strike, nonetheless provided strong military incentives for first use. By contrast, our view is
that the threshold should be somewhat higher than this, though lower than Green and Long's characterization of our position:
We do not, in fact, think that the relevant standard for political meaning "is a perfectly disarming strike." Part of our
motivation in wanting a threshold higher than "any damage limitation capability" is that it increases the utility of the
typology we offer by allowing us to draw the line in such a way that a substantial number of empirical cases exist on either
side of that threshold. Green and Long, by contrast, seem more satisfied to draw the line in such a way that cases
exhibiting very different incentives for first use -- a crisis with North Korea today compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis,
for example -- would both be classified on the same side of the threshold.
[46]
Green and Long's approach would ignore the important differences between these cases by treating both crises as exhibiting
strong incentives for nuclear first use. This would be akin to producing a meteorological map that rarely shows rain because
the forecaster judges the relevant threshold to be "catastrophic flooding." There is nothing fundamentally incorrect about
making such a choice, but it is not necessarily the most helpful approach to shedding light on the empirical variation we
observe in the historical record.
An Alternative Typology of Nuclear Crises
Second, Green and Long offer an
alternative typology for understanding the heterogeneity of nuclear crises. Green and Long argue that there are three types
of crisis: "those with political bargaining incentives for selective nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both
selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those with political risks, non-rational risks, and
military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C)." This is an interesting proposal and we have no fundamental
objections to their typology.
[47]
After all, one can categorize the same phenomenon in different ways, and different typologies may be useful for different
purposes. Space constraints inevitably prevent Green and Long from offering a full justification for their typology, and we
would certainly encourage them to offer a more fleshed out articulation of it and its merits. Their initial discussion of
the different types of signals that states can send within different types of crises is especially productive and goes
beyond the relatively simple discussion of the feasibility of signaling that we included in our article. We offer two
critiques that might be helpful as they (and others) continue to consider the relative merits of these two typologies and
build upon them. First, it is not clear how different their proposed typology is from the one we offer. At times, for
example, Green and Long suggest that their typology simply divides up the same conceptual space we identify using our two
variables, but does so differently. For example, they argue that they are essentially collapsing two of our quadrants
(stability-instability crises and staircase crises) into Type A crises, while Type B crises are similar to our brinkmanship
crises and Type C crises are similar to our firestorm crises. If so, their typology does not really suggest a fundamentally
different understanding of how nuclear crises vary, but merely of where the most interesting variation occurs within the
conceptual space we identify. The key question, then, in determining the relative merits of the two typologies, is whether
there is important variation between the two categories that Green and Long collapse. We continue to think the distinctions
between stability-instability crises and staircase crises are important. Although both types of crises are relatively
controllable and have limited risk of what Green and Long call "non-rational uncontrolled escalation," they have very
different risks when it comes to nuclear use: lower in stability-instability crises and higher in staircase crises. The
factors that determine success in stability-instability crises -- primarily the conventional military balance due to the very
low risk of nuclear escalation -- do not necessarily determine success in staircase crises, in which the nuclear balance may
matter. As a result, we think that collapsing these two categories is not necessarily a helpful analytical move. Second, to
the extent that their typology differs from our own, it does so in ways that are not necessarily helpful in shedding light
on the variation across nuclear crises that we observe. In particular, separating incentives for first use into "political
bargaining incentives" and "military incentives" is an intriguing proposal but we are not yet fully persuaded of its merits.
Given that one of Green and Long's goals is to increase the clarity of the typology we offer, and given that they
acknowledge the difficulties of coding the nuclear balance, demanding even more fine-grained assessments in order to divide
incentives for first use into two separate (but conceptually highly connected) components may be a lot to ask of analysts.
Moreover, given Green and Long's assertion that "political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively are ever present,"
their argument in fact implies (as mentioned above) that political incentives for first use are
not
a source of
interesting variation within nuclear crises. We disagree with this conclusion substantively, but it is worth noting that it
also has important conceptual implications for Green and Long's typology: It means that their three types of crises all
exhibit political incentives for nuclear first use. If this is the case, then political incentives for nuclear first use
simply fall out of the analysis. In effect, crises without political incentives for nuclear first use are simply ruled out
by definition. This analytic move renders portions of their argument tautologous. For example, they argue that the
conventional balance cannot "ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis," but this is only because they assume that
there are always political incentives to use nuclear weapons first, and thus, "any conventional victory stands only by dint
of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate." More broadly, this approach seems to us at least somewhat epistemologically
problematic. In our view, it is better to be conceptually open to the existence of certain types of crises and then discover
that such crises do not occur empirically, than it is to rule them out by definition and risk discovering later that such
crises have, in fact, taken place. In sum, while we are not fully persuaded by Green and Long's critiques, we are extremely
grateful for their insightful, thorough, and constructive engagement with our article and look forward to their future work
on these issues. We hope that they, along with other scholars, will continue to explore the ways in which nuclear crises
differ from one another, and the implications of such differences for crisis dynamics. Mark S. Bell,
Minneapolis,
Minnesota
Julia Macdonald,
Denver, Colorado
[post_title] => Contrasting Views on How to Code a Nuclear
Crisis [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => closed [post_password] =>
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[lead] => In this issue's correspondence section, Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long offer up an alternative way to
code nuclear crises in response to Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald's article in the February 2019 issue of TNSR. Bell and
Macdonald, in turn, offer a response to Green and Long's critique. [pubinfo] => [issue] => Vol 2, Iss 4 [quotes] => [style]
=> framing [type] => Framing [style_label] => The Foundation [download] => Array ( [title] => PDF Download [file] => 2442 )
[authors] => Array ( [0] => 279 [1] => 138 [2] => 258 [3] => 259 ) [endnotes] => Array ( [title] => Endnotes [endnotes] =>
[1]
Mark S.
Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises,"
Texas National Security Review
2, no. 2 (February
2019): 40–64,
http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/1944
.
[2]
Bell and
Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 42, 63.
[3]
For an
excellent treatment of this problem in the international relations context, see Robert Jervis,
Perception and
Misperception in International Politics
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 154–72.
[4]
Bell and
Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
[5]
See
Memorandum for General Maxwell Taylor from Carl Kaysen, "Strategic Air Planning and Berlin," Sept. 5, 1961, from National
Archives, Record Group 218, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB56/BerlinC1.pdf
.
[6]
Marc
Trachtenberg, David Rosenberg, and Stephen Van Evera, "An Interview with Carl Kaysen," MIT Security Studies Program (1988),
9,
http://web.mit.edu/SSP/publications/working_papers/Kaysen%20working%20paper.pdf
.
[7]
Austin
Long and Brendan Rittenhouse Green, "Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence, Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy,"
Journal of Strategic Studies
38, no. 1–2 (2015): 44–46,
https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2014.958150
.
[8]
"An
Interview with Carl Kaysen," 9.
[9]
Quoted
in Long and Green, "Stalking the Secure Second Strike," 46.
[10]
James
R. Schlesinger, "Some Notes on Deterrence in Western Europe," (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, June 30, 1962), 8.
[11]
Ernest R. May, John D. Steinbruner, and Thomas M. Wolfe,
History of the Strategic Arms Competition 1945–1972
, v.1
(Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981), 475.
[12]
Quoted in Scott Sagan, "SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy,"
International Security
12,
no. 1 (Summer 1987): 34,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538916
.
[13]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 56. See also, May, Steinbruner, and Wolfe,
History of the Strategic
Arms Competition
, 475; and Owen Coté,
The Third Battle: Innovation in the US Navy's Silent Cold War Struggle with
Soviet Submarines
(Newport, RI: Naval War College, 2003), 42.
[14]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55, 59.
[15]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
[16]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
[17]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 59, fn 96. For more on Bundy, see, e.g., McGeorge Bundy et al., "Nuclear
Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance,"
Foreign Affairs
60, no. 4 (Spring 1982): 753–68,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1982-03-01/nuclear-weapons-and-atlantic-alliance
.
[18]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
[19]
Matthew Kroenig,
The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters
(Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018), 88.
[20]
Sagan, "SIOP-62," 50.
[21]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
[22]
Sagan,
"SIOP-62," 36, and esp. n. 49.
[23]
Joint
Chiefs of Staff Memorandum 907-62 to McNamara, Nov. 20, 1962,
in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS),
1961-1963
, Vol. 8, 387–89, quotation on 388,
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d109
.
[24]
For
example, consider his remark, just after the peak of the crisis, that "My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in
extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons," before strongly implying massive U.S. preemption would be preferable to
tactical use. See ExComm Meeting, Oct. 29, 1962, in Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow, eds.,
The Kennedy Tapes: Inside
the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 657.
[25]
For
excellent accounts of Kennedy's Berlin policy and his views on nuclear superiority, which we draw upon heavily, see Marc
Trachtenberg,
A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999), chap. 8; Francis J. Gavin,
Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), chaps. 2–3.
[26]
Trachtenberg,
A Constructed Peace
, 292, 293, 294, 295.
[27]
Trachtenberg,
A Constructed Peace
, 353, 351.
[28]
Legere memorandum for the record of the White House daily staff meeting, Dec. 10, 1962, National Defense University, Taylor
Papers, Chairman's Staff Group December 1962-January 1963; quoted in
FRUS 1961-1963
, Vol. 8, 436.
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d118
.
[29]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 43.
[30]
See,
e.g., Trachtenberg,
A Constructed Peace
, 353, n. 3.
[31]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 47–49.
[32]
Thomas C. Schelling,
Arms and Influence
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 97.
[33]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 49.
[34]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 49–50.
[35]
Schelling,
Arms and Influence
, 102.
[36]
This
work was supported by U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) and Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Project on Advanced Systems
and Concepts for Countering WMD (PASCC) award FA7000-19-2-0008. The opinions, findings, views, conclusions or
recommendations contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the
official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of USAFA, DTRA or the U.S. Government.
[37]
Mark
S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises,"
Texas National Security Review
2, no. 2 (February
2019): 40-64,
http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/1944
. For additional
applications of our framework, see Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "Toward Deterrence: The Upside of the Trump-Kim
Summit,"
War on the Rocks
, June 15, 2018,
https://warontherocks.com/2018/06/toward-deterrence-the-upside-of-the-trump-kim-summit/
; Mark S. Bell and Julia
Macdonald, "How Dangerous Was Kargil? Nuclear Crises in Comparative Perspective,"
Washington Quarterly
42, no. 2
(Summer 2019): 135–48,
https://doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2019.1626691
.
[38]
One
minor correction to Green and Long's argument: The Cuban Missile Crisis is not the "sole empirical example" in our article
of a crisis characterized by a lack of incentives for first use. In the article we also argue that the 2017 Doklam Crisis
between India and China lacked strong incentives for first use, and we suspect there are plenty more crises of this sort in
the historical record. Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 60–61.
[39]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
[40]
The
quote from the crisis that Green and Long cite does not really support their argument. Green and Long state: "consider
[Kennedy's] remark, just after the peak of the crisis, that 'My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis,
everybody would use nuclear weapons,' before strongly implying massive U.S. preemption would be preferable to tactical use."
In fact, consider the full quote: "My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use
nuclear weapons. The decision to use any kind of a nuclear weapon, even the tactical ones, presents such a risk of it
getting out of control so quickly." Kennedy then trails off but "appears to agree" with an unidentified participant who
states, "But Cuba's so small compared to the world." This suggests that Kennedy was expressing deep skepticism of any sort
of nuclear use remaining limited, as well as doubts about the merits of taking such risks over Cuba, rather than making any
sort of clear comparison between the merits of tactical use and massive pre-emption as Green and Long suggest. Ernest R. May
and Philip Zelikow, eds.,
The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis
(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997), 657.
[41]
For a
recent analysis of Kennedy's behavior during the Cuban Missile Crisis that concludes that he was deeply skeptical of the
benefits of nuclear superiority during the crisis, see James Cameron,
The Double Game: The Demise of America's First
Missile Defense System and the Rise of Strategic Arms Limitation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 29–37.
[42]
For
example, see Francis Gavin's assessment that "little was done with" Kaysen's plan, a claim which echoes Marc Trachtenberg's
earlier assessment that "it is hard to tell, however, what effect [Kaysen's analysis] had, and in particular whether, by the
end of the year, the Air Force was prepared in operational terms to launch an attack of this sort." Francis J. Gavin,
Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 38; Marc
Trachtenberg,
History and Strategy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 225.
[43]
Marc
Trachtenberg, "The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis,"
International Security
10, no. 1
(Summer 1985), 162,
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2538793
.
[44]
Thomas C. Schelling,
Arms and Influence
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 97.
[45]
Indeed, at the risk of adding even more complexity, the relevant threshold likely varies with the stakes of the crisis:
Leaders are likely to view lesser damage limitation capabilities as politically relevant when the stakes are higher than
they are when the stakes involved are lower.
[46]
For
discussion of the North Korean case, see Bell and Macdonald, "Toward Deterrence," and Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think
About Nuclear Crises," 61–62.
[47]
We
do, however, suggest that our labels offer somewhat more
joie de vivre
than the alphabetic labels that Green and
Long offer. ) [contents] => Array ( [title] => [contents] => ) ) [queried_object_id] => 1948 [request] => SELECT wp_posts.*
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In Response to "How to Think About Nuclear Crises"
Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long
In their article in the February 2019 issue of the
Texas National
Security Review
, Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald make a cogent argument that all nuclear crises are not created equal.
[1]
We agree with their basic thesis: There really are different sorts of nuclear crises, which have different risk and
signaling profiles. We also concur that the existence of a variety of political and military dynamics within nuclear crises
implies that we should exercise caution when interpreting the results of cross-sectional statistical analysis. If crises are
not in fact all the same, then quantitative estimates of variable effects have a murkier meaning.
[2]
We should not be surprised that, to date, multiple studies have produced different results. Nevertheless, the article also
highlights an alternate hypothesis for nuclear scholarship's inconsistent findings about crisis outcomes and dynamics:
Nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret. The balance of resolve between adversaries -- one of the most important
variables in any crisis -- is influenced by many factors and is basically impossible to code
ex ante
. The two
variables identified as critical by Bell and Macdonald for determining the shape of a crisis -- the nuclear balance and the
controllability of escalation -- are only somewhat more tractable to interpretation. The consequence is that nuclear crises
are prone to ambiguity, with coding challenges and case interpretations often resolved in favor of the analyst's
pre-existing models of the world. In short, nuclear crises suffer from an especially pernicious interdependence between fact
and theory.
[3]
To the extent that this problem can be ameliorated -- although it cannot be resolved entirely -- the solution is to employ the
best possible conceptual and measurement standards for each key variable. Below we provide best practices for coding the
nuclear balance, with particular focus on Bell and Macdonald's interpretation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We argue that,
following much of the extant literature, Bell and Macdonald make interpretive choices that unintentionally truncate the
history that underlies their coding of the nuclear balance in this case. In our view, they incorrectly conclude that the
United States had no military incentives to use nuclear weapons first in 1962. Below, we analyze their interpretation of the
Cuba crisis by examining two indicators that might be used to establish the nuclear balance: the operational capabilities of
both sides and the perceptions of key U.S. policymakers. We conclude by drawing out some broader implications of the crisis
for their conceptual framework, offering a friendly amendment.
What Were the Operational Capabilities on Both Sides
in 1962?
Bell and Macdonald's characterization of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis is a central part
of their argument, as it is their sole empirical example of a crisis that "was not characterized by incentives for
deliberate first nuclear use." They base this assertion on a brief overview of the balance of U.S. and Soviet strategic
forces in 1962, followed by a claim that "[t]he U.S. government did not know where all of the Soviet warheads were located,
and there were concerns that U.S. forces were too inaccurate to successfully target the Soviet arsenal."
[4]
Yet, any calculation of the incentives for deliberate first use must be based on the full context of the military balance.
This hinges on the operational capabilities of both sides in the crisis, which includes a concept of operations of a first
strike as well as the ability of both sides to execute nuclear operations. The available evidence on operational
capabilities suggests that a U.S. first strike would have been likely to eliminate much, if not all, of the Soviet nuclear
forces capable of striking the United States, as we summarize briefly below. Any concept of operations for a U.S. first
strike would have been unlikely to rely solely, or even primarily, on relatively inaccurate ballistic missiles, as Bell and
Macdonald imply. In a sketch of such an attack drafted by National Security Council staffer Carl Kaysen and Deputy Assistant
Secretary of Defense Harry Rowen during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the strike would have been delivered by a U.S. bomber
force rather than with missiles. As Kaysen and Rowen describe, all Soviet nuclear forces of the time were "soft" targets, so
U.S. nuclear bombers would have been more than accurate enough to destroy them. Moreover, a carefully planned bomber attack
could have exploited the limitations of Soviet air defense in detecting low flying aircraft, enabling a successful surprise
attack.
[5]
Kaysen would retrospectively note that U.S. missiles, which were inaccurate but armed with multi-megaton warheads, could
also have been included in an attack, concluding, "we had a highly confident first strike."
[6]
Kaysen's confidence was based on his understanding of the relative ability of both sides to conduct nuclear operations. In
terms of targeting intelligence, while the United States may not have known where all Soviet nuclear warheads were, it had
detailed knowledge of the location of Soviet long-range delivery systems. This intelligence came from a host of sources,
including satellite reconnaissance and human sources. U.S. intelligence also understood the low readiness of Soviet nuclear
forces.
[7]
As Kaysen would later note, "By this time we knew that there were no goddamn missiles to speak of, we knew that there were
only 6 or 7 operational ones and 3 or 4 more in the test sites and so on. As for the Soviet bombers, they were in a very low
state of alert."
[8]
Of course, Kaysen's assessment of the balance of forces in 1961 might have been overly optimistic or no longer true a year
later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet, other contemporary analysts concurred. Andrew Marshall, who had access to the
closely held targeting intelligence of this period, subsequently described the Soviet nuclear force, particularly its
bombers, as "sitting ducks."
[9]
James Schlesinger, writing about four months before the crisis, noted, "During the next four or five years, because of
nuclear dominance, the credibility of an American first-strike remains high."
[10]
The authors of the comprehensive
History of the Strategic Arms Competition
, drawing on a variety of highly
classified U.S. sources, reach a similar conclusion:
[T]he Soviet strategic situation in 1962 might thus have been judged little short of desperate. A well-timed U.S. first
strike, employing then-available ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] and SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic
missile] forces as well as bombers, could have seemed threatening to the survival of most of the Soviet Union's own
intercontinental strategic forces. Furthermore, there was the distinct, if small, probability that such an attack could
have denied the Soviet Union the ability to inflict any significant retaliatory damage upon the United States.
[11]
The Soviet nuclear-armed submarines of 1962 were likewise vulnerable to U.S. anti-submarine warfare, as they would have had
to approach within a few hundred miles of the U.S. coast to launch their missiles. As early as 1959, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Gen. Nathan Twining testified that while "one or two isolated submarines" might reach the U.S. coast, in
general, the United States had high confidence in its anti-submarine warfare capabilities.
[12]
The performance of these capabilities during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when multiple Soviet submarines were detected and
some forced to surface, confirms their efficacy, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in their description of an attack on a
Soviet submarine during the crisis.
[13]
How Was the Nuclear Balance Perceived in 1962?
Bell and Macdonald offer three data points for their
argument that U.S. policymakers did not perceive meaningful American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
First, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other veterans of the Kennedy administration attested retrospectively that
nuclear superiority did not play an important role in the Cuba crisis.
[14]
Second, President John F. Kennedy received a Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing on the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)
-- the U.S plan for strategic nuclear weapons employment -- in 1961, which reported that Soviet retaliation should be expected
under all circumstances, even after an American pre-emptive strike.
[15]
Third, the president expressed ambivalence about the nuclear balance on the first day of the Cuba crisis.
[16]
But this evidence is a combination of truncated, biased, and weak. The retrospective testimony of Kennedy administration
alumni is highly dubious. McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and others were all highly motivated political
actors, speaking two decades after the fact in the context of fierce nuclear policy debates on which they had taken highly
public positions, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in a footnote.
[17]
The problems with giving much weight to such statements are especially evident given the fact that, as Bell and Macdonald
acknowledge,
[18]
these very same advisers made remarks during the Cuba crisis that were much more favorably disposed to the idea of American
nuclear superiority.
[19]
The Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing to Kennedy on SIOP-62 is evidence, contrary to Bell and Macdonald's interpretation, of
American nuclear superiority in 1962. Bell and Macdonald make much of the briefing's caution that "Under any
circumstances -- even a preemptive attack by the US -- it would be expected that some portion of the Soviet long-range nuclear
force would strike the United States."
[20]
But interpreting this comment as evidence that the United States did not possess "politically meaningful damage limitation"
capabilities makes sense only if one has already decided that the relevant standard for political meaning is a perfectly
disarming strike.
[21]
Scott Sagan, in commenting on the briefing, underscores that "although the United States could expect to suffer some
unspecified nuclear damage under any condition of war initiation, the Soviet Union would confront absolutely massive
destruction regardless of whether it struck first or retaliated."
[22]
Crucially, the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for maintaining a U.S. first-strike capability in a memorandum to McNamara
commenting on his plans for strategic nuclear forces for fiscal years 1964–68. This memorandum, sent shortly after the
crisis, argues that the United States could not, in the future, entirely eliminate Soviet strategic forces. Yet, the
memorandum continues: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable,
although the degree or level of attainment is a matter of judgment and depends upon the US reaction to a changing Soviet
capability."
[23]
In short, not only did the Joint Chiefs of Staff conclude the United States had a meaningful first-strike capability in
1962, they believed such a capability could and should be maintained in the future. As for Kennedy's personal views, it is
important not just to consider isolated quotes during the Cuban crisis -- after all, he made several comments that point in
opposite directions.
[24]
One has to consider the political context of the Cuban affair writ large: the multi-year contest with the Soviets over the
future of Berlin, and effectively, the NATO alliance. Moreover, Kennedy had deliberately built Western policy during the
Berlin crisis on a foundation of nuclear superiority. NATO planning assumed that nuclear weapons would ultimately be used,
and probably on a massive scale.
[25]
As Kennedy put it to French President Charles de Gaulle in June of 1961, "the advantage of striking first with nuclear
weapons is so great that if [the] Soviets were to attack even without using such weapons, the U.S. could not afford to wait
to use them." In July, he told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that "he felt the critical point is to be able to use nuclear
weapons at a crucial point before they use them." In January of 1962, expecting the Berlin Crisis to heat up in the near
future, he stressed the importance of operational military planning, and of thinking "hard about the ways and means of
making decisions that might lead to nuclear war." As he put it at that meeting, "the credibility of our nuclear deterrent is
sufficient to hold our present positions throughout the world" even if American conventional military power "on the ground
does not match what the communists can bring to bear."
[26]
But the president recognized that this military strength was a wasting asset: The development of Soviet nuclear forces meant
that the window of American nuclear superiority was closing. For this reason, Kennedy thought it important to bring the
Berlin Crisis to a head as soon as possible, while the United States still possessed an edge. "It might be better to let a
confrontation to develop over Berlin now rather than later," he argued just two weeks before the Cuba crisis. After all,
"the military balance was more favorable to us than it would be later on."
[27]
Two months after the crisis, his views were little different. Reporting on a presidential trip to Strategic Air Command
during which Kennedy was advised that "the really neat and clean way to get around all these complexities [about the precise
state of the nuclear balance] was to strike first," Bundy "said that of course the President had not reacted with any such
comments, but Bundy's clear implication was that the President felt that way."
[28]
Broader Implications
Our argument about the nuclear balance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, if correct,
requires some friendly amendments to Bell and Macdonald's framework for delineating types of nuclear crisis. Our discussion
of the operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions during the Cuba crisis underscores that Bell and Macdonald's
first variable -- "the strength of incentives to use nuclear weapons first in a crisis"
[29]
-- probably ought to be unpacked into two separate variables: military incentives for a first strike, and political
bargaining incentives for selective use. After all, whatever the exact nuclear balance was during 1962, the United States
was certainly postured for asymmetric escalation. The salience of America's posture is thrown into especially bold relief
once the political context of the crisis is recognized: The Cuban affair was basically the climax of the superpower
confrontation over Berlin, in which American force structure and planning was built around nuclear escalation. Indeed, this
is how policymakers saw the Cuba crisis, where the fear of Soviet countermoves in Berlin hung as an ever-present cloud over
discussions within the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.
[30]
According to Bell and Macdonald, either kind of incentive is sufficient to put a case into the "high" risk category for
deliberate use. But in truth, political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively -- even if only against military
targets -- are ever present. They are just seldom triggered until matters have gone seriously awry on the battlefield. In
short, we believe Bell and Macdonald were right to expend extra effort looking for military first-strike incentives, which
add genuinely different sorts of risk to a crisis. We argue that operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions in the
Cuba crisis show that such incentives are more common than generally credited. So, we would build on Bell and Macdonald's
central insight that different types of nuclear crisis have different signaling and risk profiles by modestly amending their
framework. We suggest that there are three types of nuclear crisis: those with political bargaining incentives for selective
nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those
with political risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C). Type A crises
essentially collapse Bell and Macdonald's "staircase" and "stability-instability" models, and are relatively low risk.
[31]
Any proposed nuclear escalation amounts to a "threat to launch a disastrous war coolly and deliberately in response to some
enemy transgression."
[32]
Such threats are hard to make credible until military collapse has put a state's entire international position at stake.
Outcomes of Type A crises will be decided solely by the balance of resolve. We disagree with Bell and Macdonald's argument
that the conventional military balance can ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis, since any conventional victory
stands only by dint of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate. But the lower risks of a Type A crisis mean that signals
of resolve are harder to send, and must occur through large and not particularly selective or subtle means -- essentially,
larger conventional and nuclear operations. Type B crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "brinksmanship" model.
[33]
These have a significantly greater risk profile, since they also contain genuine risks of uncontrolled escalation in
addition to political risks. Crisis outcomes remain dependent on the balance of resolve, but signaling is easier and can be
much finer-grained than in Type A crises. The multiple opportunities for uncontrolled escalation mean that there are simply
many more things a state can do at much lower levels of actual violence to manipulate the level of risk in a crisis. For
instance, alerting nuclear forces will often not mean much in a Type A crisis (at least before the moment of conventional
collapse), since there is no way things can get out of control. But alerting forces in a Type B crisis could set off a chain
of events where states clash due to the interaction between each other's rules of nuclear engagement, incentivize forces
inadvertently threatened by conventional operations to fire, or misperceive each other's actions. Any given military move
will have more political meaning and will also be more dangerous. Type C crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's
"firestorm" model.
[34]
These are the riskiest sorts of nuclear crisis, since there are military reasons for escalation as well as political and
non-rational risks. Outcomes will be influenced both by the balance of resolve and the nuclear balance: either could give
states incentives to manipulate risk. Such signals will be the easiest to send, and the finest-grained of any type of
crisis. But because the risk level jumps so much with any given signal, the time in which states can bargain may be short.
[35]
In sum, Bell and Macdonald have made an important contribution to the study of nuclear escalation by delineating different
types of crisis with different risk and signaling profiles. We believe they understate the importance of American nuclear
superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that these coding problems highlight some conceptual issues with their
framework. In the end, though, our amendments appear to us relatively minor, further underscoring the importance of Bell and
Macdonald's research. We hope that they, and other scholars, will continue to build on these findings. Brendan R. Green,
Cincinnati, Ohio
Austin Long,
Arlington, Virginia
In Response to a Critique
Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald
We thank Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long for their positive assessment
of our work and for engaging with our argument so constructively.
[36]
Their contribution represents exactly the sort of productive scholarly debate we were hoping to provoke. As we stated in our
article, we intended our work to be only an initial effort to think through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises, and we are
delighted that Green and Long have taken seriously our suggestion for scholars to continue to think in more detail about the
ways in which nuclear crises differ from one another. Their arguments are characteristically insightful, offer a range of
interesting and important arguments and suggestions, and have forced us to think harder about a number of aspects of our
argument. In this reply, we briefly lay out the argument we made in our article before responding to Green and Long's
suggestion that we underestimate the incentives to launch a nuclear first-strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis and their
proposal of an alternative typology for understanding nuclear crises.
Our Argument
In our article, we offer
a framework for thinking through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises.
[37]
While the existing literature on such crises assumes that they all follow a certain logic (although there is disagreement on
what that logic is), we identify factors that might lead nuclear crises to differ from one another in consequential ways. In
particular, we argue that two factors -- whether incentives are present for nuclear first use and the extent to which
escalation is controllable by the leaders involved -- lead to fundamentally different sorts of crises. These two variables
generate four possible "ideal type" models of nuclear crises: "staircase" crises (characterized by high first-use incentives
and high controllability), "brinkmanship" crises (low first-use incentives and low controllability), "stability-instability"
crises (low first-use incentives and high controllability), and "firestorm" crises (high first-use incentives and low
controllability). Each of these ideal types exhibits distinctive dynamics and offers different answers to important
questions, such as, how likely is nuclear escalation, and how might it occur? How feasible is signaling within a crisis?
What factors determine success? For example, crises exhibiting high incentives for nuclear first use combined with low
crisis controllability -- firestorm crises -- are particularly volatile, and the most dangerous of all four models in terms of
likelihood of nuclear war. These are the crises that statesmen should avoid except under the direst circumstances or for the
highest stakes. By contrast, where incentives for the first use of nuclear weapons are low and there is high crisis
controllability -- the stability-instability model -- the risk of nuclear use is lowest. When incentives for nuclear first use
are low and crisis controllability is also low -- brinkmanship crises -- or when incentives for first use are high and crisis
controllability is also high -- the staircase model -- there is a moderate risk of nuclear use, although through two quite
different processes. For the brinkmanship model, low levels of crisis controllability combined with few incentives for
nuclear first use mean that escalation to the nuclear level would likely only happen inadvertently and through a process of
uncontrolled, rather than deliberate, escalation. On the other hand, high levels of crisis controllability combined with
high incentives for nuclear first use -- characteristic of the staircase model -- mean that escalation would more likely occur
through a careful, deliberate process.
First-Use Incentives in the Cuban Missile Crisis
First, Green and
Long address the extent of incentives for launching a nuclear first strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In short, they
argue that there were substantial military incentives for America to strike first during the crisis and that these were
understood and appreciated by American leaders.
[38]
While space constraints meant that our analysis of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis was briefer than we would
have liked, we certainly agree that the United States possessed nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union during the crisis.
[39]
The debate between us and Green and Long is, therefore, primarily over whether the nuclear balance that we (more or less)
agree existed in 1962 was sufficiently lopsided as to offer meaningful incentives for nuclear first use, and whether it was
perceived as such by the leaders involved. In this, we do have somewhat different interpretations of how much weight to
assign to particular pieces of evidence. For example, we believe that the retrospective assessment of key participants does
have evidentiary value, although we acknowledge (as we did in our article) the biases of such assessments in this case.
Given the rapidly shifting nuclear balance, we place less weight on President John F. Kennedy's statements in years prior to
the crisis than on those he made during the crisis itself,
[40]
which were more consistently skeptical of the benefits associated with U.S. nuclear superiority at a time when the stakes
were at their highest.
[41]
We also place somewhat less weight than Green and Long on the 1961 analysis of Carl Kaysen, given doubts about whether his
report had much of an effect on operational planning.
[42]
And finally, we put less weight on the Joint Chiefs of Staff document from 1962 cited by Green and Long in support of their
argument, given that it acknowledges the U.S. inability to eliminate Soviet strategic nuclear forces -- thus highlighting the
dangers of a U.S. nuclear first strike -- as well as focuses on future force planning in the aftermath of the crisis. We
would also note that our assessment that U.S. nuclear superiority in the Cuban Missile Crisis did not obviously translate
into politically meaningful incentives for first use is in line with standard interpretations of this case, including among
scholars that Green and Long cite. For Marc Trachtenberg, for example, "[t]he American ability to 'limit damage' by
destroying an enemy's strategic forces did not seem, in American eyes, to carry much political weight" during the Cuban
Missile Crisis.
[43]
Similarly, the relative lack of incentives for rational first use in the crisis motivated Thomas Schelling's assessment that
only an "unforeseeable and unpredictable" process could have led to nuclear use in the crisis.
[44]
Regardless of whether participants in the Cuban Missile Crisis understood the advantages (or lack thereof) associated with
nuclear superiority, in some ways, our disagreement with Green and Long is more of a conceptual one: where to draw the
threshold at which a state's level of nuclear superiority (and corresponding ability to limit retaliatory damage) should be
deemed "politically meaningful," i.e., sufficiently lopsided to offer incentives for first use. This is a topic about which
there is certainly room for legitimate disagreement. "Political relevance" is a tricky concept, which reinforces Green and
Long's broader argument that "nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret" -- a point with which we agree.
[45]
But Green and Long seem to view
any
ability to limit retaliatory damage as politically meaningful, since they argue
that a nuclear balance that would have likely left a number of American cities destroyed (and potentially more), even in the
aftermath of a U.S. first strike, nonetheless provided strong military incentives for first use. By contrast, our view is
that the threshold should be somewhat higher than this, though lower than Green and Long's characterization of our position:
We do not, in fact, think that the relevant standard for political meaning "is a perfectly disarming strike." Part of our
motivation in wanting a threshold higher than "any damage limitation capability" is that it increases the utility of the
typology we offer by allowing us to draw the line in such a way that a substantial number of empirical cases exist on either
side of that threshold. Green and Long, by contrast, seem more satisfied to draw the line in such a way that cases
exhibiting very different incentives for first use -- a crisis with North Korea today compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis,
for example -- would both be classified on the same side of the threshold.
[46]
Green and Long's approach would ignore the important differences between these cases by treating both crises as exhibiting
strong incentives for nuclear first use. This would be akin to producing a meteorological map that rarely shows rain because
the forecaster judges the relevant threshold to be "catastrophic flooding." There is nothing fundamentally incorrect about
making such a choice, but it is not necessarily the most helpful approach to shedding light on the empirical variation we
observe in the historical record.
An Alternative Typology of Nuclear Crises
Second, Green and Long offer an
alternative typology for understanding the heterogeneity of nuclear crises. Green and Long argue that there are three types
of crisis: "those with political bargaining incentives for selective nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both
selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those with political risks, non-rational risks, and
military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C)." This is an interesting proposal and we have no fundamental
objections to their typology.
[47]
After all, one can categorize the same phenomenon in different ways, and different typologies may be useful for different
purposes. Space constraints inevitably prevent Green and Long from offering a full justification for their typology, and we
would certainly encourage them to offer a more fleshed out articulation of it and its merits. Their initial discussion of
the different types of signals that states can send within different types of crises is especially productive and goes
beyond the relatively simple discussion of the feasibility of signaling that we included in our article. We offer two
critiques that might be helpful as they (and others) continue to consider the relative merits of these two typologies and
build upon them. First, it is not clear how different their proposed typology is from the one we offer. At times, for
example, Green and Long suggest that their typology simply divides up the same conceptual space we identify using our two
variables, but does so differently. For example, they argue that they are essentially collapsing two of our quadrants
(stability-instability crises and staircase crises) into Type A crises, while Type B crises are similar to our brinkmanship
crises and Type C crises are similar to our firestorm crises. If so, their typology does not really suggest a fundamentally
different understanding of how nuclear crises vary, but merely of where the most interesting variation occurs within the
conceptual space we identify. The key question, then, in determining the relative merits of the two typologies, is whether
there is important variation between the two categories that Green and Long collapse. We continue to think the distinctions
between stability-instability crises and staircase crises are important. Although both types of crises are relatively
controllable and have limited risk of what Green and Long call "non-rational uncontrolled escalation," they have very
different risks when it comes to nuclear use: lower in stability-instability crises and higher in staircase crises. The
factors that determine success in stability-instability crises -- primarily the conventional military balance due to the very
low risk of nuclear escalation -- do not necessarily determine success in staircase crises, in which the nuclear balance may
matter. As a result, we think that collapsing these two categories is not necessarily a helpful analytical move. Second, to
the extent that their typology differs from our own, it does so in ways that are not necessarily helpful in shedding light
on the variation across nuclear crises that we observe. In particular, separating incentives for first use into "political
bargaining incentives" and "military incentives" is an intriguing proposal but we are not yet fully persuaded of its merits.
Given that one of Green and Long's goals is to increase the clarity of the typology we offer, and given that they
acknowledge the difficulties of coding the nuclear balance, demanding even more fine-grained assessments in order to divide
incentives for first use into two separate (but conceptually highly connected) components may be a lot to ask of analysts.
Moreover, given Green and Long's assertion that "political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively are ever present,"
their argument in fact implies (as mentioned above) that political incentives for first use are
not
a source of
interesting variation within nuclear crises. We disagree with this conclusion substantively, but it is worth noting that it
also has important conceptual implications for Green and Long's typology: It means that their three types of crises all
exhibit political incentives for nuclear first use. If this is the case, then political incentives for nuclear first use
simply fall out of the analysis. In effect, crises without political incentives for nuclear first use are simply ruled out
by definition. This analytic move renders portions of their argument tautologous. For example, they argue that the
conventional balance cannot "ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis," but this is only because they assume that
there are always political incentives to use nuclear weapons first, and thus, "any conventional victory stands only by dint
of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate." More broadly, this approach seems to us at least somewhat epistemologically
problematic. In our view, it is better to be conceptually open to the existence of certain types of crises and then discover
that such crises do not occur empirically, than it is to rule them out by definition and risk discovering later that such
crises have, in fact, taken place. In sum, while we are not fully persuaded by Green and Long's critiques, we are extremely
grateful for their insightful, thorough, and constructive engagement with our article and look forward to their future work
on these issues. We hope that they, along with other scholars, will continue to explore the ways in which nuclear crises
differ from one another, and the implications of such differences for crisis dynamics. Mark S. Bell,
Minneapolis,
Minnesota
Julia Macdonald,
Denver, Colorado
[post_title] => Contrasting Views on How to Code a Nuclear
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[lead] => In this issue's correspondence section, Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long offer up an alternative way to
code nuclear crises in response to Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald's article in the February 2019 issue of TNSR. Bell and
Macdonald, in turn, offer a response to Green and Long's critique. [pubinfo] => [issue] => Vol 2, Iss 4 [quotes] => [style]
=> framing [type] => Framing [style_label] => The Foundation [download] => Array ( [title] => PDF Download [file] => 2442 )
[authors] => Array ( [0] => 279 [1] => 138 [2] => 258 [3] => 259 ) [endnotes] => Array ( [title] => Endnotes [endnotes] =>
[1]
Mark S.
Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises,"
Texas National Security Review
2, no. 2 (February
2019): 40–64,
http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/1944
.
[2]
Bell and
Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 42, 63.
[3]
For an
excellent treatment of this problem in the international relations context, see Robert Jervis,
Perception and
Misperception in International Politics
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 154–72.
[4]
Bell and
Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
[5]
See
Memorandum for General Maxwell Taylor from Carl Kaysen, "Strategic Air Planning and Berlin," Sept. 5, 1961, from National
Archives, Record Group 218, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB56/BerlinC1.pdf
.
[6]
Marc
Trachtenberg, David Rosenberg, and Stephen Van Evera, "An Interview with Carl Kaysen," MIT Security Studies Program (1988),
9,
http://web.mit.edu/SSP/publications/working_papers/Kaysen%20working%20paper.pdf
.
[7]
Austin
Long and Brendan Rittenhouse Green, "Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence, Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy,"
Journal of Strategic Studies
38, no. 1–2 (2015): 44–46,
https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2014.958150
.
[8]
"An
Interview with Carl Kaysen," 9.
[9]
Quoted
in Long and Green, "Stalking the Secure Second Strike," 46.
[10]
James
R. Schlesinger, "Some Notes on Deterrence in Western Europe," (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, June 30, 1962), 8.
[11]
Ernest R. May, John D. Steinbruner, and Thomas M. Wolfe,
History of the Strategic Arms Competition 1945–1972
, v.1
(Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981), 475.
[12]
Quoted in Scott Sagan, "SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy,"
International Security
12,
no. 1 (Summer 1987): 34,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538916
.
[13]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 56. See also, May, Steinbruner, and Wolfe,
History of the Strategic
Arms Competition
, 475; and Owen Coté,
The Third Battle: Innovation in the US Navy's Silent Cold War Struggle with
Soviet Submarines
(Newport, RI: Naval War College, 2003), 42.
[14]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55, 59.
[15]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
[16]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
[17]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 59, fn 96. For more on Bundy, see, e.g., McGeorge Bundy et al., "Nuclear
Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance,"
Foreign Affairs
60, no. 4 (Spring 1982): 753–68,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1982-03-01/nuclear-weapons-and-atlantic-alliance
.
[18]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
[19]
Matthew Kroenig,
The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters
(Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018), 88.
[20]
Sagan, "SIOP-62," 50.
[21]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
[22]
Sagan,
"SIOP-62," 36, and esp. n. 49.
[23]
Joint
Chiefs of Staff Memorandum 907-62 to McNamara, Nov. 20, 1962,
in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS),
1961-1963
, Vol. 8, 387–89, quotation on 388,
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d109
.
[24]
For
example, consider his remark, just after the peak of the crisis, that "My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in
extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons," before strongly implying massive U.S. preemption would be preferable to
tactical use. See ExComm Meeting, Oct. 29, 1962, in Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow, eds.,
The Kennedy Tapes: Inside
the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 657.
[25]
For
excellent accounts of Kennedy's Berlin policy and his views on nuclear superiority, which we draw upon heavily, see Marc
Trachtenberg,
A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999), chap. 8; Francis J. Gavin,
Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), chaps. 2–3.
[26]
Trachtenberg,
A Constructed Peace
, 292, 293, 294, 295.
[27]
Trachtenberg,
A Constructed Peace
, 353, 351.
[28]
Legere memorandum for the record of the White House daily staff meeting, Dec. 10, 1962, National Defense University, Taylor
Papers, Chairman's Staff Group December 1962-January 1963; quoted in
FRUS 1961-1963
, Vol. 8, 436.
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d118
.
[29]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 43.
[30]
See,
e.g., Trachtenberg,
A Constructed Peace
, 353, n. 3.
[31]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 47–49.
[32]
Thomas C. Schelling,
Arms and Influence
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 97.
[33]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 49.
[34]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 49–50.
[35]
Schelling,
Arms and Influence
, 102.
[36]
This
work was supported by U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) and Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Project on Advanced Systems
and Concepts for Countering WMD (PASCC) award FA7000-19-2-0008. The opinions, findings, views, conclusions or
recommendations contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the
official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of USAFA, DTRA or the U.S. Government.
[37]
Mark
S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises,"
Texas National Security Review
2, no. 2 (February
2019): 40-64,
http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/1944
. For additional
applications of our framework, see Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "Toward Deterrence: The Upside of the Trump-Kim
Summit,"
War on the Rocks
, June 15, 2018,
https://warontherocks.com/2018/06/toward-deterrence-the-upside-of-the-trump-kim-summit/
; Mark S. Bell and Julia
Macdonald, "How Dangerous Was Kargil? Nuclear Crises in Comparative Perspective,"
Washington Quarterly
42, no. 2
(Summer 2019): 135–48,
https://doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2019.1626691
.
[38]
One
minor correction to Green and Long's argument: The Cuban Missile Crisis is not the "sole empirical example" in our article
of a crisis characterized by a lack of incentives for first use. In the article we also argue that the 2017 Doklam Crisis
between India and China lacked strong incentives for first use, and we suspect there are plenty more crises of this sort in
the historical record. Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 60–61.
[39]
Bell
and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.
[40]
The
quote from the crisis that Green and Long cite does not really support their argument. Green and Long state: "consider
[Kennedy's] remark, just after the peak of the crisis, that 'My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis,
everybody would use nuclear weapons,' before strongly implying massive U.S. preemption would be preferable to tactical use."
In fact, consider the full quote: "My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use
nuclear weapons. The decision to use any kind of a nuclear weapon, even the tactical ones, presents such a risk of it
getting out of control so quickly." Kennedy then trails off but "appears to agree" with an unidentified participant who
states, "But Cuba's so small compared to the world." This suggests that Kennedy was expressing deep skepticism of any sort
of nuclear use remaining limited, as well as doubts about the merits of taking such risks over Cuba, rather than making any
sort of clear comparison between the merits of tactical use and massive pre-emption as Green and Long suggest. Ernest R. May
and Philip Zelikow, eds.,
The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis
(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997), 657.
[41]
For a
recent analysis of Kennedy's behavior during the Cuban Missile Crisis that concludes that he was deeply skeptical of the
benefits of nuclear superiority during the crisis, see James Cameron,
The Double Game: The Demise of America's First
Missile Defense System and the Rise of Strategic Arms Limitation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 29–37.
[42]
For
example, see Francis Gavin's assessment that "little was done with" Kaysen's plan, a claim which echoes Marc Trachtenberg's
earlier assessment that "it is hard to tell, however, what effect [Kaysen's analysis] had, and in particular whether, by the
end of the year, the Air Force was prepared in operational terms to launch an attack of this sort." Francis J. Gavin,
Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 38; Marc
Trachtenberg,
History and Strategy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 225.
[43]
Marc
Trachtenberg, "The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis,"
International Security
10, no. 1
(Summer 1985), 162,
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2538793
.
[44]
Thomas C. Schelling,
Arms and Influence
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 97.
[45]
Indeed, at the risk of adding even more complexity, the relevant threshold likely varies with the stakes of the crisis:
Leaders are likely to view lesser damage limitation capabilities as politically relevant when the stakes are higher than
they are when the stakes involved are lower.
[46]
For
discussion of the North Korean case, see Bell and Macdonald, "Toward Deterrence," and Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think
About Nuclear Crises," 61–62.
[47]
We
do, however, suggest that our labels offer somewhat more
joie de vivre
than the alphabetic labels that Green and
Long offer. ) [contents] => Array ( [title] => [contents] => ) ) ) [post_count] => 1 [current_post] => -1 [in_the_loop] =>
[post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1948 [post_author] => 279 [post_date] => 2019-10-03 05:00:03 [post_date_gmt] =>
2019-10-03 09:00:03 [post_content] =>
In Response to "How to Think About Nuclear Crises"
Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long
In their article in the February 2019 issue of the
Texas National
Security Review
, Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald make a cogent argument that all nuclear crises are not created equal.
[1]
We agree with their basic thesis: There really are different sorts of nuclear crises, which have different risk and
signaling profiles. We also concur that the existence of a variety of political and military dynamics within nuclear crises
implies that we should exercise caution when interpreting the results of cross-sectional statistical analysis. If crises are
not in fact all the same, then quantitative estimates of variable effects have a murkier meaning.
[2]
We should not be surprised that, to date, multiple studies have produced different results. Nevertheless, the article also
highlights an alternate hypothesis for nuclear scholarship's inconsistent findings about crisis outcomes and dynamics:
Nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret. The balance of resolve between adversaries -- one of the most important
variables in any crisis -- is influenced by many factors and is basically impossible to code
ex ante
. The two
variables identified as critical by Bell and Macdonald for determining the shape of a crisis -- the nuclear balance and the
controllability of escalation -- are only somewhat more tractable to interpretation. The consequence is that nuclear crises
are prone to ambiguity, with coding challenges and case interpretations often resolved in favor of the analyst's
pre-existing models of the world. In short, nuclear crises suffer from an especially pernicious interdependence between fact
and theory.
[3]
To the extent that this problem can be ameliorated -- although it cannot be resolved entirely -- the solution is to employ the
best possible conceptual and measurement standards for each key variable. Below we provide best practices for coding the
nuclear balance, with particular focus on Bell and Macdonald's interpretation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We argue that,
following much of the extant literature, Bell and Macdonald make interpretive choices that unintentionally truncate the
history that underlies their coding of the nuclear balance in this case. In our view, they incorrectly conclude that the
United States had no military incentives to use nuclear weapons first in 1962. Below, we analyze their interpretation of the
Cuba crisis by examining two indicators that might be used to establish the nuclear balance: the operational capabilities of
both sides and the perceptions of key U.S. policymakers. We conclude by drawing out some broader implications of the crisis
for their conceptual framework, offering a friendly amendment.
What Were the Operational Capabilities on Both Sides
in 1962?
Bell and Macdonald's characterization of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis is a central part
of their argument, as it is their sole empirical example of a crisis that "was not characterized by incentives for
deliberate first nuclear use." They base this assertion on a brief overview of the balance of U.S. and Soviet strategic
forces in 1962, followed by a claim that "[t]he U.S. government did not know where all of the Soviet warheads were located,
and there were concerns that U.S. forces were too inaccurate to successfully target the Soviet arsenal."
[4]
Yet, any calculation of the incentives for deliberate first use must be based on the full context of the military balance.
This hinges on the operational capabilities of both sides in the crisis, which includes a concept of operations of a first
strike as well as the ability of both sides to execute nuclear operations. The available evidence on operational
capabilities suggests that a U.S. first strike would have been likely to eliminate much, if not all, of the Soviet nuclear
forces capable of striking the United States, as we summarize briefly below. Any concept of operations for a U.S. first
strike would have been unlikely to rely solely, or even primarily, on relatively inaccurate ballistic missiles, as Bell and
Macdonald imply. In a sketch of such an attack drafted by National Security Council staffer Carl Kaysen and Deputy Assistant
Secretary of Defense Harry Rowen during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the strike would have been delivered by a U.S. bomber
force rather than with missiles. As Kaysen and Rowen describe, all Soviet nuclear forces of the time were "soft" targets, so
U.S. nuclear bombers would have been more than accurate enough to destroy them. Moreover, a carefully planned bomber attack
could have exploited the limitations of Soviet air defense in detecting low flying aircraft, enabling a successful surprise
attack.
[5]
Kaysen would retrospectively note that U.S. missiles, which were inaccurate but armed with multi-megaton warheads, could
also have been included in an attack, concluding, "we had a highly confident first strike."
[6]
Kaysen's confidence was based on his understanding of the relative ability of both sides to conduct nuclear operations. In
terms of targeting intelligence, while the United States may not have known where all Soviet nuclear warheads were, it had
detailed knowledge of the location of Soviet long-range delivery systems. This intelligence came from a host of sources,
including satellite reconnaissance and human sources.
U.S. intelligence also understood the low readiness of Soviet nuclear
forces.
[7]
As Kaysen would later note, "By this time we knew that there were no goddamn missiles to speak of, we knew that there were
only 6 or 7 operational ones and 3 or 4 more in the test sites and so on.
As for the Soviet bombers, they were in a very low
state of alert."
[8]
Of course, Kaysen's assessment of the balance of forces in 1961 might have been overly optimistic or no longer true a year
later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet, other contemporary analysts concurred. Andrew Marshall, who had access to the
closely held targeting intelligence of this period, subsequently described the Soviet nuclear force, particularly its
bombers, as "sitting ducks."
[9]
James Schlesinger, writing about four months before the crisis, noted, "During the next four or five years, because of
nuclear dominance, the credibility of an American first-strike remains high."
[10]
The authors of the comprehensive
History of the Strategic Arms Competition
, drawing on a variety of highly
classified U.S. sources, reach a similar conclusion:
[T]he Soviet strategic situation in 1962 might thus have been judged little short of desperate. A well-timed U.S. first
strike, employing then-available ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] and SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic
missile] forces as well as bombers, could have seemed threatening to the survival of most of the Soviet Union's own
intercontinental strategic forces. Furthermore, there was the distinct, if small, probability that such an attack could
have denied the Soviet Union the ability to inflict any significant retaliatory damage upon the United States.
[11]
The Soviet nuclear-armed submarines of 1962 were likewise vulnerable to U.S. anti-submarine warfare, as they would have had
to approach within a few hundred miles of the U.S. coast to launch their missiles. As early as 1959, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Gen. Nathan Twining testified that while "one or two isolated submarines" might reach the U.S. coast, in
general, the United States had high confidence in its anti-submarine warfare capabilities.
[12]
The performance of these capabilities during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when multiple Soviet submarines were detected and
some forced to surface, confirms their efficacy, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in their description of an attack on a
Soviet submarine during the crisis.
[13]
How Was the Nuclear Balance Perceived in 1962?
Bell and Macdonald offer three data points for their
argument that U.S. policymakers did not perceive meaningful American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
First, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other veterans of the Kennedy administration attested retrospectively that
nuclear superiority did not play an important role in the Cuba crisis.
[14]
Second, President John F. Kennedy received a Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing on the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)
-- the U.S plan for strategic nuclear weapons employment -- in 1961, which reported that Soviet retaliation should be expected
under all circumstances, even after an American pre-emptive strike.
[15]
Third, the president expressed ambivalence about the nuclear balance on the first day of the Cuba crisis.
[16]
But this evidence is a combination of truncated, biased, and weak. The retrospective testimony of Kennedy administration
alumni is highly dubious. McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and others were all highly motivated political
actors, speaking two decades after the fact in the context of fierce nuclear policy debates on which they had taken highly
public positions, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in a footnote.
[17]
The problems with giving much weight to such statements are especially evident given the fact that, as Bell and Macdonald
acknowledge,
[18]
these very same advisers made remarks during the Cuba crisis that were much more favorably disposed to the idea of American
nuclear superiority.
[19]
The Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing to Kennedy on SIOP-62 is evidence, contrary to Bell and Macdonald's interpretation, of
American nuclear superiority in 1962. Bell and Macdonald make much of the briefing's caution that "Under any
circumstances -- even a preemptive attack by the US -- it would be expected that some portion of the Soviet long-range nuclear
force would strike the United States."
[20]
But interpreting this comment as evidence that the United States did not possess "politically meaningful damage limitation"
capabilities makes sense only if one has already decided that the relevant standard for political meaning is a perfectly
disarming strike.
[21]
Scott Sagan, in commenting on the briefing, underscores that "although the United States could expect to suffer some
unspecified nuclear damage under any condition of war initiation, the Soviet Union would confront absolutely massive
destruction regardless of whether it struck first or retaliated."
[22]
Crucially, the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for maintaining a U.S. first-strike capability in a memorandum to McNamara
commenting on his plans for strategic nuclear forces for fiscal years 1964–68. This memorandum, sent shortly after the
crisis, argues that the United States could not, in the future, entirely eliminate Soviet strategic forces. Yet, the
memorandum continues: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable,
although the degree or level of attainment is a matter of judgment and depends upon the US reaction to a changing Soviet
capability."
[23]
In short, not only did the Joint Chiefs of Staff conclude the United States had a meaningful first-strike capability in
1962, they believed such a capability could and should be maintained in the future. As for Kennedy's personal views, it is
important not just to consider isolated quotes during the Cuban crisis -- after all, he made several comments that point in
opposite directions.
[24]
One has to consider the political context of the Cuban affair writ large: the multi-year contest with the Soviets over the
future of Berlin, and effectively, the NATO alliance. Moreover, Kennedy had deliberately built Western policy during the
Berlin crisis on a foundation of nuclear superiority. NATO planning assumed that nuclear weapons would ultimately be used,
and probably on a massive scale.
[25]
As Kennedy put it to French President Charles de Gaulle in June of 1961, "the advantage of striking first with nuclear
weapons is so great that if [the] Soviets were to attack even without using such weapons, the U.S. could not afford to wait
to use them." In July, he told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that "he felt the critical point is to be able to use nuclear
weapons at a crucial point before they use them." In January of 1962, expecting the Berlin Crisis to heat up in the near
future, he stressed the importance of operational military planning, and of thinking "hard about the ways and means of
making decisions that might lead to nuclear war." As he put it at that meeting, "the credibility of our nuclear deterrent is
sufficient to hold our present positions throughout the world" even if American conventional military power "on the ground
does not match what the communists can bring to bear."
[26]
But the president recognized that this military strength was a wasting asset: The development of Soviet nuclear forces meant
that the window of American nuclear superiority was closing. For this reason, Kennedy thought it important to bring the
Berlin Crisis to a head as soon as possible, while the United States still possessed an edge. "It might be better to let a
confrontation to develop over Berlin now rather than later," he argued just two weeks before the Cuba crisis. After all,
"the military balance was more favorable to us than it would be later on."
[27]
Two months after the crisis, his views were little different. Reporting on a presidential trip to Strategic Air Command
during which Kennedy was advised that "the really neat and clean way to get around all these complexities [about the precise
state of the nuclear balance] was to strike first," Bundy "said that of course the President had not reacted with any such
comments, but Bundy's clear implication was that the President felt that way."
[28]
Broader Implications
Our argument about the nuclear balance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, if correct,
requires some friendly amendments to Bell and Macdonald's framework for delineating types of nuclear crisis. Our discussion
of the operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions during the Cuba crisis underscores that Bell and Macdonald's
first variable -- "the strength of incentives to use nuclear weapons first in a crisis"
[29]
-- probably ought to be unpacked into two separate variables: military incentives for a first strike, and political
bargaining incentives for selective use. After all, whatever the exact nuclear balance was during 1962, the United States
was certainly postured for asymmetric escalation. The salience of America's posture is thrown into especially bold relief
once the political context of the crisis is recognized: The Cuban affair was basically the climax of the superpower
confrontation over Berlin, in which American force structure and planning was built around nuclear escalation. Indeed, this
is how policymakers saw the Cuba crisis, where the fear of Soviet countermoves in Berlin hung as an ever-present cloud over
discussions within the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.
[30]
According to Bell and Macdonald, either kind of incentive is sufficient to put a case into the "high" risk category for
deliberate use. But in truth, political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively -- even if only against military
targets -- are ever present. They are just seldom triggered until matters have gone seriously awry on the battlefield. In
short, we believe Bell and Macdonald were right to expend extra effort looking for military first-strike incentives, which
add genuinely different sorts of risk to a crisis. We argue that operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions in the
Cuba crisis show that such incentives are more common than generally credited. So, we would build on Bell and Macdonald's
central insight that different types of nuclear crisis have different signaling and risk profiles by modestly amending their
framework. We suggest that there are three types of nuclear crisis: those with political bargaining incentives for selective
nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those
with political risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C). Type A crises
essentially collapse Bell and Macdonald's "staircase" and "stability-instability" models, and are relatively low risk.
[31]
Any proposed nuclear escalation amounts to a "threat to launch a disastrous war coolly and deliberately in response to some
enemy transgression."
[32]
Such threats are hard to make credible until military collapse has put a state's entire international position at stake.
Outcomes of Type A crises will be decided solely by the balance of resolve. We disagree with Bell and Macdonald's argument
that the conventional military balance can ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis, since any conventional victory
stands only by dint of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate. But the lower risks of a Type A crisis mean that signals
of resolve are harder to send, and must occur through large and not particularly selective or subtle means -- essentially,
larger conventional and nuclear operations. Type B crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "brinksmanship" model.
[33]
These have a significantly greater risk profile, since they also contain genuine risks of uncontrolled escalation in
addition to political risks. Crisis outcomes remain dependent on the balance of resolve, but signaling is easier and can be
much finer-grained than in Type A crises. The multiple opportunities for uncontrolled escalation mean that there are simply
many more things a state can do at much lower levels of actual violence to manipulate the level of risk in a crisis. For
instance, alerting nuclear forces will often not mean much in a Type A crisis (at least before the moment of conventional
collapse), since there is no way things can get out of control. But alerting forces in a Type B crisis could set off a chain
of events where states clash due to the interaction between each other's rules of nuclear engagement, incentivize forces
inadvertently threatened by conventional operations to fire, or misperceive each other's actions. Any given military move
will have more political meaning and will also be more dangerous. Type C crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's
"firestorm" model.
[34]
These are the riskiest sorts of nuclear crisis, since there are military reasons for escalation as well as political and
non-rational risks. Outcomes will be influenced both by the balance of resolve and the nuclear balance: either could give
states incentives to manipulate risk. Such signals will be the easiest to send, and the finest-grained of any type of
crisis. But because the risk level jumps so much with any given signal, the time in which states can bargain may be short.
[35]
In sum, Bell and Macdonald have made an important contribution to the study of nuclear escalation by delineating different
types of crisis with different risk and signaling profiles. We believe they understate the importance of American nuclear
superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that these coding problems highlight some conceptual issues with their
framework. In the end, though, our amendments appear to us relatively minor, further underscoring the importance of Bell and
Macdonald's research. We hope that they, and other scholars, will continue to build on these findings. Brendan R. Green,
Cincinnati, Ohio
Austin Long,
Arlington, Virginia
In Response to a Critique
Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald
We thank Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long for their positive assessment
of our work and for engaging with our argument so constructively.
[36]
Their contribution represents exactly the sort of productive scholarly debate we were hoping to provoke. As we stated in our
article, we intended our work to be only an initial effort to think through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises, and we are
delighted that Green and Long have taken seriously our suggestion for scholars to continue to think in more detail about the
ways in which nuclear crises differ from one another. Their arguments are characteristically insightful, offer a range of
interesting and important arguments and suggestions, and have forced us to think harder about a number of aspects of our
argument. In this reply, we briefly lay out the argument we made in our article before responding to Green and Long's
suggestion that we underestimate the incentives to launch a nuclear first-strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis and their
proposal of an alternative typology for understanding nuclear crises.
Our Argument
In our article, we offer
a framework for thinking through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises.
[37]
While the existing literature on such crises assumes that they all follow a certain logic (although there is disagreement on
what that logic is), we identify factors that might lead nuclear crises to differ from one another in consequential ways. In
particular, we argue that two factors -- whether incentives are present for nuclear first use and the extent to which
escalation is controllable by the leaders involved -- lead to fundamentally different sorts of crises. These two variables
generate four possible "ideal type" models of nuclear crises: "staircase" crises (characterized by high first-use incentives
and high controllability), "brinkmanship" crises (low first-use incentives and low controllability), "stability-instability"
crises (low first-use incentives and high controllability), and "firestorm" crises (high first-use incentives and low
controllability). Each of these ideal types exhibits distinctive dynamics and offers different answers to important
questions, such as, how likely is nuclear escalation, and how might it occur? How feasible is signaling within a crisis?
What factors determine success? For example, crises exhibiting high incentives for nuclear first use combined with low
crisis controllability -- firestorm crises -- are particularly volatile, and the most dangerous of all four models in terms of
likelihood of nuclear war. These are the crises that statesmen should avoid except under the direst circumstances or for the
highest stakes. By contrast, where incentives for the first use of nuclear weapons are low and there is high crisis
controllability -- the stability-instability model -- the risk of nuclear use is lowest. When incentives for nuclear first use
are low and crisis controllability is also low -- brinkmanship crises -- or when incentives for first use are high and crisis
controllability is also high -- the staircase model -- there is a moderate risk of nuclear use, although through two quite
different processes. For the brinkmanship model, low levels of crisis controllability combined with few incentives for
nuclear first use mean that escalation to the nuclear level would likely only happen inadvertently and through a process of
uncontrolled, rather than deliberate, escalation. On the other hand, high levels of crisis controllability combined with
high incentives for nuclear first use -- characteristic of the staircase model -- mean that escalation would more likely occur
through a careful, deliberate process.
First-Use Incentives in the Cuban Missile Crisis
First, Green and
Long address the extent of incentives for launching a nuclear first strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In short, they
argue that there were substantial military incentives for America to strike first during the crisis and that these were
understood and appreciated by American leaders.
[38]
While space constraints meant that our analysis of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis was briefer than we would
have liked, we certainly agree that the United States possessed nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union during the crisis.
[39]
The debate between us and Green and Long is, therefore, primarily over whether the nuclear balance that we (more or less)
agree existed in 1962 was sufficiently lopsided as to offer meaningful incentives for nuclear first use, and whether it was
perceived as such by the leaders involved. In this, we do have somewhat different interpretations of how much weight to
assign to particular pieces of evidence. For example, we believe that the retrospective assessment of key participants does
have evidentiary value, although we acknowledge (as we did in our article) the biases of such assessments in this case.
Given the rapidly shifting nuclear balance, we place less weight on President John F. Kennedy's statements in years prior to
the crisis than on those he made during the crisis itself,
[40]
which were more consistently skeptical of the benefits associated with U.S. nuclear superiority at a time when the stakes
were at their highest.
[41]
We also place somewhat less weight than Green and Long on the 1961 analysis of Carl Kaysen, given doubts about whether his
report had much of an effect on operational planning.
[42]
And finally, we put less weight on the Joint Chiefs of Staff document from 1962 cited by Green and Long in support of their
argument, given that it acknowledges the U.S. inability to eliminate Soviet strategic nuclear forces -- thus highlighting the
dangers of a U.S. nuclear first strike -- as well as focuses on future force planning in the aftermath of the crisis. We
would also note that our assessment that U.S. nuclear superiority in the Cuban Missile Crisis did not obviously translate
into politically meaningful incentives for first use is in line with standard interpretations of this case, including among
scholars that Green and Long cite. For Marc Trachtenberg, for example, "[t]he American ability to 'limit damage' by
destroying an enemy's strategic forces did not seem, in American eyes, to carry much political weight" during the Cuban
Missile Crisis.
[43]
Similarly, the relative lack of incentives for rational first use in the crisis motivated Thomas Schelling's assessment that
only an "unforeseeable and unpredictable" process could have led to nuclear use in the crisis.
[44]
Regardless of whether participants in the Cuban Missile Crisis understood the advantages (or lack thereof) associated with
nuclear superiority, in some ways, our disagreement with Green and Long is more of a conceptual one: where to draw the
threshold at which a state's level of nuclear superiority (and corresponding ability to limit retaliatory damage) should be
deemed "politically meaningful," i.e., sufficiently lopsided to offer incentives for first use. This is a topic about which
there is certainly room for legitimate disagreement. "Political relevance" is a tricky concept, which reinforces Green and
Long's broader argument that "nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret" -- a point with which we agree.
[45]
But Green and Long seem to view
any
ability to limit retaliatory damage as politically meaningful, since they argue
that a nuclear balance that would have likely left a number of American cities destroyed (and potentially more), even in the
aftermath of a U.S. first strike, nonetheless provided strong military incentives for first use. By contrast, our view is
that the threshold should be somewhat higher than this, though lower than Green and Long's characterization of our position:
We do not, in fact, think that the relevant standard for political meaning "is a perfectly disarming strike." Part of our
motivation in wanting a threshold higher than "any damage limitation capability" is that it increases the utility of the
typology we offer by allowing us to draw the line in such a way that a substantial number of empirical cases exist on either
side of that threshold. Green and Long, by contrast, seem more satisfied to draw the line in such a way that cases
exhibiting very different incentives for first use -- a crisis with North Korea today compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis,
for example -- would both be classified on the same side of the threshold.
[46]
Green and Long's approach would ignore the important differences between these cases by treating both crises as exhibiting
strong incentives for nuclear first use. This would be akin to producing a meteorological map that rarely shows rain because
the forecaster judges the relevant threshold to be "catastrophic flooding." There is nothing fundamentally incorrect about
making such a choice, but it is not necessarily the most helpful approach to shedding light on the empirical variation we
observe in the historical record.
An Alternative Typology of Nuclear Crises
Second, Green and Long offer an
alternative typology for understanding the heterogeneity of nuclear crises. Green and Long argue that there are three types
of crisis: "those with political bargaining incentives for selective nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both
selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those with political risks, non-rational risks, and
military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C)." This is an interesting proposal and we have no fundamental
objections to their typology.
[47]
After all, one can categorize the same phenomenon in different ways, and different typologies may be useful for different
purposes. Space constraints inevitably prevent Green and Long from offering a full justification for their typology, and we
would certainly encourage them to offer a more fleshed out articulation of it and its merits. Their initial discussion of
the different types of signals that states can send within different types of crises is especially productive and goes
beyond the relatively simple discussion of the feasibility of signaling that we included in our article. We offer two
critiques that might be helpful as they (and others) continue to consider the relative merits of these two typologies and
build upon them. First, it is not clear how different their proposed typology is from the one we offer. At times, for
example, Green and Long suggest that their typology simply divides up the same conceptual space we identify using our two
variables, but does so differently. For example, they argue that they are essentially collapsing two of our quadrants
(stability-instability crises and staircase crises) into Type A crises, while Type B crises are similar to our brinkmanship
crises and Type C crises are similar to our firestorm crises. If so, their typology does not really suggest a fundamentally
different understanding of how nuclear crises vary, but merely of where the most interesting variation occurs within the
conceptual space we identify. The key question, then, in determining the relative merits of the two typologies, is whether
there is important variation between the two categories that Green and Long collapse. We continue to think the distinctions
between stability-instability crises and staircase crises are important. Although both types of crises are relatively
controllable and have limited risk of what Green and Long call "non-rational uncontrolled escalation," they have very
different risks when it comes to nuclear use: lower in stability-instability crises and higher in staircase crises. The
factors that determine success in stability-instability crises -- primarily the conventional military balance due to the very
low risk of nuclear escalation -- do not necessarily determine success in staircase crises, in which the nuclear balance may
matter. As a result, we think that collapsing these two categories is not necessarily a helpful analytical move. Second, to
the extent that their typology differs from our own, it does so in ways that are not necessarily helpful in shedding light
on the variation across nuclear crises that we observe. In particular, separating incentives for first use into "political
bargaining incentives" and "military incentives" is an intriguing proposal but we are not yet fully persuaded of its merits.
Given that one of Green and Long's goals is to increase the clarity of the typology we offer, and given that they
acknowledge the difficulties of coding the nuclear balance, demanding even more fine-grained assessments in order to divide
incentives for first use into two separate (but conceptually highly connected) components may be a lot to ask of analysts.
Moreover, given Green and Long's assertion that "political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively are ever present,"
their argument in fact implies (as mentioned above) that political incentives for first use are
not
a source of
interesting variation within nuclear crises. We disagree with this conclusion substantively, but it is worth noting that it
also has important conceptual implications for Green and Long's typology: It means that their three types of crises all
exhibit political incentives for nuclear first use. If this is the case, then political incentives for nuclear first use
simply fall out of the analysis. In effect, crises without political incentives for nuclear first use are simply ruled out
by definition. This analytic move renders portions of their argument tautologous. For example, they argue that the
conventional balance cannot "ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis," but this is only because they assume that
there are always political incentives to use nuclear weapons first, and thus, "any conventional victory stands only by dint
of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate." More broadly, this approach seems to us at least somewhat epistemologically
problematic. In our view, it is better to be conceptually open to the existence of certain types of crises and then discover
that such crises do not occur empirically, than it is to rule them out by definition and risk discovering later that such
crises have, in fact, taken place. In sum, while we are not fully persuaded by Green and Long's critiques, we are extremely
grateful for their insightful, thorough, and constructive engagement with our article and look forward to their future work
on these issues. We hope that they, along with other scholars, will continue to explore the ways in which nuclear crises
differ from one another, and the implications of such differences for crisis dynamics.
On January 25, 1995, the Russian military mistook a Black Brant XII missile launched by a
group of scientists from Norway and the United States to study the Northern lights over
Svalbard for a nuclear attack by the US Navy with a Trident ballistic missile. It was the first
case when the Russian leader brought the nuclear suitcase in a state of combat readiness.
The rocket, which was equipped to study the Northern lights, was launched from the island's
Andøya Rocket Range, located off the North-West coast of Norway. It was moving along the
same trajectory that US Intercontinental nuclear missiles could fly towards Moscow. Alarm
sirens sounded in the Russian radar center, where technical specialists recorded the flight of
the missile, and where the message about the us missile attack came from.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin summoned the generals and military advisers, and a "nuclear
suitcase" "Cheget"was delivered to him. He had less than ten minutes to decide whether the
Russian military would strike back. "I really used my" little black box "with a button for the
first time yesterday, which is always with me," Yeltsin told the press the next day, after
narrowly avoiding a nuclear disaster. -- I immediately contacted the Ministry of defense and
all the military commanders I needed, and we tracked the movement of this missile from start to
finish."
A few years later, Spiegel Online noted that Yeltsin left Russian nuclear missiles in his
mines at the time, probably "because relations between Russia and the United States in 1995
were relatively trusting."
The scientists who conducted the study, starting in 1962, launched more than 600 missiles,
but the Black Brant XII rocket was larger than the previous ones and more like an American
ballistic missile. A month before this launch, a team of researchers instructed the Norwegian
foreign Ministry to notify neighboring countries of their experiment. Russian officials
received such a notification from Oslo three weeks before the launch, but it was apparently
ignored by them. The radar crews of the Russian missile warning system (SPRn) were also not
informed and reported that it was a potentially nuclear missile moving towards Russia.
Peter Pry, a former CIA officer, wrote that although there were other false alarms in the
nuclear age, none of them went as far as the Norwegian missile incident, "the single most
dangerous moment of the nuclear missile era."
"... The decision to invade Afghanistan following the events of September 11, 2001, while declaring an "axis of evil" to be confronted that included nuclear-armed North Korea and budding regional hegemon Iran, can be said to be the reason for many of the most significant strategic problems besetting the U.S.. ..."
"... The U.S. often prefers to disguise its medium- to long-term objectives by focusing on supposedly more immediate and short-term threats. Thus, the U.S.'s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) and its deployment of the Aegis Combat System (both sea- and land-based) as part of the NATO missile defense system, was explained as being for the purposes of defending European allies from the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. ..."
"... As was immediately clear to most independent analysts as well as to President Putin , the deployment of such offensive systems are only for the purposes of nullifying the Russian Federation's nuclear-deterrence capability . Obama and Trump faithfully followed in the steps of George W. Bush in placing ABM systems on Russia's borders, including in Romania and Poland. ..."
"... There is no defense against such Russian systems as the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which serves to restore the deterrence doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which in turn serves to ensure that nuclear weapons can never be employed so long as this "balance of terror" exists. Moscow is thus able to ensure peace through strength by showing that it is capable of inflicting a devastating second strike with regard regard for Washington's vaunted ABM systems. ..."
"... In addition to the continued economic and military pressure placed on Iran, one of the most immediate consequences of the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, better known as the Iran nuclear deal) has been Tehran being forced to examine all options. Although the country's leaders and political figures have always claimed that they do not want to develop a nuclear weapon, stating that it is prohibited by Islamic law, I should think that their best course of action would be to follow Pyongyang's example and acquire a nuclear deterrent to protect themselves from U.S. aggression. ..."
"... Once again, Washington has ended up shooting itself in the foot by inadvertently encouraging one of its geopolitical opponents to behave in the opposite manner intended. Instead of stopping nuclear proliferation in the region, the U.S., by scuppering of the JCPOA, has only encouraged the prospect of nuclear proliferation. ..."
"... Trump's short-sightedness in withdrawing from the JCPOA is reminiscent of George W. Bush's withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. By triggering necessary responses from Moscow and Tehran, Washington's actions have only ended up leaving it at a disadvantage in certain critical areas relative to its competitors. ..."
Starting from the presidency of George W. Bush to that of Trump, the U.S. has made some
missteps that not only reduce its influence in strategic regions of the world but also its
ability to project power and thus impose its will on those unwilling to genuflect appropriately
.
Some examples from the recent past will suffice to show how a series of strategic errors
have only accelerated the U.S.'s hegemonic decline.
ABM + INF = Hypersonic Supremacy
The decision to invade Afghanistan following the events of September 11, 2001, while
declaring an "axis of evil" to be confronted that included nuclear-armed North Korea and
budding regional hegemon Iran, can be said to be the reason for many of the most significant
strategic problems besetting the U.S..
The U.S. often prefers to disguise its medium- to long-term objectives by focusing on
supposedly more immediate and short-term threats. Thus, the U.S.'s withdrawal from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) and its deployment of the Aegis Combat System (both
sea- and land-based) as part of the NATO missile defense system, was explained as being for the
purposes of defending European allies from the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. This
argument held little water as the Iranians had neither the capability nor intent to launch such
missiles.
As was immediately clear to most independent analysts as well as to President Putin , the deployment of such
offensive systems are only for the purposes of nullifying the
Russian Federation's nuclear-deterrence capability . Obama and Trump faithfully followed in
the steps of George W. Bush in placing ABM systems on Russia's borders, including in Romania
and Poland.
Following from Trump's momentous decision to
withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), it is also likely
that the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) will also be abandoned, creating more
global insecurity with regard to nuclear proliferation.
Moscow was forced to pull out all stops to develop new weapons that would restore the
strategic balance, Putin revealing to the world in a speech in 2018 the introduction of
hypersonic weapons and other technological breakthroughs that would serve to disabuse
Washington of its first-strike fantasies.
Even as Washington's propaganda refuses to acknowledge the tectonic shifts on the global
chessboard occasioned by these technological breakthroughs, sober
military assessments acknowledge that the game has fundamentally changed.
There is no defense against such Russian systems as the Avangard hypersonic glide
vehicle, which serves to restore the deterrence doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD),
which in turn serves to ensure that nuclear weapons can never be employed so long as this
"balance of terror" exists. Moscow is thus able to ensure peace through strength by showing
that it is capable of inflicting a devastating second strike with regard regard for
Washington's vaunted ABM systems.
In addition to ensuring its nuclear second-strike capability, Russia has been forced to
develop the most advanced ABM system in the world to fend off Washington's aggression. This ABM
system is integrated into a defensive network that includes the Pantsir, Tor, Buk, S-400 and
shortly the devastating S-500 and A-235 missile systems. This combined system is designed to
intercept ICBMs as well as any future U.S. hypersonic weapons
The wars of aggression prosecuted by George W. Bush, Obama and Trump have only ended up
leaving the U.S. in a position of nuclear inferiority vis-a-vis Russia and China. Moscow has
obviously shared some of its technological innovations with its strategic partner, allowing
Beijing to also have hypersonic weapons together with ABM systems like the Russian S-400.
No
JCPOA? Here Comes Nuclear Iran
In addition to the continued economic and military pressure placed on Iran, one of the
most immediate consequences of the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
(JCPOA, better known as the Iran nuclear deal) has been Tehran being forced to examine all
options. Although the country's leaders and political figures have always claimed that they do
not want to develop a nuclear weapon, stating that it is
prohibited by Islamic law, I should think that their best course of action would be to
follow Pyongyang's example and acquire a nuclear deterrent to protect themselves from U.S.
aggression.
While this suggestion of mine may not correspond with the intentions of leaders of the
Islamic Republic of Iran, the protection North Korea enjoys from U.S. aggression as a result of
its deterrence capacity may oblige the Iranian leadership to carefully consider the pros and
cons of following suit, perhaps choosing to adopt the Israeli stance of nuclear ambiguity or
nuclear opacity, where the possession of nuclear weapons is neither confirmed nor denied. While
a world free of nuclear weapons would be ideal, their deterrence value cannot be denied, as
North Korea's experience attests.
While Iran does not want war, any pursuit of a nuclear arsenal may guarantee a conflagration
in the Middle East. But I have long maintained that the risk of a nuclear war (once nuclear
weapons have been acquired)
does not exist , with them having a
stabilizing rather than destabilizing effect, particularly in a multipolar environment.
Once again, Washington has ended up shooting itself in the foot by inadvertently
encouraging one of its geopolitical opponents to behave in the opposite manner intended.
Instead of stopping nuclear proliferation in the region, the U.S., by scuppering of the JCPOA,
has only encouraged the prospect of nuclear proliferation.
Trump's short-sightedness in withdrawing from the JCPOA is reminiscent of George W.
Bush's withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. By triggering necessary responses from Moscow and
Tehran, Washington's actions have only ended up leaving it at a disadvantage in certain
critical areas relative to its competitors.
The death of Soleimani punctures the myth
of the U.S. invincibility
I wrote a couple of articles in the wake of General Soleimani's death that
examined the incident and then
considered the profound ramifications of the event in the region.
What seems evident is that Washington appears incapable of appreciating the consequences of
its reckless actions. Killing Soleimani was bound to invite an Iranian response; and even if we
assume that Trump was not looking for war (I
explained why some months ago), it was obvious to any observer that there would be a
response from Iran to the U.S.'s terrorist actions.
The response came a few nights later where, for the first time since the Second World War, a
U.S. military base was subjected to a rain of missiles (22 missiles each with a 700kg payload).
Tehran thereby showed that it possessed the necessary technical, operational and strategic
means to obliterate thousands of U.S. and allied personnel within the space of a few minutes if
it so wished, with the U.S. would be powerless to stop it.
U.S. Patriot air-defense systems yet again failed to do their job, reprising their failure
to defend Saudi oil and gas facilities against a missile attack conducted by Houthis a few
months ago.
We thus have confirmation, within the space of a few months, of the inability of the U.S. to
protect its troops or allies from Houthi, Hezbollah and Iranian missiles. Trump and his
generals would have been reluctant to respond to the Iranian missile attack knowing that any
Iranian response would bring about uncontrollable regional conflagration that would devastate
U.S. bases as well as oil infrastructure and such cities of U.S. allies as Tel Aviv, Haifa and
Dubai.
After demonstrating to the world that U.S. allies in the region are defenseless against
missile attacks from even the likes of the Houthis, Iran drove home the point by conducting
surgical strikes on two U.S. bases that only highlights the disconnect between the perception
of U.S. military invincibility and the reality that would come in the form of a multilayered
missile conflict.
Conclusion
Washington's diplomatic and military decisions in recent years have only brought about a
world world that is more hostile to Washington and less inclined to accept its diktats, often
being driven instead to acquire the military means to counter Washington's bullying. Even as
the U.S. remains the paramount military power, its ineptitude has resulted in Russia and China
surpassing it in some critical areas, such that the U.S. has no chance of defending itself
against a nuclear second strike, with even Iran having the means to successfully retaliate
against the U.S. in the region.
As I continue to say, Washington's power largely rests on perception management helped by
the make-believe world of Hollywood. The recent missile attacks by Houthis on Saudi Arabia's
oil facilities and the Iranian missile attack a few days ago on U.S. military bases in Iraq
(none of which were intercepted) are like Toto drawing back the curtain to reveal Washington's
military vulnerability. No amount of entreaties by Washington to pay no attention to the man
behind the curtain will help.
The more aggressive the U.S. becomes, the more it reveals its tactical, operational and
strategic limits, which in turn only serves to accelerate its loss of hegemony.
If the U.S. could deliver a nuclear first strike without having to worry about a retaliatory
second strike thanks to its ABM systems, then its quest for perpetual unipolarity could
possibly be realistic. But Washington's peer competitors have shown that they have the means to
defend themselves against a nuclear first strike by being able to deliver an unstoppable second
strike, thereby communicating that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) is here
to stay. With that, Washington's efforts to maintain its status as uncontested global hegemon
are futile.
In a region
vital to U.S. interests , Washington does not have the operational capacity to stand in the
way of Syria's liberation. When it has attempted to directly impose its will militarily, it has
seen as many as 80% of its cruise missiles
knocked down or deflected , once again highlighting the divergence between Washington's
Hollywood propaganda and the harsh military reality.
The actions of George W. Bush, Obama and Trump have only served to inadvertently accelerate
the world's transition away from a unipolar world to a multipolar one. As Trump follows in the
steps of his predecessors by being aggressive towards Iran, he only serves to weaken the U.S.
global position and strengthen that of his opponents.
Up to the election of our current President, I agree that we were bullying for the
personal gain of a few and our military was being used as a mercenary force. The current
administration is working on getting us out of long term conflicts. What do you think "drain
the swamp" means? It is a huge undertaking and need to understand what the "deep state" is
all about and their goals.
The death of Soleimani was needed and made the world a safer place. Dr. Janda / Freedom
Operation has had several very intriguing presentations on this issue. It is my firm belief
that there is a worldwide coalition to make the world a better and safer place. If you want
to know about the "deep state" try watching: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cYZ8dUgPuU
All mostly true, but the constant drone of this type of article gets old, as the comments
below attest. We really don't need more forensic analysis by the SCF, what we need is an
answer to America's dollar Imperialism problem. But we'll never get it, just as England never
got an answer to it's pound Imperialism problem.
I like Tulsi Gabbard, but she can never truly reveal the magnitude of the dollar
Imperialism behind her "stop these endless wars" sloganism. Besides, she doesn't have the
billions required to mount any real successful campaign. Only billionaires like Bloomberg
need apply these days.
The Truth is that NO ONE will stand up to Wall Street and it's system of global dollar
corporatism (from which Bloomberg acquired his billions, and to which the USG is bound). It's
suicide to speak the truth to the masses. The dollar must die of its own disease.
Trump is America's Chemo. The cure nearly as bad as the cancer, but the makers of it have
a vested interest in its acceptance.
General Bonespur murders a genuine military man from the comfort of his golf course.
America is still dangerous, Pinky might be tired but the (((Brain))) is working feverishly on
solutions for the jaded .
There has been a perception in the last 25 years that the US could win a nuclear war. This
perception is extremely dangerous as it invites the US armed forces to commit atrocities and
think they can get away with it (they are for now). The world opinion has turned, but the
citizens of the United States of America are not listening.
If the US keeps going down the path they are currently on, they are ensuring that war will
eventually reach its coast.
To challenge the US Empire the new Multipolar World is focused on a two-pronged
strategy:
1. Nullifying the US nuclear first strike (at will) as part of the current US military
doctrine - accomplished (for a decade maybe).
2. Outmaneuvering the US petrodollar in trade, the tool to control the global fossil fuel
resources on the planet - in progress.
What makes 2.) decisive is that the petrodollar as reserve currency is the key to recycle
the US federal budget deficit via foreign investment in U.S. Treasury Bonds (IOUs) by the
central banks, thus enabling the global military presence and power projection of the US
military empire.
All their little plots and schemes failed, as corrupt arsehole after corrupt arsehole
stole the funding from those plots and schemes to fill their own pockets. They also put the
most corrupt individuals they could find into power, so as much as possible could be stolen
and voila, everywhere they went, everything collapsed, every single time.
Totally and utterly ludicrous decades, of not punishing failure after failure has resulted
in nothing but more failure, like, surprise, surprise, surprise.
Routine failures have forced other nation to go multipolar or just rush straight to global
economic collapse as a result of out of control US corruption. Russia and China did not
outsmart the USA, the USA did it entirely to itself by not prosecuting corruption at high
levels, even when it failed time and time again, focusing more on how much they could steal,
then on bringing what ever plot or scheme to a successful conclusion.
The use of the terms "Unintended Consequences", shortsightedness, mistakes, stupidity, or
ignorance provides the avenue to transfer or divert the blame. It excuses it away as bad
decisions so that the truth and those responsible are never really exposed and held
accountable. The fact is, these actions were not mistakes or acts of shortsightedness...they
were deliberate and planned and the so-called "unintended consequences" were actually
intended and part of their plan. Looking back and linking the elites favorite process to
drive change (problem, reaction, solution)...one can quickly make the connection to many of
the so-called "unintended consequences" as they are very predictable results their actions.
It becomes very clear that much of what has occurred over the last few decades has been
deliberate with planned/intended outcomes.
I think the biggest advantage USA used to have was that they claimed to stand for Freedom
and Democracy. And for a time, many people believed them. That's partly why the USSR fell
apart, and for a time USA had a lot of goodwill among ordinary Russians.
But US political leaders squandered this goodwill when they used NATO to attack Yugoslavia
against Russia's objections and expanded NATO towards Russia's borders. This has been long
forgotten in USA. But many ordinary Russians still seethe about these events. This was the
turning point for them that motivated them to support Putin and his rebuilding of Russia's
military.
When you have goodwill among your potential competitors, then they don't have much
motivation to increase their capabilities against you. This was the situation USA was in
after the USSR fell apart. But USA squandered all of this goodwill and motivated the Russians
to do what they did.
And now, USA under Trump has done something like this with China. USA used to have a lot
of goodwill among the ordinary Chinese. But now this is gone as a result of US tariffs,
sanctions, and its support for separatism in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Now, the Chinese will be
as motivated as the Russians to do their best at promoting their interests at the expense of
USA. And together with Russia, they have enough people and enough natural resources to do
more than well against USA and its allies.
I think USA could've maintained a lot more influence around the world through goodwill
with ordinary people, than through sanctions, threats, and military attacks. If USA had left
Iraq under Saddam Hussein alone, then Iran wouldn't have had much influence in there. And if
USA had left Iran alone, then the young people there might've already rebelled against their
strict Islamic rule and made their government more friendly with USA.
Doing nothing, except business and trade, would've left USA in a much better position,
than the one USA is in now.
Now USA is bankrupting itself with unsustainable military spending and still falling
behind its competitors. USA might still have the biggest economy in the world in US Dollar
terms. But this doesn't take into account the cost of living and purchasing parity. With
purchasing parity taken into account, China now has a bigger economy than that of USA.
Because internally, they can manufacture and buy a lot more for the same amount of money than
USA can. A lot of US military spending is on salaries, pensions, and healthcare of its
personnel. While such costs in Russia and China are comparatively small. They are spending
most of their money on improving and building their military technology. That's why in the
long run, USA will probably fall behind even more.
The Anglos in the U.S. are not from there and are imposters who are claiming
characteristics and a culture that doesn't belong to them. They're using it as a way
to hide from scrutiny, so you blame "Americans", when its really them. That's why
there's such a huge disconnect between stated values and actions. The values belong to
another group of people, TRUE Americans, while the actions belong to Anglos, who have a
history of aggressive and forced, irrational violence upon innocents.
It's true that ordinary people are often different from their government, including in
Russia, in China, in Iran, in USA, and even in Nazi Germany in the past.
But the people in such a situation are usually powerless and unable to influence their
government. So, their difference is irrelevant in the way their government behaves and
alienates people around the world.
USA is nominally a democracy, where the government is controlled by the people. But in
reality, the people are only a ceremonial figurehead, and the real power is a small minority
of rich companies and individuals, who fund election campaigns of politicians.
That's why for example most Americans want to have universal healthcare, just like all
other developed countries have. But most elected politicians from both major parties won't
even consider this idea, because their financial donors are against it. And if the people are
powerless even within their own country, then outside with foreigners, they have even less
influence.
1. Nation Building? It worked with Germany and Japan, rinse and repeat. So what if it's
comparing apples to antimatter?
2. US won the Cold War? So make the same types of moves made during Reagan adm? The real
reason the Soviet Empire collapsed was because it was a money losing empire while the US was
a money making empire. Just review the money pits they invested in.
3. Corruption? That was your grandfather's time. The US has been restructured. Crime
Syndicate and Feudal templates are the closest. Stagnation and decline economically and
technologically are inevitable.
4. Evaluating the competition is problematic. However perhaps the most backward and
regressive elements in this society are branding themselves as progressive and getting away
with it. That can't work.
That's right. I used to know the guys at Gannet in a major US city. Nice people, but not
technically aware, and politically-philosophically innocent. Naifs. Put on nice parties where
they chatted about their pasts in foreign places entirely unaware of the objective and
obvious exploitation going on right before their eyes.
I might add that the engineering students dread, as a rule, English 1-A, and do,
generally, quite poorly. (My wife used to teach that class)
The result is a nice antipodal bar-bell shaped arrangement whereby neither group sees
reality, but only a simulacrum of one part or another.
In this regard, Yasha Levine > " Weaponizing Fascism for Democracy: The Beginning "
Begins in the DP camps...
I've said before that the plans to nuke USSR were being drawn prior to the Trinity test.
Levine's essay buttresses this quite well, though essentially in background...he says nothing
about the bomb. He doen't have to...
"... What i find truly amazing is that American Zionists still believe crushing Iran is easy enough. Israel, with 8 million jews stuffed in a small country, is nothing more than a carrier battle group marooned on land ..."
The tramp & nutNyahoo machismo show continues to be fun to watch. Both
show off their penis worms as they arrogantly claim they can crush iran. Both the usa and
israel keep banging on the doors and walls of their pissed-off neighbors' houses. That
eventually gets you murdered whether in baltimore or baghdad.
A crushable iran is true if and only if they can mount a full-on nuclear war on Iran.
But such horrendous cheating means all bets are off, and iran's allies will provide the
nukes required to melt down the American homeland too. Nobody, not even Russia and china,
can afford to stay in the sidelines in a nuclear war in the 2020s.
What i find truly amazing is that American Zionists still believe crushing Iran is easy
enough. Israel, with 8 million jews stuffed in a small country, is nothing more than a
carrier battle group marooned on land. Sitting ducks, with nice armor, nukes and all, are
... still sitting ducks. nutNyahoo should ask his technical crew just how few megatons are
needed, or just a few thousand modern missiles are required to transform sitting ducks into
nicely roasted peking ducks.
So a conventional war it is. The usa and israel has exactly zero, zilch and nada chances
of winning a war with iran. The usa keeps forgetting that it is a dying empire with dying
funding value and mental resources. Just like israel which oddly thinks dozens of f-35s
will give it immunity through air superiority. Proof of this fact that iran will win comes
from simply asking american and israeli war experts to go on cnn or the washington post on
how they intend to win a war with iran.
Im sure these expert bloviators will say that it is as easy as winning a naval war
against china, which is capable of launching only 3 new warships in a week. Or an even
easier time against russia, which can launch only a few thousand hypersonic nuke missiles
because its GDP is no bigger than that of texas.
The Pentagon is super slow to adapt and learn. If you understand that
bureaucracy is an ancient organizational structure and that the organizational culture of
the Pentagon is pathologically dysfunctional you could have predicted the moral and
financial bankruptcy of America 15-20 years ago. The "Why?", finally made sense when I
discovered what a sociopath was.
It's about time the US practices what it preachs and start behaving like a normal
country instead of a spoiled narcissistic brat. see more
US military & strategic thought became lazy during the
late days of the Cold War. It mirrored the decline & fall of the foundations of its
opponent, USSR. Post-Cold War, US military & strategic thinking flushed into the sewer.
It was all about maintaining the military as some sort of a social policy jobs program,
operating legacy tech as the mission. And then came the "world-improvers" -- beginning w
the Clinton Admin -- who worked to turn the world into a global "urban renewal" project;
meaning to mirror the success US Big Govt showed in the slums of American cities from sea
to sea. The past 30 yrs of US strategic thinking and related governance truly disgusts me.
see more
Soviet union fall had very different reasons and Soviet military thought was
doing quite well then along with military. Current russian military wonders is completion
of what was started then and not finished earlier because of the disintegration of the
Soviet state. The soviet fall however is extremely regrettable because there was a new way how things can
be done that Soviet union was showing to the world. USA fall long term is a very good thing
because USA is a paragon of how things should be done the old way and basically a huge
parasite. Many negative trends that are afflicting the world were started by USA. Unlimited
individualism and consumerism would be a couple of those. see more
Why does almost every person on Earth feel the need to force others to
bend the knee to their beliefs?
Religious beliefs are what one thinks should be done to promote survival in an
afterlife, political beliefs are what one thinks should be done to promote survival in this
world.
The world would be a far better, more civilized, of world if such beliefs were only
shared on a voluntary basis.
As for individualism, I would rather be free than live in a modern day egalitarian
hunter-gatherer tribe run by modern day psychopathic alpha-males.
That is certainly not a recipe for success. see more
It also mirrors the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It was Emperor
Augustus that decided the costs to further expand the Empire were too great after losing
one (or two?) legions against the Germanic tribes.
The US has reached its greatest extent. We are living through it. The US didn't go forward
into war with Iran twice. The odds of humanity surviving this immense turn of history is
looking better. see more
Frankly, nothing in common. I read this comparison all the
time.
Yes, Augustus decided not to continue along with expansion into Germany after losing 3
Varus legions due to ambush.
But he famously noted that it does not worth to go fishing with golden hook. Basically
speaking, Germany was not worth fighting for. Poor and remote it had nothing to offer. Just
a drain on resources. As long as conquest was moving smoothly it was ok, but after losses
were inflicted Augustus decided it was not worth it.
Roman expansion under augustus was carried mostly to consolidate previous conquests and
create strategical debth along core and strategical provinces also creating linkage.
When enemy far stronger than germans posed resources which made the whole conquest worthy
no amount of resistance saved Dacians and Parthia also almost died under Trajan attack.
Roman policies were adequate and wise. Treaties were respected, allies supported and
benefited. Empire was build around Mediterranean creating good communication and routes
considering obviously limits of that day technology.
Rome did not behave like crazy and did not deliver threats that she could not follow
through. When war was decided upon thorough preparations were taken. Political goals were
achieved. Wars were won. When Adrian considered that empire was overextended in Parthis, he
simply abandoned all conquered territories. Just like that.
Logical calm thinking USA,is not capable of. Rome truly based upon superior military and
diplomacy dominance lasted many centuries. USA few decades. One hit wonder, lucky fool I
would call it. see more
Yes, this is somewhat puzzling. As I said, let's wait and see where it all
develops to, but as Twisted Genius succinctly observed -- Iran now controls tempo because she
has conventional superiority. Anyone who has precision-guided, stand off weaponry in good
numbers will be on top. see more
The old submarine saying is, "There are two kinds of ships; submarines, and
targets." . The new version for land ops is, "There are two kinds of land-based military assets;
precision-guided missiles, and targets." (And per the photos, those Iranian missiles were
quite precise; bulls-eyes.) . Iran and its missiles demonstrated that the entire strategic foundation for US mil presence
in the Middle East is now obsolete. Everything the US would ever want to do there is now
subject to Iran's version of "steel rain." Every runway, hangar, aircraft parking area;
every supply depot or warehouse; every loading pier, fuel site, naval pier. Everything...
is a target. And really... there's no amount of US "airpower" and "tech" than can mitigate
the Iran missile threat. . Meanwhile, related thinking... Iran's true strategic interest is NOT fighting a near-term
war w/ USA. Iran wants US to exit Middle East; and Iran wants to be able to pursue its
nuclear program. Soleimani or no, Iran appears to have its eyeballs fixed on the long-term
goals. see more
The new version for land ops is, "There are two kinds of land-based military assets;
precision-guided missiles, and targets."
Exactly, and Iran has long-range TLAMs in who knows what numbers, That, in its turn,
brings about the next issue of range for Iranian indigenous anti-ship missiles. Not, of
course, to mention the fact of only select people knowing if Russia transferred P-800 Onyx
to Iran She certainly did it for Syria. If that weapon is there--the Persian Gulf and
Hormuz Strait will be shut completely closed and will push out CBGs far into the Indian
Ocean. see more
It is simply pathetic after decades of talking non stop about developments of
anti missiles and huge amounts wasted and nobody is responsible. This is the way capitalism
works.profits is everything and outcomes secondary. Thankfully russia has got soviet
foundation and things so far are working well. I come to think that in our times no serious
industrial processes should be allowed to stay in private hands. Only services and so.e
other simpler stuff under heavy state control to ensure quality. Otherwise profit
orientation will eventually destroy everything like with Boeing.
I know, i already wrote a full scale war scenario in one of
the comments. Iran can destroy all US bases in 2000 km range. But this does not mean that
it can not be bombed back to the stone age, if the US really wishes so. The problem for the
US is the high cost as well as the high debt levels, but it does have the technical
capability to do that after 2 - 3 years of bombing.
Also low yield tactical nukes are designed to lower the treshold of the use of nukes in
otherwise conventional war, producing less international outrage than the megaton city
buster bombs. Why do you think the US is developing them again? Because they would want to
use them in conventional conflicts.
Here btw is Yurasumy, he also says that the US can technically bomb Iran back to the
stone age, but the cost will be too high.
Again--what's the plan and what's the price? Iran HAS Russia's ISR on her side in case
of such SEAD.
Does the United States want to risk lives of thousands of its personnel (not
to speak of expensive equipment) in Qatar, KSA, Iraq. Does Israel want to "get it"?
There
are numbers which describe such an operation (it was. most likely, already planned as
contingency). Immediate question: when was the last time USAF operated in REAL dense ECM
and ECCM environment? I do not count some brushes with minimal EW in Syria.
Russia there
uses only minimally required option, for now. Iran has a truck load EW systems, including
some funny Russian toys which allowed Iran to take control of US UAVs, as an example. As I
say, this is not Iraq and by a gigantic margin. see more
I already said that debt levels do not allow it and the price
would be too high, but yes, the US does have the military capability to destroy Iran. By
conventional means. It is another question that it is not in good fiscal shape. Anyway, US
ballistic missiles (non nuclear armed) will be hard to stop by EW. Even if Iran gets rid of
50 % of incoming TLAMs, the US will keep sending more and more until most infrastructure,
bridges, oil refineries, power plants, factories, ports etc. are destroyed. This is why i
said it would take 2 - 3 years. see more
but yes, the US does have the military capability to destroy Iran. By conventional
means
That is the whole point: NO, it doesn't. Unless US goes into full mobilization mode and
addresses ALL (plus a million more not listed) requirements for such a war which I listed
in the post. Well, that or nukes. see
more
Yurasumy is a pretty good analist and he thinks that they can. I do not
see it for the US being too hard to produce more TLAMS, ICBMs and IRBMs (conventional) to
sustain the effort for 2 years, by that time most iranian infrastructure will be destroyed.
If the fiscal situation allowes it. see more
I don't know who Yarasumy is and what is his background, but unlike him I
actually write books, including on modern warfare. This is not to show off, but I am sure I
can make basic calculations. This is not to mention the fact that even Sivkov agrees with
my points and Sivkov, unlike Yarsumy, graduated Popov's VVMURE, served at subs, then
graduated Kuznetsov Academy, then Academy of the General Staff and served in Main
Operational Directorate (GOU) until retiring in the rank of Captain 1st Rank from the
billet of Combat Planning group. So, I would rather stick to my opinion.
see more
Why do you think that the US can not destroy Iran with IRBMs? Actually this
is their strategy vs China. If they think its viable vs China, then it should be viable vs
Iran too. see more
Because unlike the US, Russia's Air Defenses have a rather
very impressive history of shifting the balance in wars in favor of those who have them,
when used properly. But then I can quote for you a high ranking intelligence officer:
A friend of mine who has expertise in these matters wrote me:
Any air defense engineer with a securityclearance that isn't lying through his teeth
will admit that Russia'sair defense technology surpassed us in the 1950's and we've never
been able to catch up. The systems thy have in place surrounding Moscow make our Patriot
3's look like fucking nerf guns.
Mathematics is NOT there for the United States for a real combined operations war of
scale with Iran. Unless US political class really wants to see people with pitch-forks.
see more
"Mathematics is not there..." . Neither is the industrial base, including supply lines. Not the mines, mills, factories to
produce any significant levels of warfighting materiel such as we're talking about here.
Not the workforce, either. Meanwhile, where are the basic designs for these weps? The years
of lab work, bench tests, pilot specimens & prototypes, the development pipeline? The
contractors to build them? the Tier 2, 3, 4 suppliers? Where are the universities that
train such people as are needed? Where is the political will? Where is the government
coordination? Where is the money? Indeed, every Democrat and probably half the Republicans
who run for office campaign on controlling military spending; not that USA gets all that
much benefit from the current $800 billion per year. see more
You see, here is the difference--I can calculate approximate required force
for that but I don't want to. It is Friday. You can get some basic intro into operational
theory (and even into Salvo Equations) in my latest book. Granted, my publisher fought me
tooth and nail to remove as much match as possible. But I'll give you a hint--appearance of
S-500 on any theater of operations effectively closes it off effectively for any missile or
aircraft operations when deployed in echeloned (multi-layer) AD. see more
O nce in a blue moon an indispensable book comes out making a clear case for sanity in what
is now a post-MAD world. That's the responsibility carried by " The (Real)
Revolution in Military Affairs ," by Andrei Martyanov (Clarity Press), arguably the most
important book of 2019.
Martyanov is the total package -- and he comes with extra special attributes as a top-flight
Russian military analyst, born in Baku in those Back in the U.S.S.R. days, living and working
in the U.S., and writing and blogging in English.
Right from the start, Martyanov wastes no time destroying not only Fukuyama's and
Huntington's ravings but especially Graham Allison's childish and meaningless Thucydides Trap
argument -- as if the power equation between the U.S. and China in the 21stcentury could be
easily interpreted in parallel to Athens and Sparta slouching towards the Peloponnesian War
over 2,400 years ago. What next? Xi Jinping as the new Genghis Khan?
(By the way, the best current essay on Thucydides is in Italian, by Luciano Canfora ("
Tucidide: La Menzogna, La Colpa, L'Esilio" ). No Trap. Martyanov visibly relishes defining the
Trap as a "figment of the imagination" of people who "have a very vague understanding of real
warfare in the 21st century." No wonder Xi explicitly said the Trap does not exist.)
Martyanov had already detailed in his splendid, previous book, "Losing Military Supremacy:
The Myopia of American Strategic Planning," how "American lack of historic experience with
continental warfare" ended up "planting the seeds of the ultimate destruction of the American
military mythology of the 20thand 21stcenturies which is foundational to the American decline,
due to hubris and detachment of reality." Throughout the book, he unceasingly provides solid
evidence about the kind of lethality waiting for U.S. forces in a possible, future war against
real armies (not the Taliban or Saddam Hussein's), air forces, air defenses and naval
power.
Do the Math
One of the key takeaways is the failure of U.S. mathematical models: and readers of the book
do need to digest quite a few mathematical equations. The key point is that this failure led
the U.S. "on a continuous downward spiral of diminishing military capabilities against the
nation [Russia] she thought she defeated in the Cold War."
In the U.S., Revolution in Military
Affairs (RMA) was introduced by the late Andrew Marshall, a.k.a. Yoda, the former head of
Net Assessment at the Pentagon and the de facto inventor of the "pivot to Asia" concept. Yet
Martyanov tells us that RMA actually started as MTR (Military-Technological Revolution),
introduced by Soviet military theoreticians back in the 1970s.
One of the staples of RMA concerns nations capable of producing land-attack cruise missiles,
a.k.a. TLAMs. As it stands, only the U.S., Russia, China and France can do it. And there are
only two global systems providing satellite guidance to cruise missiles: the American GPS and
the Russian GLONASS. Neither China's BeiDou nor the European Galileo qualify – yet
– as global GPS systems.
Then there's Net-Centric Warfare (NCW). The term itself was coined by the late Admiral
Arthur Cebrowski in 1998 in an
article he co-wrote with John Garstka's titled, "Network-Centric Warfare – Its Origin and
Future."
Deploying his mathematical equations, Martyanov soon tells us that "the era of subsonic
anti-shipping missiles is over." NATO, that brain-dead organism (copyright Emmanuel Macron)
now has to face the supersonic Russian P-800 Onyx and the Kalibr-class M54 in a "highly hostile
Electronic Warfare environment." Every developed modern military today applies Net-Centric Warfare
(NCW), developed by the Pentagon in the 1990s.
Rendering of a future combat systems network. (soldiersmediacenter/Flickr, CC BY 2.0,
Wikimedia Commons)
Martyanov
mentions in his new book something that I learned on my visit to Donbass in March 2015: how
NCW principles, "based on Russia's C4ISR capabilities made available by the Russian military to
numerically inferior armed forces of the Donbass Republics (LDNR), were used to devastating
effect both at the battles of Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo, when attacking the cumbersome Soviet-era
Ukrainian Armed Forces military."
No Escape From the Kinzhal
Martyanov provides ample information on Russia's latest missile – the hypersonic
Mach-10 aero-ballistic Kinzhal, recently tested in the Arctic.
Crucially, as he explains, "no existing anti-missile defense in the U.S. Navy is capable of
shooting [it] down even in the case of the detection of this missile." Kinzhal has a range of
2,000 km, which leaves its carriers, MiG-31K and TU-22M3M, "invulnerable to the only defense a
U.S. Carrier Battle Group, a main pillar of U.S. naval power, can mount – carrier fighter
aircraft." These fighters simply don't have the range.
The Kinzhal was one of the weapons announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin's
game-changing March
1, 2018 speech at the Federal Assembly. That's the day, Martyanov stresses, when the real
RMA arrived, and "changed completely the face of peer-peer warfare, competition and global
power balance dramatically."
Top Pentagon officials such as General
John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have admitted on the record there are "no
existing countermeasures" against, for instance, the hypersonic, Mach 27 glide vehicle Avangard
(which renders anti-ballistic missile systems useless), telling the U.S. Senate Armed Services
Committee the only way out would be "a nuclear deterrent." There are also no existing
counter-measures against anti-shipping missiles such as the Zircon and Kinzhal.
Any military analyst knows very well how the Kinzhal destroyed a land target the size of a
Toyota Corolla in Syria after being launched 1,000 km away in adverse weather conditions. The
corollary is the stuff of NATO nightmares: NATO's command and control installations in Europe
are de facto indefensible.
Martyanov gets straight to the point: "The introduction of hypersonic weapons surely pours
some serious cold water on the American obsession with securing the North American continent
from retaliatory strikes."
Kh-47M2 Kinzhal; 2018 Moscow Victory Day Parade. (Kremilin via Wikimedia Commons)
Martyanov is thus unforgiving on U.S. policymakers who "lack the necessary tool-kit for
grasping the unfolding geostrategic reality in which the real revolution in military affairs
had dramatically downgraded the always inflated American military capabilities and continues to
redefine U.S. geopolitical status away from its self-declared hegemony."
And it gets worse: "Such weapons ensure a guaranteed retaliation [Martyanov's italics] on
the U.S. proper." Even the existing Russian nuclear deterrents – and to a lesser degree
Chinese, as paraded recently -- "are capable of overcoming the existing U.S. anti-ballistic
systems and destroying the United States," no matter what crude propaganda the Pentagon is
peddling.
In February 2019, Moscow announced the completion of tests of a nuclear-powered engine for
the Petrel cruise missile. This is a subsonic cruise missile with nuclear propulsion that can
remain in air for quite a long time, covering intercontinental distances, and able to attack
from the most unexpected directions. Martyanov mischievously characterizes the Petrel as "a
vengeance weapon in case some among American decision-makers who may help precipitate a new
world war might try to hide from the effects of what they have unleashed in the relative safety
of the Southern Hemisphere."
Hybrid War Gone Berserk
A section of the book expands on China's military progress, and the fruits of the
Russia-China strategic partnership, such as Beijing buying $3 billion-worth of S-400 Triumph
anti-aircraft missiles -- "ideally suited to deal with the exact type of strike assets the
United States would use in case of a conventional conflict with China."
Beijing parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic, October 2019.
(YouTube screenshot)
Because of the timing, the analysis does not even take into consideration the arsenal
presented in early October at the Beijing parade celebrating the 70thanniversary of the
People's Republic.
That includes, among other things, the "carrier-killer" DF-21D, designed to hit warships at
sea at a range of up to 1,500 km; the intermediate range "Guam Killer" DF-26; the DF-17
hypersonic missile; and the long-range submarine-launched and ship-launched YJ-18A anti-ship
cruise missiles. Not to mention the DF-41 ICBM – the backbone of China's nuclear
deterrent, capable of reaching the U.S. mainland carrying multiple warheads.
Martyanov could not escape addressing the RAND Corporation, whose reason to exist is to
relentlessly push for more money for the Pentagon – blaming Russia for "hybrid war" (an
American invention) even as it moans about the U.S.'s incapacity of defeating Russia in each
and every war game. RAND's war games pitting the U.S. and allies against Russia and China
invariably ended in a "catastrophe" for the "finest fighting force in the world."
Martyanov also addresses the S-500s, capable of reaching AWACS planes and possibly even
capable of intercepting hypersonic non-ballistic targets. The S-500 and its latest middle-range
state of the art air-defense system S-350 Vityaz will be operational in 2020.
His key takeway: "There is no parity between Russia and the United States in such fields as
air-defense, hypersonic weapons and, in general, missile development, to name just a few fields
– the United States lags behind in these fields, not just in years but in generations
[italics mine]."
All across the Global South, scores of nations are very much aware that the U.S. economic
"order" – rather disorder – is on the brink of collapse. In contrast, a
cooperative, connected, rule-based, foreign relations between sovereign nations model is being
advanced in Eurasia – symbolized by the merging of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the NDB (the BRICS bank).
The key guarantors of the new model are Russia and China. And Beijing and Moscow harbor no
illusion whatsoever about the toxic dynamics in Washington. My recent conversations with top
analysts in Kazakhstan last month and in Moscow last week once again stressed the futility of
negotiating with people described – with overlapping shades of sarcasm – as
exceptionalist fanatics. Russia, China and many corners of Eurasia have figured out there are
no possible, meaningful deals with a nation bent on breaking every deal.
Indispensable?
No: Vulnerable
Martyanov cannot but evoke Putin's speech to the Federal Assembly in February 2019, after
the unilateral Washington abandonment of the INF treaty, clearing the way for U.S. deployment
of intermediate and close range missiles stationed in Europe and pointed at Russia:
"Russia will be forced to create and deploy those types of weapons against those regions
from where we will face a direct threat, but also against those regions hosting the centers
where decisions are taken on using those missile systems threatening us."
Translation: American Invulnerability is over – for good.
In the short term, things can always get worse. At his traditional, year-end presser in
Moscow, lasting almost four and a half hours, Putin stated that Russia is more than ready to
"simply renew the existing New START agreement", which is bound to expire in early 2021: "They
[the U.S.] can send us the agreement tomorrow, or we can sign and send it to Washington." And
yet, "so far our proposals have been left unanswered. If the New START ceases to exist, nothing
in the world will hold back an arms race. I believe this is bad."
"Bad" is quite the euphemism. Martyanov prefers to stress how "most of the American elites,
at least for now, still reside in a state of Orwellian cognitive dissonance" even as the real
RMA "blew the myth of American conventional invincibility out of the water."
Martyanov is one of the very few analysts – always from different parts of Eurasia --
who have warned about the danger of the U.S. "accidentally stumbling" into a war against
Russia, China, or both which is impossible to be won conventionally, "let alone through the
nightmare of a global nuclear catastrophe."
Is that enough to instill at least a modicum of sense into those who lord over that massive
cash cow, the industrial-military-security complex? Don't count on it.
* * *
Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong
Kong-based Asia Times . His latest book is
"
2030 ." Follow him on Facebook .
The Congress been on a MIC spending spree for anti ballistic missile defense since Reagan
wanted Star Wars. Today Trump wants Space Force. One and the same. Perhaps MOSGA. Make Outer
Space Great Again? So what is Russia to do? It is the oldest of military equations we have
not been using at all. That equation states that an offensive or defensive weapon system will
ultimately fail if there is a cheaper counter measure that neutralizes it. ABM technology is
hard and expensive. Making missiles faster is cheap and also effective.
But our military has never given a crap about making sense about anything it spends
trillions of dollars on. Most of these massive programs are white elephants and will never
deliver the promises they make. Especially the ABM systems. Russia could have saved the fast
missiles since our systems only are able to shoot down slow ones about 25% of the time under
tightly controlled test parameters that are designed to provide the optimal conditions that
enable a successful intercept.
I really think everyone in the military knows this is a fools errand but we just have to
keep paying it forward to future budgets with bigger allocations for nonsense.
The scariest part is our Congress and President are getting stupider by the day. They
really may actually feel they can rely on this "protection" and remain safe. If that really
takes hold then the likelihood of a first strike grows by leaps and bounds. That is why
Russia has to launch all the new scary weapons. It is because our brain dead government is
not afraid of mere ten megaton thermonuclear bombs any more.
Walter , December 22, 2019 at 19:32
The statement> "One of the staples of RMA concerns nations capable of producing
land-attack cruise missiles, a.k.a. TLAMs. As it stands, only the U.S., Russia, China and
France can do it"
May not be true. Use searchterm "the 5000 dollar cruise missile" or "New Zealand man
'building cruise missile in garage'
Withal, anybody can build a fairly good cruise missile, with a range near 500 miles. The
gizmo to make it effective is another matter. And it is a stupid thing to build. Do it and
get caught – you won't need a retirement plan. It's still easy.
Drew Hunkins , December 22, 2019 at 16:38
Martyanov's "Losing Military Supremacy" was spectacular. I have it on my bookshelf with
vast passages highlighted and underlined.
Cat , December 22, 2019 at 15:58
The world will eventually witness WW3 as Russia, China and U.S. (which is currently
working on at least six different hypersonic programs/projects) are developing hypersonic
weapons and the supremely capable USAF being already fully primed to use dial-a-yield B61
tactical nukes supposedly safe to civilians on the other two (Russia and China).
ttshasta , December 22, 2019 at 15:25
That the US outspends others does not directly connote superiority.
Was it not apx. $200M
in overcharges by Halliburton for meals not delivered and fuel overcharges in Iraq?
How many false test results and double billings are there, we may never know.
And what of the F35, it was designed by Congress to have parts sourced from 50 states
guaranteeing passage. The result; so many bells and whistles it needs constant maintanence,
and its anti radar coating may melt at top speed.
As well in hurricane Michael in Florida 22 of 55 F22s were not flown to safety in Ohio and
endured the hurricane. Apparently the F22 also spends 49% of it's time in maintenance.
Of course we. need defense, but with accountability. Look up Catherine Austin Fitts and
missing money, the Pentagon's black hole of a budget is staggering.
John Drake , December 22, 2019 at 14:21
Very interesting!!!
I look at the Pentagon budget as a warped economic stimulus plan considering how many of
their exotic weapons are lemons: the F-35, the USS Gerald Ford which six years after
launching is still not fully ready to deploy, etc. etc. This organization can't even complete
a complete audit-or is it they don't dare.
They make sure their vendors are in all 50 states so any time a congress critter votes
against a defense budget, he/she votes against jobs in that state.
jo6pac , December 22, 2019 at 11:06
Thanks PE as you are an interesting read for sure. Thanks for the link to Andrei Martyanov
site.
This is capitalism at its best. Selling the world a delusional reality. What if I told you
these weapons are already obsolete? The real issue being who has more highly advanced
technology that's being held from public knowledge and what they're going to use it
towards.
Anna , December 22, 2019 at 19:41
Genuine capitalism demands expertise, technical, scientific, et cet., as well as an
adherence to the unforgiving rules of responsibility. Instead, the US "deciders" are mired in
incompetence and sycophancy.
The stunning story of the Boeing 737 MAX plane tells it all, including the total lack of
responsibility in the highest echelons of the "deciders."
SteveK9 , December 22, 2019 at 08:25
If China and Russia want to fight the American Empire, missiles are not going to be the
way. I suppose they have to keep building up conventional forces, but the idea that there
could be a long-term conventional war between the US and either Russia or China, seems
fanciful nuclear weapons. America's main weapon now is the control of international finance
through the dollar and the use of the dollar in sanctions, arming proxies, paying fifth
columnists. Those are the avenues that Russia and China have to block, if they want to loosen
America's hold on the World. Trump is helping quite a bit.
Rob , December 23, 2019 at 11:13
Nailed it. Both Russia and China have pursued advanced weaponry as a deterrent against
U.S. aggression, not for the sake of fighting a conventional war. The message being sent to
the U.S. and its allies is that there will be a heavy price to pay both at home and abroad
for hostile military threats or actual attacks.
Skip Scott , December 22, 2019 at 08:09
For pennies on the dollar, Russia and China have military superiority over us. It is the
end of Empire, but there is no getting through to our thickheaded emperors. We have no choice
but to quit insisting on our "exceptionalism", and wage peace. All the money and manpower
wasted on our 800+ military bases and bloated weapons programs could feed the world, educate
our children, and transform our infrastructure into a new model of sustainability. Hubris and
entrenched power structures must be overcome if we are to survive as a species.
It is time for the latte sippers to wake up and insist on real change or their last view
of the world will be mushroom clouds out the window from their stools in Starbucks. Corporate
sponsored warmonger from column B will not suffice.
Walter , December 22, 2019 at 07:17
Speaking from History Walter observed that "all war originates from Domestic
interests".
Mikhail Alexandrov (expert) says> " One can break through air defenses only as a result
of a massive attack operation. This can be done by concentrating aviation into massive fire
support." (Pravda)
"As soon as we can see the concentration of American aircraft on airfields in Europe
– they cannot reach us in any other way – we will simply destroy those airfields
by launching our medium-range ballistic missiles at those targets. Afterwards, our troops
will go on offensive in the Baltic direction and take control of the entire Baltic territory
within 48 hours. NATO won't even have time to come to its senses – they will see a very
powerful military buildup on the borders with Poland. Then they will have to think whether
they should continue the war. As a result, all this will end with NATO losing the Baltic
States,"
Not exactly a watered-down view, eh? See also >" According to The National Interest, a
B-52 bomber of the US Air Force practiced an attack on the Kaliningrad region in March of
this year ."
This is an explicit statement by Russia – fire on opposing forces prior in time
– an error Stalin made was to not trust the intel. Russia, it seems, designs to avoid
that mistake the next time the nazis concentrate force.
Donald Duck , December 22, 2019 at 04:51
There was an old song British soldiers used to sing in the trenches of Flanders and France
during WW1.
It went something like this:
'Hush, here comes a whizzbang (German artillery)
Hush, here comes a whizzbang
Come on you solider boys
Get down those stairs
Into your dug out
And say your prayers
Hush here comes a whizzbang
And its headed straight for you
And you'l see all the wonders of no-man's land
When that whizzbang hits you.
Now with my amendments:
Hush here comes a Zircon
Hush here comes a Zircon
Come on you neo-cons
And get down those stairss
Into your fall-out shelters
And say your prayers
Hush here comes a Zircon
And its headed straight for you
And you'll see all the wonders
Of a post nuclear apoclypse
When the Zircon hits you.
A
curious , December 22, 2019 at 00:05
@Jeff
"The Culture of Defeat by Wolfgang Scheivelbusch, posits that in the future wars will be won
when the opposing entity's economy is destroyed or at least seriously damaged"
China has the capability and the will to play the long game in not capitulating to the
demands of the US. The current trade wars initiated and used by the US to threaten China's
independently minded progress is only party due to the trade deficit between the two
countries. The real reason the US is so belligerent is that China successfully developing
socialist based political system which is exposing the deep failures and lack of people
oriented capitalistic system. Once the US population wakes up the this fact it will spell
doom for those wealthy oligarchs ruling the US who want to keep their "gravy" train rolling.
They know their time is running out.
Jeff Harrison , December 22, 2019 at 21:32
Oh, I agree completely that the US is still fighting the socialism vs capitalism wars of
the early 20th century. A form of socialism is the only sensible approach. But, as Nicolas
Van Rijn (see Poul Anderson's Trader to the Stars) puts it: Oh, Governments they come and
they go but greed goes on forever. But as for your thought that everybody will rise up and
hang the oligarchs by the heels from the nearest light pole? Better hope not. We know what
that looks like. It was the great communist wave before and after WWII. The reason it was so
effective in Cuba is that Castro had all the oligarchs still in the country shot.
CitizenOne , December 21, 2019 at 23:55
Cruise missiles deployed by the US do not depend on GPS information to find their targets.
They fly by internal guidance that cannot be blocked or jammed or interfered with in any way.
There is nothing else I can say other than destroying satellites or radars or even
obliterating land targets such that they are unrecognizable will have no (zero) effect on a
US counter strike by nuclear cruise missiles that will be highly lethal to the Russians. The
triad of US defenses is based on an unstoppable and completely independent model based on
unalterable and insurmountable attack strategies. If the Russians or the Chinese try to wage
a preemptive strike they will need to defeat so many invincible technologies that the task
becomes impossible. The US is also playing catch up with intermediate range nukes which the
Russians long ago abandoned the treaty prohibiting these weapons. Intermediate Nukes pose the
greatest danger for the human race since the time from launch to impact is short. That is
what this article announces as an unstoppable threat but it it is not a post MAD World we
live in. We live in a current MAD world where Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is still
healthy and a world where the US can still inflict extinction on any nation that chooses to
launch a preemptive nuclear strike on the US. Just because the Russians chose to abandon the
anti nuclear treaties does not mean they have an edge. The US has followed suit and has
nullified the various treaties banning intermediate nuclear armaments and has begun
testing.
There can be little doubt that the nuclear armaments of the USA arrayed across multiple
weapons platforms that use technology immune to interference by any known or unknown
technology are prepared to launch a counter strike which will effectively annihilate the
nation or nations that choose to use a first strike option no matter what the technology they
employ to use for their advantage.
Hyper sonic nuclear weapons developed by various nations may be a threat but there are
enough missiles left in place to defeat this threat. The US will also develop the same
weapons.
If North Korea were ever to launch nuclear tipped missiles it would be obliterated. If
Russia were ever to do the same it would be obliterated. If China were ever to do the same it
would be obliterated.
So what is the point of the author threatening that the US will be obliterated by new
technology when the defenses the US uses rely on old tech and unstoppable means to retaliate?
Who cares about whether we can survive a first strike?
What matters is that we can mount a credible deterrence by a counter strike that will
obliterate the enemy. That has not changed in the present power balance. The United States
maintains the ability to mount a lethal blow to any nation that tries to attack it with
nuclear weapons. Hyper sonic weapons and Russians loud announcements that they have the upper
hand just amount to nothing. The facts are that even if the US was obliterated we would still
have the means to obliterate Russia.
That will keep the balance of MAD in place and also renders the article useless and devoid
of any useful information.
Nobody wants nuclear war. But if there is nuclear war then we must and will win. That is
the proposition of the US government and it is also a vision that we Americans need to
support.
Lawrence Magnuson , December 23, 2019 at 13:16
"But if there is nuclear war then we must and will win." I thought you, elsewhere in your
panegyric, conceded Mutual Assured Destruction?
Donald Duck , December 23, 2019 at 14:01
"Nobody wants nuclear war. But if there is nuclear war then we must and will win. That is
the proposition of the US government and it is also a vision that we Americans need to
support."
"Nobody wants nuclear war."
Really, so who moved NATO right up to Russia's western frontiers and parked there military
hardware there? Who revoked the INF treaty? Who is using Ukraine and Georgia as battering
rams and forward attack bases – The same goes for Poland and Romania where the US has
stationed or is stationing Intermediate Range Missiles. How would you like the Russians doing
likewise in Mexico and Canada. This is the Cuban crisis in reverse.
Nobody wants nuclear war! You called have fooled me. Your neo-con lunatics seem to be
gagging for one. And BTW you won't win such a war, nobody will. And that my friend is the
cold logic of the age, accept for your demented neo-cons.
TimN , December 23, 2019 at 15:09
So, supporting the destruction of all life is something "we" need to support? A nuclear
war can't be won, sonny, and insisting "we" to support total destruction . There's something
wrong with you.
NoOneYouKnow , December 23, 2019 at 15:51
Sure, except Obama embarked on a $1.5 trillion plan to modernize the US's nuclear arsenal
to make it "more usable." So if anyone is looking to start a nuclear war, it's the US.
LJ , December 23, 2019 at 18:11
@ CitizenOne
It seems to me that what this essay and the Russian advertising their new technology is to
ensure that MAD is still in place, as US has been 'updating' its nuclear arms in an attempt
to promote a nuclear war that is survivable.
You make the classic US mistake of assuming that North Korea, Russia, China etc are
interested in and possibly planning nuclear pre-emptive strikes against the USA. In my
opinion, it is much more likely to be the US that initiates nuclear war, and these weapons
are developed to ensure that US policy makers realise that, as you say, "The facts are that
even if the US was obliterated we would still have the means to obliterate Russia." –
if Russia/China/etc are obliterated, they still have the means to obliterate the USA.
I hope you are right that o one wants nuclear war, because it is doubtful many of us in
any country would survive it!
Dick , December 21, 2019 at 22:39
The problem with the US is the military, Congress, and the President, perhaps even most
Americans, believe their own propaganda. Belief in one's exceptionalism leads to hubris,
which leads to arrogance leading one to overestimate their capabilities and underestimating
the capabilities of one's adversary; this is always fatal.
"The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself" – Jane
Addams
Jeff Harrison , December 21, 2019 at 18:44
Ah, Pepe, you are always a fascinating read. The United States has been foolishly chasing
diminishing returns in military hardware that have a cost that is looking asymptotic. The
actual military hardware may well become, like the medieval castle, irrelevant. One of the
more fascinating books I've read recently, The Culture of Defeat by Wolfgang Scheivelbusch,
posits that in the future wars will be won when the opposing entity's economy is destroyed or
at least seriously damaged. The cold war ended when the old SovU had their economy collapse
when they tried to keep up with the US's profligate war spending capability. Actual defense
has, historically and traditionally, been cheaper than offense. Both Russia and China have an
advantage – they are really only interested in defense; they are no longer interested
in conquering the world, unlike the US which still seeks global hegemonic status. Indeed, a
relatively small investment by Russia and China is causing the US to spend huge sums of money
in response.
Of late the US has been using its economic power in the form of the status of our currency
and the need for countries and companies to keep assets on deposit in the US where the US can
readily steal them based on illegitimate legalities. When the petro-dollar finally dies, the
US will be substantially poorer. People have to borrow US $s to trade oil even if the buyer
is India and the seller Iran and the US makes interest on every one of those loans. And it
wasn't even our oil! I predict that this latest cold war will end when enough countries are
buying and selling oil in national currencies and not the US $, when countries start to hold
fewer and fewer US$s for national reserves, and when international businesses shun American
products for fear that they won't be able to export them. Either that or, given our existing
$23T in debt with the rest of our military spending will leave us trying to borrow more money
than the world has.
Moi , December 22, 2019 at 01:46
Conventional warfare seems to depend on which nation has the greatest industrial output.
On that premise the US has already lost to China.
Perhaps that's why the US is taking warfare to space. The new frontier is hi-tech and,
because no one else is really doing it yet, it is asymmetrical not conventional.
Anna , December 22, 2019 at 12:39
The first shoots of global spring: "Russia, China Sign Deal To Settle All Trade In
Respective Currencies And Drop Bilateral Use Of US Dollars" See:
russia-briefing.com/news/russia-china-sign-deal-settle-trade-respective-currencies-drop-bilateral-use-us-dollars.html/
John Drake , December 22, 2019 at 14:05
Good analysis, however the Soviet economy never collapsed though it was weak. Gorbachev
ended it trying to transition to a Scandinavian style socialism. Then he got ousted and
Yeltsin allowed a hundred mostly American neo-liberal economic advisers in to supervise his
selling off of state assets along with "liberalization". It was the neo-liberal reforms and
predatory raiding that wiped out the Russian economy, twice, ushering in the economic and
social malaise of the early '90's.
Who was behind that: Bill Clinton. He can take credit for not only wrecking the US economy
with his banking deregulation, but the Russian economy as well. And his wife is even
worse.
Bob Van Noy , December 23, 2019 at 10:47
(In response to John Drake) Yes, John Drake and Clinton's program is well described in F.
William Engdahl's book "Manifest Destiny".
They poisoned with the USA with Russophobia for decades to come, and that really increases
the risk of nuclear confrontation, which would wipe out all this jerks, but also mass of innocent
people.
Notable quotes:
"... The only way to prevent it, IMHO, is having a Western public shifting just 5 % of their "breads and circuses" paradigm to that issue. Just 5. Not holding my breath I am afraid. ..."
"... Which proves the main point of mine: access to information means shit in the real world of power play. Sheeple didn't care then; they care even less now (better distractions). ..."
Sooner or later you'll have this, IMHO: Reaction time 7 minutes . You know,
decision-making time to say "launch" or not. The decision-maker in the White House, Downing
Street and Elysees Palace either a geriatric or one of this new multiracial breed. Just think
about those people
Add to that the level of overall expertise by the crews manning those systems, its
maintenance etc. Add increased automation of some parts of the launch process with
hardware/software as it's produced now (you know, quality control etc.).
It will take a miracle not to have that launch sooner or later. Not big, say .80 KT. What
happens after that is anybody's guess. Mine, taking the second point from the fourth
paragraph .a big bang.
The only way to prevent it, IMHO, is having a Western public shifting just 5 % of
their "breads and circuses" paradigm to that issue. Just 5.
Not holding my breath I am afraid.
@peterAUS The rational actor false supposition has it that the biologics can't be used
because they don't recognize friend from foe.
Rational actors? Where? Anthrax via the US mail.
One rational actor point of view is that you have to be able to respond to anything.
Anything. In a measured or escalating response. Of course biologics are being actively
pursued to the hilt. Just like you point out about Marburg.
But, the view from above is that general panic in the population cannot be allowed, and so
all biologics have to be down played. "of course we would never do anything like that, it
would be insane to endanger all of humanity". Just like nukes. So professors pontificate
misdirection, and pundits punt.
So don't expect real disclosure, or honest analysis. "We only want the fear that results
in more appropriations. Not the fear that sinks programs." Don't generate new Church
commissions. Hence the fine line. some fear yes, other fears, no.
Well Washington D.C.
Hahahahaha sorry, couldn't resist.
So don't expect real disclosure, or honest analysis.
I don't.
But I also probably forgot more about nuclear war than most of readers here will ever
know. And chemical, when you think about it; had a kit with atropine on me all the time in
all exercises. We didn't practice much that "biologics" stuff, though. We knew why, then.
Same reason for today. Call it a "stoic option" to own inevitable demise.
Now, there is a big difference between the age of those protests I mentioned and today.
The Internet. The access to information people, then, simply didn't have.
Which proves the main point of mine: access to information means shit in the real
world of power play. Sheeple didn't care then; they care even less now (better
distractions).
Well, they will care, I am sure. For about ..say in the USA ..several hours, on
average.
We here where I am typing from will care for "how to survive the aftermath" .. for two
months.Tops.
but if you take away still viable American aerospace, automotive and pharmaceutical
industries among very few others, you will find a wasteland of financial speculations and
selling the snake oil
Lovely takes, Andrei. The people that need to read you see your name and immediately retort,
"Agent for Putin", Washington Post-style. Gets them off the hook from thinking because after
all, college deliberately taught them NOT to think. Most of the kids, they're hopeless. They're
hopeless idiots, they know nothing of the Constitution, they think all is normal. And they were
fleeced by the academics that dumbed them down. Meanwhile, we have in effect, been selling each
other hamburgers (services) for the past 50 years. Also, they've been selling the oil and gas
right out from under our feet overseas and putting THAT in their pockets even as we pay a world
price for gasoline and finished product. Every other country that produces crude gets a
discount. Not us. To steal a quote from a movie I watched once, they struck oil under our
garden and all we get is dead tomatoes. Our society is hollowed out, depraved, the women
becoming more and more hideous, all the institutions that held us together, deliberately
broken. decay everywhere.
As for the military? A reflection of our society. When I went into the Navy in 1975, it was
Stars and Stripes and we served in large part for Mom, Apple Pie and Chevrolet.
Today it is clear that the Stars and Stripes should be dollar signs over a defense
contractor logo. The rest? From where I sit today, for most kids, Mom is a divorced slut, Apple
Pie is a turd in a wax paper wrapper and Chevrolet is a bent shit can from China. This isn't a
society I'd defend as a nation worth defending. The feminists sit on their fat, comfortable
asses, made such on the labors of us White guys and they declare their hatred. Only a moron or
a kid that needs a shot at a job or trade or gets a kick out of airplanes or such joins. Our
women in general aren't worth defending on the streets or the world. Not in the Blue cities,
they are hideous. Take care of your own wman and kids and community and hell with the rest.
There's no draft, the society mostly hates Vets, so it isn't for country most serve. It's to
grab something, from a trade, to a pilot's license. A military based on that has no staying
power. And our corruptions and waste and outright theft in military procurement for shitty
weapons makes us ripe for the taking. And our talent is wasted building shitty weapons and the
second level builds shitty airliners. Can't fly into space? We cannot fly, literally, to
anywhere in the newest build out, the Maxx. And we're depending on the Theranos of Aerospace,
Spacex/Musk to get us to space? Right! Except for the nukes, we're ripe, man.
Andrei, speaking of Musk, how the Hell does he smoke big fat doobies and keep his security
clearance when everyone else in Washington gets fired for getting near the stuff? Queer
privilege? I'm convinced the whole thing with Musk is a shell game. You?
Thanks for your work. Very good stuff, but we can't get those who need it to even look. Our
people are incapable of marching in the streets or even seeing why they should. Kudos to those
who did it to us. They did a fine job. Read More Agree: Andrei Martyanov
Replies:
@Arioch ,
@Andrei Martyanov Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread
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@Frederick V. Reed It has a dangerous set of nukes. The tripwires are and have always
been easy-sinkers like our surface ships. The psychos that run our policy have subs and silos
with missiles with lots of nukes.
It's a dangerous game to consider a dopey thought like that Fred. Bet your ass Russia sees
plenty of military here to defend against. Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, to them it was impossible, we
killed millions. There's enough military here that Israel wants and has harnessed it. In what
universe do you reside Fred? Ah yes, the moon name of Tequila. Fred? Go drink something.
Jesus.
After six years of trials, Russia's 29B6 Konteyner over-the-horizon-radar has
finally become fully operational. According to its chief designer Mikhail Petrov, the radar
is detecting and tracking F-35 jets up to 3000 km away . The radar, located in
Mordovia (receiver) and Nizhny Novgorod Oblast (transmitter), is oriented westwards; Russia
plans to build three
more 29B6 Konteyners for the east, north-west, and south directions.
I hardly ever hear any discussion or outrage about nukes and nuclear war on the site/boards
that I see or visit from time to time, and yet it seems to me to be by far the most pressing
existential threat to all humankind, as well as to the planet
I went searching again for one or two of the scientific studies that I'd seen within the
past few years about global effects of a 'small' nuclear war, and came across a new study.
Surprisingly enough, there have been but a handful of studies in the past 30-40 years!! Yes,
it's true. The appetites of sharks and shark attacks on humans are more studied than nuclear
war and the Fate of the Earth.
In this recent case, a mere 100 nukes exchanged between India and Pakistan would bring
devastation
here's a few for everyone's info. And a new one which I just became aware of, from Fox of
all places:
A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would place the entire planet in jeopardy by
unleashing a "climate catastrophe," according to new research published in Science Advances,
a journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
"A nuclear war between India and Pakistan -- which share a long history of conflicts --
would not only result in 50 to 125 million direct fatalities but could jeopardize the entire
planet, causing sharp drops in global temperatures and precipitation that could devastate the
world's food supply," writes AAAS...
..."They find that if Pakistan attacks urban targets in 2025 with 150-kiloton nuclear
weapons and if India responds with 100-kiloton nuclear weapons, smoke from burning cities
would release 16 to 36 teragrams of black carbon into the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight
and cooling the global surface by 2 to 5°C (3.6 to 9°F).".....global average
precipitation would drop by 15 percent to 30 percent. Additionally, the rate at which plants
store energy as biomass would decline by 15 percent to 30 percent on land and by 5 percent to
15 percent in oceans, a scenario that would threaten mass starvation.
"Russia and the United States still possess by far the most nuclear warheads, at 6,850 and
6,550, respectively.....
If the birthrate is trending down, it is not a crisis for capitalism, but for the
economy.
Actually, Earth added 83 million people to the planet last year.
We are in massive overshoot, in a collapsing ecosystem.
Not a problem, a predicament.
some of the science about nuclear war is presented here at this link, from a 2008 study.
Computer models are much more advanced now, and it would appear that environmental
consequences of even a small nuclear war would be more severe than previously thought
Environmental consequences of nuclear war - Owen B. Toon, Alan Robock, and Richard P.
Turco
A regional war involving 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons would pose a worldwide threat due to
ozone destruction and climate change. A superpower confrontation with a few thousand weapons
would be catastrophic
More than 25 years ago, three independent research groups made valuable contributions to
elaborating the consequences of nuclear warfare.1 Paul Crutzen and John Birks proposed that
massive fires and smoke emissions in the lower atmosphere after a global nuclear exchange
would create severe short-term environmental aftereffects. Extending their work,two of us
(Toon and Turco) and colleagues discovered "nuclear winter," which posited that worldwide
climatic cooling from stratospheric smoke would cause agricultural collapse that threatened
the majority of the human population with starvation.
.....Neither the US Department of Homeland Security nor any other governmental agency in
the world currently has an unclassified program to evaluate the impact of nuclear
conflict.Neither the US National Academy of Sciences, nor any other scientific body in the
world, has conducted a study of the issue IN THE PART 20 YEARS (my emphasis)...
O
ct.
27, 1962, is the date on which we humans were spared extinction thanks to Soviet Navy submarine Captain Vasili
Alexandrovich Arkhipov.
Arkhipov insisted on
following the book on using nuclear weapons. He overruled his colleagues on Soviet submarine B-59, who were readying
a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo to fire at the USS Randolph task force near Cuba without the required authorization from
Moscow.
Communications links with
naval headquarters were down, and Arkhipov's colleagues were convinced WWIII had already begun. After hours of
battering by depth charges from U.S. warships, the captain of B-59, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky, screamed, "We're
going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all -- we will not disgrace our Navy!" But Captain
Arkipov's permission was also required. He countermanded Savitsky and B-59 came to the surface.
Much of this account of
what happened on submarine B-59 is drawn from Daniel Ellsberg's masterful book, "The Doomsday Machine" -- one of the
most gripping and important books I have ever read. Dan explains, inter alia, on pages 216-217 the curious
circumstance whereby the approval of Arkhipov, chief of staff of the submarine brigade at the time, was also
required.
Ellsberg adds that had
Arkhipov been stationed on one of the other submarines (for example, B-4, which was never located by the Americans),
there is every reason to believe that the carrier USS Randolph and several, perhaps all, of its accompanying
destroyers would have been destroyed by a nuclear explosion.
Equally chilling, says Dan:
"The source of this
explosion would have been mysterious to other commanders in the Navy and officials on the ExComm, since no
submarines known to be in the region were believed to carry nuclear warheads. The clear implication on the cause
of the nuclear destruction of this antisubmarine hunter-killer group would have been a medium-range missile from
Cuba whose launch had not been detected. That is the event that President Kennedy had announced on October 22
would lead to a full-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union."
'The Most Dangerous
Moment in Human History'
Historian Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., a close adviser to President John F. Kennedy, later described Oct. 27, 1962, as Black Saturday,
calling it "the most dangerous moment in human history." On that same day, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended an
all-out invasion of Cuba to destroy the newly emplaced Soviet missile bases there. Kennedy, who insisted that former
U.S. Ambassador to Russia Llewelyn Thompson attend the meetings of the crisis planning group, rejected the advice of
the military and, with the help of his brother Robert, Ambassador Thompson, and other sane minds, was able to work
out a compromise with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
As for the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, the president had already concluded that the top military were unhinged Russophobes, and that they deserved
the kind of sobriquet used by Under Secretary of State George Ball applied to them -- a "sewer of deceit." As
Ellsberg writes (in his Prologue, p. 3): "The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first
strike aimed at the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact satellites, and China, would be roughly six hundred million dead. A
hundred Holocausts." And yet the fools pressed on, as in trying to cross "The Big Muddy."
Intelligence Not So
Good
The pre-Cuban-missile
crisis performance of the intelligence community, including Pentagon intelligence, turned out to hugely inept. The
U.S. military, for example, was blissfully unaware that the Soviet submarines loitering in the Caribbean were
equipped with nuclear-armed torpedoes. Nor did U.S. intelligence know that the Russians had already mounted nuclear
warheads on some of the missiles installed in Cuba and aimed at the U.S. (The U.S. assumption on Oct. 27 was that the
warheads had not been mounted.)
It was not until 40 years
later, at a Cuban crisis "anniversary" conference in Havana, that former U.S. officials like Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy learned that some of their key assumptions were dead and
dangerously wrong. (Ellsberg p. 215ff)
Today
the Establishment media has inculcated into American brains that it is a calumny to criticize the "intelligence
community." This is despite the relatively recent example of the concocting of outright fraudulent "intelligence" to
"justify" the attack on Iraq in 2003, followed even more recently, sans evidence, falsely accusing Putin himself of
ordering Russian intelligence to "hack" the computers of the Democratic National Committee. True, the U.S.
intelligence performance on Russia and Cuba in 1962 came close to getting us all killed in 1962, but back then in my
view it was more a case of ineptitude and arrogance than outright dishonesty.
As for Cuba, one of the
most consequential CIA failures was the formal Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) of Sept. 19, 1962, which
advised President Kennedy that Russia would not risk trying to put nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. To a large extent
this judgment was a consequence of one of the cardinal sins of intelligence analysis -- "mirror imaging." That is, we
had warned the Russians strongly against putting missiles in Cuba; they knew the U.S., in those years would not take
that kind of risk; ergo, they would take us at our word and avoid blowing up the world over Cuba. Or so the esteemed
NIE estimators thought.
The Russians, too, were
mirror imaging. Khrushchev and his advisers regarded U.S. nuclear war planners as rational actors acutely aware of
the risks of escalation, who would shy away from ending life immediately for hundreds of millions of human beings.
Their intelligence was not very good on the degree of Russophobia infecting Air Force General Curtis LeMay and others
on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were prepared to countenance hundreds of millions of deaths in order "to end the
Soviet threat." (Ellsberg was there; he provides a first-hand account of the craziness in "The Doomsday Machine.")
Where Did the
Grenade Launchers Go?
I reported for active duty
at Infantry Officers School at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Nov. 3, 1962, six days after the incident. Most of us new
lieutenants had heard about a new weapon, the grenade launcher, and were eager to try it out. There were none to be
found. Lots of other weapons normally used for training were also missing.
After we made numerous
inquiries, the brass admitted that virtually all the grenade launchers and much of the other missing arms and
vehicles had been swept up and carried south by a division coming through Georgia a week or so before. All of it was
still down in the Key West area, we were told. Tangible signs as to how ready the JCS and Army brass were to attack
Cuba, were President Kennedy to have acceded to their wishes.
Had that happened, it is
likely that neither you nor I would be reading this. Yet, down at Benning, there were moans and groans complaining
that we let the Commies off too easy.
Ray McGovern works
with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an
Army infantry/intelligence officer from 1962-64 and later served as Chief of CIA's Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and
morning briefer of the President's Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).
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"airmen were holding an Air Force nuclear missile crew at gunpoint deep in a top-secret bunker on
Okinawa.
The crew had just been ordered to launch the island's missiles at targets in the Soviet Union and
Asia, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was reaching a harrowing climax in October 1962. But an Air
Force launch officer was opposing the order.
The officer sent "two men over there with .45's and [they were] told to shoot anybody who tried to
launch until the situation was resolved so those two men kept that whole crew at bay while we made a
decision of what to do," said John Bordne, a nuclear missile mechanic for the Okinawa-based 873rd
Tactical Missile Squadron who was on duty Oct. 28, 1962."
Coleen Rowley
,
October 30, 2019 at 21:44
Arkhipov was not the only Russian to save the world from nuclear Armageddon.
See this article:
vox.com/2018/9/26/17905796/nuclear-war-1983-stanislav-petrov-soviet-union?fbclid=IwAR3XZREPaiekG2ncpUOUGkzppOqs9102z4pityZtIjvi19tWsHD4CLf3h4s
for a few other cases of Russians who kept their cool during mistaken perceptions when the protocol
would have been to launch nuclear war.
Remembering the time and remembering it was like watching children playing chicken. Remember to0 the
country was ingrained with the belief that mankind could be destroyed. Movies like On the Beach and Dr.
Strangelove(that may not have been the title) made America conscious of the real threat of extinction out
there and equally serious that there might be a Doctor Strangelove near the trigger. So as I and others
watched and read we were torn between fear and the sense that it was unreal. The former Lieutenant Ray
McGovern reminds us it was. And yes, a Russian of all things saved our behinds. Back to game seven of the
World Series.
Lone Wolf
,
October 30, 2019 at 09:55
Mr. Ray McGovern, your article is a ray of light, no pun intended, shining brightly on the heart of
darkness we live in. A MAD rule keeps the clock ticking two minutes to midnight, and there is no hope in
sight of moving it backwards. All for what? Greed and possessiveness. What is the winner going to inherit
after a nuclear war? A nuclear winter? How can they market that? Summer in Venus? Retirement on the moon?
Tanning rooms galore? Just FYI, survivors might not have a skin to tan. The empire is reaching sunset,
and it is threatening to take humanity with it into a long nuclear night mare. We can't let them.
Lone Wolf
PS: A new abnormal: It is still two minutes to midnight – See:
thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/
A Tribute to Vasily Arkhipov (Who Saved the World in October of 1962)
(b. 30 January 1926 d. 19 August 1998)
Vice Admiral, Russian Navy
By Dave Evans
Today, as I sense the earth awakening
Under an umbrella of dueling pear trees,
I inhale the sweet esters of spring
Assuaging all my mortal fears.
So much beauty in a simple flower
Cast away those jaded eyes!
To see the art of a higher power
In the tears the racing clouds cry.
The universe has for many eons labored
To produce a blushing plum,
As the mountains were skillfully chiseled
With the rays of the rising sun.
Ours is a blue green gem hanging in the sky
Home to so many great aspirations,
Of generations gone by and by
Rising above our pitiful lamentations.
And what of our tumultuous history
Frozen in amber teardrop,
We are the offspring of a great mystery
Whose outcome we know not.
The world goes round and round
On this the eve of destruction,
As we are oblivion bound
Unknown actors in a tragic production.
Once before in history we were on the brink
Verily, verily, verily!
We have but one man to thank
Vasily, Vasily, Vasily!
Thank you for preserving Sophia's dream
Beyond the Warmongers' guile,
As the angry Generals screamed
With a blood-lust most vile.
Vasily, you have saved all mankind
We owe you a great debt of gratitude,
As we part the mists of time
And pay homage to your infinitude.
Bless the wake of your fair heart
That gave us our world back,
With the rays of a brand new start
Stopping the final attack!
I wish I could thank you to your face
Vasily my dear friend,
For saving the human race
And to our noble destiny defend!
To say the proper words to thank you
They are indeed hard to find,
As we were trapped in annihilation's queue
You saved all mankind!
elmerfudzie
,
October 29, 2019 at 22:49
Ray, thank you for rewriting the old propaganda story that claimed humanity was saved by JFK s diplomatic
negotiations and unique skills during the Cuban missile crisis. Here's a cut n paste reprint of a few
comments I made a few years ago, regarding the heroism of one, Vice Admiral Vasili Arkhipov and it is
paraphrased here. I wish to pause, take a moment to extend the warmest thanks to Soviet Naval officer,
Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov and his extended family. He, who single handed-ly prevented WW III during
the crisis by refusing to launch a nuclear tipped torpedo into one of our U.S. battle cruisers.
Vice
Admiral Arkhipov, if you can hear us from the grave, we award you the real "Nobel Peace Prize" not a
piece of paper, not a figurine, not a check for one million dollars but a peace prize from our hearts,
from those of us who truly understand, what is meant by military leadership and just how lonely,
unrewarding, that place of authority and decision was for you! The world will NEVER be so lucky again!
Coleen Rowley
,
October 30, 2019 at 21:31
A FB friend filled me in on the following "rest of the story" re Arkhipov who was also on the the
Soviet submarine K-19:
(From Wikipedia) "In July 1961, Arkhipov was appointed deputy commander and therefore executive
officer of the new Hotel-class ballistic missile submarine K-19.[3] After a few days of conducting
exercises off the south-east coast of Greenland, the submarine developed an extreme leak in its
reactor coolant system. This leak led to failure of the cooling system. Radio communications were also
affected, and the crew was unable to make contact with Moscow. With no backup systems, Commander
Zateyev ordered the seven members of the engineer crew to come up with a solution to avoid nuclear
meltdown. This required the men to work in high radiation levels for extended periods. They eventually
came up with a secondary coolant system and were able to keep the reactor from a meltdown. Although
they were able to save themselves from a nuclear meltdown, the entire crew, including Arkhipov, were
irradiated. All members of the engineer crew and their divisional officer died within a month due to
the high levels of radiation they were exposed to. Over the course of two years, fifteen more sailors
died from the after-effects."
Tony
,
October 31, 2019 at 09:44
Yes, but Kennedy was also a big factor.
He was able to resist pressure to invade Cuba and so the Luna tactical nuclear missiles in Cuba
were not used. We owe both Kennedy and Arkhipov a great deal.
now wth the dumbest is president of the usa
remember the usa is only on of 35 independent countries
i worry more than i did in from 1950 to 1963
but i realise it is hard to open any pressure cooker under full pressure
also the now totally useless un is degraded to an puppy of the usa
all the hope we had with the un is not lost i hope they wake and rise up
Stan W.
,
October 29, 2019 at 15:33
I remember those days well as I was on a temporary assignment in Washington, D.C. Nerve-wracking period
in history!
Tony
,
October 29, 2019 at 12:09
It is truly frightening to think of what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had been president at the
time.
He bombed Hanoi at around the time that Soviet premier Kosygin was there!
We need to eliminate nuclear
weapons before they eliminate us. That is the very clear message coming from Ellsberg's book.
Incidentally, the Bay of Pigs was deliberately set up by the CIA to fail. It was in order to force JFK
to invade Cuba.
John Drake
,
October 29, 2019 at 18:55
Good point, it is even more frightening to contemplate if Richard Nixon had defeated Kennedy and was
President then.
Let us not forget that Kennedy refused to follow up war in Laos and Cambodia and had ordered the
withdrawal of 1000 US troops(stymied by the Pentagon) from Vietnam; a precursor to complete
withdrawal.
LBJ immediately reversed the order after JFK's death and then sent in combat troops after an election
in which he promised "I'll not send Amurican(sic) boys to do what Asian boys ought to do for
themselves".
jerry olek
,
October 29, 2019 at 10:53
I remember working on National Estimates in the late 1970s when the Pentagon was still pushing the idea
that we could fight and win a nuclear war with the Soviets. Then CIA director, Stansfield Turner strongly
disagreed with the analysis and successfully convinced people in power not to entertain such an idea. I
believe military and civilian leaders, especially after Chernobyl, have come to realize that nuclear war
would be catastrophic for all participants. But, I am concerned that President Trump does not fully
understand the consequences of using nuclear weapons He supposedly asked in a Pentagon briefing why we
had nuclear weapons if we don't use them.
M Le Docteur Ralph
,
October 29, 2019 at 08:40
Words mean everything.
We always call it the Cuban missile crisis, not the Turkish missile crisis and that betrays our
prejudice.
Meaning that it was perfectly okay for the U.S. Air Force to handover nuclear capable Jupiter missiles
that could reach Moscow to the Italian and Turkish air force to be installed at Bari and Izmir, but when
Khrushchev reacted and installed Soviet missiles in Cuba this created the crisis.
The real origins of this crisis lie in the fact that the real enemy of the U.S. Army was never the Red
Army it was always the U.S. Navy and the US Air Force. The U.S. Army developed the Jupiter missile so
that it would possess its own nuclear deterrent but then lost control of it to the U.S. Air Force.
The U.S. Air Force and its preferred contractors were not missile friendly at the time as they wanted to
build as many bombers as possible and had invented the "bomber gap" to enable this. So given the U.S.
Army's Jupiter program was an anathema to the U.S. Air Force as they represented a potential threat to
the bomber budget, the missiles were parked on Italian and Turkish air force bases with the local air
force being responsible for the missiles (to ensure there would be problems with the Army developed
missiles) and the U.S. Air Force controlling the nuclear warheads.
A brilliant plan, sure to win victory in the war of inter-service rivalry but which failed to take into
account the fact that what the Soviet leadership saw were missiles that could reach Moscow being placed
into the hands of the Italians who had participated in Operation Barbarossa and their traditional enemies
the Turks with whom Russia had fought an endless series of wars and who had so recently facilitated the
Nazi invasion of the USSR by allowing access through the Dardanelles.
In April 1959, the Secretary of the Air Force issued instructions to deploy two Jupiter squadrons to
Italy to be operated by Italian Air Force crews with USAF personnel controlling the arming of the nuclear
warheads. In October 1959, a government-to-government agreement was signed with Turkey and resulted in a
third Jupiter squadron being deployed in and around ?zmir, Turkey. In October 1962 a first flight of
three Jupiter missiles was handed over to control of the Turkish Air Force again with USAF personnel
supposedly controlling the arming of the nuclear warheads.
How are the Soviets to know that the USAF personnel were really in control and an Italian or Turkish
equivalent of General Ripper did not have access to the keys? You cannot overfly with a U2 to find that
out.
Real equivalence in the so-called Cuban missile crisis would be if the Soviet Union had installed
medium-range missiles that could hit Los Angeles, Chicago and New York at a base in Sinaloa Mexico, then
handed over the keys to the missiles to the Mexicans while insisting that everything was hunky-dory
because a Soviet officer with known drug problems had the keys to the nuclear warhead.
Todd Pierce
,
October 29, 2019 at 08:24
Great article Ray! And absolutely necessary for the American people, meaning all of us in this
hemisphere, to know how close millions of us came to being incinerated by the criminality of the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff and their allies in government who saw the Cuban Crisis as an "opportunity" to launch our
own "preemptive" nuclear attack on the USSR, and the JCS willingness to accept a reciprocal attack in
retaliation which would predictably kill at least 20 million people in this hemisphere, as a "fair
exchange" for the hundreds of millions of human beings the US nuclear attack would incinerate in the
USSR. That's how "Mad" the US military was then, and is today, if one reads current doctrine. William R.
Polk was there in the White House as McGeorge Bundy's advisor, and has written of this and told me
details in a lengthy oral history. He tells of how angry at Kennedy the JCS were, so much that he feared
a military coup, as did Kennedy, as explained in this video:
`JFK wanted movie "Seven Days in May" made' [youtube.com/watch?v=fRiZtqVPJ9U]
But Americans have this placid confidence, similar to the "What, me worry" attitude of the Holstein
cows I once dealt with in my youth, even as we would be preparing them for a ride to the stockyards, that
the threat or possibility of nuclear war/accident is a thing of the past, even while we, the US, under
three administrations now, has been hard at work to increase the possibility of some sort of nuclear
conflagration in our lifetimes.
Noah Way
,
October 28, 2019 at 20:09
The Soviets also had atomic artillery which could have been used to repel a US invasion, which would also
have started WW3. The bullet was dodged twice – first by JFK NOT invading, then by Arkhipov by not
allowing the launch of a nuclear torpedo.
As Ray has said, now there are no adults in the room.
SteveK9
,
October 28, 2019 at 17:46
Our military is no less crazy today. Subtext of Putin's March 1, 2018 address on new strategic nuclear
weapons 'nuclear war is unthinkable, so kindly stop thinking about it'.
geeyp
,
October 28, 2019 at 16:27
Those moans and groans weren't just happening in Georgia, Ray.
robert e williamson jr
,
October 28, 2019 at 16:02
Hats off again to Mr. McGovern for calling balls and strikes with uncanny precision .
I'm sure of that moaning and groaning at Ft. Benning seeing as how those folks had no clue to what had
really happened and would have moaned and groaned even had they known. After all Ray it was OCS.
Ray I'm recommending that everyone listen to the interview of Edward Snowden by Joe Rogan. In fact get
a hold of Bill Binney, Tom Drake, J. Kurt Wiebe and Ed Loomis and let them know about it. Some
fascinating stuff for me and it could be a major eye opener for those naive individuals who believe cell
phones in their current configuration are great tools. I'm betting 90% of those who would watch this
would want that, "I own my data not ( the cell phone company name goes here), "button" Snowden talked
about.
I'm I wrong here or can everyone who agrees that the "Orange Apocalypse" could shoot someone on 5th
Avenue and be above prosecution be tried on conspiring to give the " fake potus" dictatorial powers and
removed from office?
Thanks again Ray for your great work
Tennegon
,
October 29, 2019 at 17:50
As for Mr. Snowden, I happened to watch the video, 'Citizenfour', last night on Roku. If you're not
aware of it, it's certainly worth trying to view: citizenfourfilm.com
incontinent reader
,
October 28, 2019 at 14:34
Ray- Great article. I hope those in the Administration and Congress read it- and read Ellsberg's book.
Drew Hunkins
,
October 28, 2019 at 14:05
Now the lines of communication between the Kremlin and Washington are all but severed. Any current or
future U.S. president who merely wants to sit down for two minutes and discuss Russian hockey with Lavrov
will be immediately branded a Putin puppet or Moscow stooge. If we experience a Cuban missile crisis type
scenario today we could all be pulverized into dust thanks to Maddow, Clapper, Brennan, Podesta, NPR,
Fred Hiatt and the other establishment Russophobes in our midst.
This madness must stop.
Hank
,
October 28, 2019 at 19:07
I feel that the unspoken consensus among high CIA officials and warmongering US military brass was
that the Bay of Pigs was a win-win for them, regardless of how it played out. The CIA had to know
Castro's immense popularity among the Cuban population, so long impoverished by American corporations
under Batista. To think that a man like Castro would have to face a "Cuban uprising" when a beachhead
was secured by a small contingent of about 1300 anti-Castro mercenaries(trained by the CIA) is
laughable when looking back. JFK was between a rock and a hard place and he NEVER promised any air
support should this small brigade come under attack by Castro small Cuban air force of a few planes!
He even had to deal with a lying Adlai Stevenson at the UN, who stated that the USA was NOT involved
in the Bay of Pigs attack. That ammunition ship off shore that blew up could easily have been a CIA op
expediting what it really wanted- a crushing and embarrassing defeat for the new President(who wasn't
supposed to be President in the first place- sound familiar?) JFK quickly accepted responsibility for
this defeat but was now intent on paying back those in the CIA who had set him up. Much of what we
think we know about wars is just the "smoke" that comes out of the fire, while the fire generally gets
swept under the rug of "history". Kennedy stood up to the Deep State in the early 60's much like Trump
advertised his intention to during his campaign, but it was certainly easier to convince a gullible
public that "Oswald did it" in 1963 than it would be to set someone up for Trump's assassination
nowadays! Hence, we have the CONSTANT media/Deep State CHARACTER assassination of Trump 24/7.
countykerry
,
October 28, 2019 at 19:58
I completely agree with you DH .
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Russia and Ukraine are topics on all Americans' minds only because the Obama Administration made the collossal mistake of trying
to turn Ukraine into a de facto American base. Under Obama, the US sponsored a coup which put Ukraine under the control of anti-Russian
nationalists. The ultimate goal for the US and the Ukrainian nationalists was to turn Ukraine into a NATO member.
Clearly, the Obama Administration attacked Russia on a geopolitical and geostrategic level. Unsurprisingly, Russia fought back
ferociously, just as the Russian have always done when their existential needs and vital national security interests are threatened.
Consequently, the Ukrainian nationalists have been defeated in war and at the polls in Ukraine. America must now make its exit
from Ukraine in as graceful and organized a way as possible. Nobody wants to see US helicopters fleeing the rooftops of Kiev.
Trump has the right idea about pulling America out of Ukraine. The US should never have been in that country in the first place.
Ukraine is part of Russia's zone of influence. Nothing will ever change that.
"when an experimental nuclear-powered cruise missile exploded during testing along the shores of the White Sea."
Except it wasn't. A damaged nuclear reactor with highly enriched uranium for fuel would still be glowing to this day. Also,
while tragic, seven people dead is less than a pipeline explosion, if that's the worst that can happen, it's pretty safe technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Russia reported radioisotopes for power source (radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs), which makes more sense. RTGs
are used for long term power needs (such as batteries on Voyager spacecraft that are still going strong). That makes them ideal
for robotic sleeper drones (Poseidon/Status 6 types) that will go undetected to the ocean floor and then get activated in the
event of nuclear war.
""The American television channel CNBC recently reported that the test of the Petrel missile near Arkhangelsk was the fifth
in a row, and all five were unsuccessful. Is this an acceptable number of failures for a new project?""
Yes. That's how you learn - by building and testing. Also, I strongly doubt Russian military invites CNBC to every classified
weapons test. Five tests may have been unsuccessful, but there could have been more tests that CNBC doesn't know about.
"but this record illustrates an "emergency situation" and indeed a "failed development process.""
It doesn't. Nuclear powered propulsion is a difficult subject and very few countries can do it successfully. Especially at
small size.
"So, "this missile is only necessary in the circumstance that we and America depart from all arms agreements and beat each
other with missiles until we are blue"
United States is indeed leaving all arms agreements and is preparing for nuclear war.
"The best explanation Gorbachevsky can find for this weapon is "domestic consumption.""
If that's the case, then Gorbachevsky is not well informed.
The reason that Russia will continue to invest in nuclear weapons and their modernization regardless of the cost is that it
is still cheaper than the alternative.
Having a western Army murder and slaughter its way to your capital as it did in 1941 is the one thing you definitely avoid
if you have a viable nuclear deterrance.
For Russia it is the ultimate insurance policy and the threat of a preemptive nuclear strike is the one effective guarantee
against any western power once again launching another invasion against Russia.And is relatively cheap at the price!
They have sufficient numbers of existing nuclear weapons to protect themselves from some imaginary western Army. Where they
need to worry is in their far east that is where the real threat will come from. Spending additional monies on nuclear weapons
is overkill and the money is better spent diversifying the economy.
You overlook that the real issue isn't war or nuclear war, but the stationing of US military assets all along Russia's borders.
If that happens, America will have established coercive influence over Russia. That's because Russia will have to spend untold
billions countering the fleets of American F-35's that are parked only minutes away from the RF's cities and defensive bastions.
That's the kind of stress that the US is trying to impose on Russia. That's why Russia wants the US and NATO out of the former
Soviet Union, and for good reason.
Your remark about Russia's far east comes across as Sinophobia, BTW.
Russian Federation: 146 million, China: 1.4 billion a 10 to 1 advantage in population in a country with little to no natural
resources and little usable open space. Lebensraum has been used many times in the past as a reason to start a war.
As I pointed in another post the irony is that NATO was pretty timid up until 2008 and Putin's first little go at a mini war in
Georgia then invade and annex Crimea followed by fostering war in Donbas. Of course NATO responded to those Russian aggressions
and low and behold we now have Putin pouting about NATO an the US surrounding Russia.
You have missiles in Kaliningrad aimed at Europe same in Sevastopol. The basic problem is that no one trusts Russia and no one
really likes Russia. Putin started this and now he will need to change his tack if he wants the "stress" to start to be relieved.
NATO is a defensive organization and they are deploying in a defensive manner in other NATO countries.
Nuclear propulsion research is by definition diversifying the economy. It is far more high tech than "like" button on Facebook
or whatever passes for "high tech" in Silicon Valley.
Considering the Soviet Union was working on this in the 1970's it really doesn't count as "diversification" in the traditional
economic sense. Why not work with the US, UK, Canada, France on nuclear fusion? That would truly take man kind a lot further than
nuclear powered cruise missiles.
NATO will have to stop expanding into the former USSR before Russia can realistically be expected to work the US, UK, Canada,
and France on nuclear fusion.
Western aggression against Russia must stop. That's step number one towards solving the West vs East problem.
Russia is a part of the ITER project, so it does work with the West in fusion research. As far as Burevestnik goes, i view
it in the same venue as NASA Kilopower type small reactors (or Soviet TOPAZ line). If it is light enough to power a cruise missile,
it is light enough to provide power to spacecraft. This will be very economically important in the near future.
Fair enough regarding the joint study on Fusion. However the nuclear powered cruise missile is for domestic consumption and
to incite the western MSM. It makes little sense to pile more nuclear weapons on top of the existing ones. As the article mentions
there are a lot nuclear reactors that need maintenance in Russia old Soviet era designs that pose a safety risk.
As long as the US is setting up bases in the Baltics and ramping up mililtary aid to Ukraine, and as long as the West is trying
to turn Ukraine into a NATO member, then Russia has no option except to fight back. That means Russia must develop new missiles
and even more destructive WMD's.
American and the Ukrainian nationalists have suffered a humiliating defeat in Donbass. It looks like peace will be made there
on Russian terms, and that the US and its allies will pull out of Ukraine. Upon completion of that retreat, the relationship between
Russia and the West can be reassessed. But not until then.
It is rather ironic that there were no NATO forces in the Baltic states until Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and tried the
same in Donbas. Naturally the countries such as the Baltic states who have experienced Russian/Soviet occupation tend too get
nervous when Putin decides to play war in the neighborhood.
As far as Ukraine the amount of military aid provided by the US, Canada, Poland is relatively small with regard to major arms
systems. The only major arms system is Javelin which is a defensive weapon.
You obviously have little or no knowledge of nuclear weapons and MAD. Russia has plenty of nuclear warheads in fact the most of
any nation on planet Earth.
There are no NATO forces anywhere near the line of contact in Donbas. Any peace accord/deal has nothing to do with the US or NATO
it is between Ukraine and Russia with the pawns being the poor saps called separatists.
The only major arms system is Javelin which is a defensive weapon.
Javelins can be used to support offensive operations. They can serve to neutralize the enemy's ability to use tanks on the
defensive, or to squelch the enemy's counteroffensive.
It's a very thin line that differentiates offense from defense.
True but all weapons have a certain amount of offensive capability. Javelin is designed for infantrymen to take out advancing
armor. Artillery and tanks are offensive.
Artillery and tanks are also used for counter-offensives, so the defender can repulse the aggressor.
There are hawks in the West who are hoping that Ukraine launches one more major military offensive against Donbass. In that
case, the Ukrainians will attack with superior numbers of tanks and troops. If the Ukrainians capture ground (which is unlikely),
they will use their Javelins to try to prevent the Russians and rebels from using tanks to recapture that ground.
That's the real significance of the Javelin missile. That's why American warmongers are sending this weapon to Kiev.
It is rather ironic that there were no NATO forces in the Baltic states until Putin invaded and annexed Crimea...
You are in denial of the facts again. The reality is that the Baltics joined NATO in 2004. That means, since that year, the
US could put any weapons systems it so desires in the Baltics, and there's nothing Russia can do about it short of war.
If that's not a threatening situation for Russia, then I don't know what is.
There was nothing in the Baltic's until after Putin's venture into Crimea and Ukraine proper. He miscalculated as to the push
back regarding both operations and now you are complaining. Those nations are tiny and have almost no defensive capability hence
the deployment of US, UK, Canadian and the NATO troops.
Well, nuclear weapons get obsolete like anything else. ICBMs travel in predictable trajectories and silos are vulnerable to
first strikes. Hence the need for technology evolution.
And sure, old Soviet reactors are getting up there in age. Rosatom is replacing them with modern VVER-1200 designs, not just
in Russia, but all over the world. Rosatom is like the largest and most productive nuclear corporation in the world. in general
though, i would argue that fears of nuclear power are vastly overblown, and it is one of the safest, most reliable forms of power
available.
I'm not anti nuclear power however like everything mechanical it has a safe life time. Weapons of course need modernizing and
that can be done without designing an entirely new weapons system.
MAD is still relevant today as it was during the Cold War. Ultimately I would like to see a reduction in the number of war heads
that the US, Russia have as China, France, UK, India, Pakistan and Israel have far fewer.
I think, US people have enough of their own internal problems. Isn't it better to concentrate on them? Slavics will deal with
their problems themselves. US already piled fantastic bunch of sh@t in Ukraine. As well as in the Middle East.
Current trends of immigration and birthrates in the west mean that by 2070 Russia will be the last homogeneous all white conservative
christian democracy left on earth.
It's possible that there are actually 11,400,000 Moslems in Russia, but nobody knows for certain. Either way, it's rubbish
to claim that there are "25 million Moslems" in the RF.
as famous Russian classics once meticulously observed - Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house [Всё смешалось
в доме Облонских]
Same is this article - first they "scare" you with this "Vergeltungswaffe" of the Soviet designed ca 1970, and, consequently,
abandoned around same time for multiple reasons.
Then they praise the wisdom of not helping Ukraine with real weapons - because Russia was not able achieve much in the current
status quo, so it was wise not to arm Ukraine.
The only thing one can learn from this article (or, more accurately, despite) is that to get a degree in Slavic Studies, ability
to use colloquial phrases in Russian only will not cut it. Even superficially, one should drop Polish or Czech, or, god forbid,
Ukrainian words of wisdom - [Кохайтеся, чорнобриві,. Та не з москалями]
"... Hitler's Third Reich was obliterated by massive military force in 1945. It lasted just 12 years. Stalin's Soviet Union bore the brunt of beating Hitler, but later succumbed to economic sclerosis. It fell apart in 1991, after 68 years. The mystery of the People's Republic of China is that it is still with us. ..."
The 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China was not a birthday I felt like
celebrating. As Dutch historian Frank Dikötter has shown in his searing three-volume
history of the Mao Zedong era, the Communist regime claimed the lives of tens of millions of
people: 2 million in the revolution between 1949 and 1951, another 3 million by the end of
the 1950s, up to 45 million in the man-made famine known as the "Great Leap Forward," and yet
more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, Mao's campaign against the intelligentsia,
which escalated into a civil war.
Hitler's Third Reich was obliterated by massive military force in 1945. It lasted just
12 years. Stalin's Soviet Union bore the brunt of beating Hitler, but later succumbed to
economic sclerosis. It fell apart in 1991, after 68 years. The mystery of the People's
Republic of China is that it is still with us.
Now, I could give you a rather boring explanation of why I think China's bid to "catch up
and surpass" (ganchao) the United States will fail. But maybe a more interesting answer can
be found in Liu Cixin's astonishing 2008 novel, "The Three-Body Problem," which I read for
the first time last week.
The problem of the title is introduced to the reader -- and to the nanotechnology
scientist Wang Miao, one of the central characters -- as a virtual reality game, set in a
strange, distant world with three suns rather than the familiar one. The mutually perturbing
gravitational attractions of the three suns prevent this planet from ever settling into a
predictable orbit with regular days, nights, and seasons. It has occasional "stable eras,"
during which civilization can advance, but with minimal warning, these give way to "chaotic
eras" of intense heat or cold that render the planet uninhabitable The central conceit of
Liu's novel is that China's history has the same pattern as the three-body problem: periods
of stability always end with periods of chaos -- what the Chinese call dong luan. The other
key character in the book is Ye Wenjie, who sees her father, a professor at Tsinghua
University, beaten to death by a gang of teenage Red Guards during the Cultural
Revolution.
Banished from Beijing to a labor camp in benighted rural backwater, Ye is rescued when she
is given a lowly job in a mysterious observatory known as Red Coast. But nothing can undo the
emotional damage of witnessing her father's murder. Nor can she escape the chaos of
Communism. She watches in horror as the entire area around the observatory is deforested.
Everything -- even astrophysics -- is subordinated to Mao's warped ideology.
Disillusioned completely by the madness of mankind -- a sentiment reinforced by a chance
meeting with an American environmentalist -- Ye stumbles on a way of beaming a message from
Earth deep into space by bouncing it off the sun. When, after years of empty noise, a clear
message is received in reply, she does not hesitate. Even though the message is a warning not
to communicate with Trisolaris -- the name of a real planet with three suns -- Ye sends
another message, ensuring that the Trisolarians can locate Earth, and initiate their
long-planned relocation.
Rehabilitated in the political thaw that follows Mao's death, Ye Wenjie returns to
Beijing, following in her father's footsteps as a physics professor. But she leads a double
life, for she also becomes the Commander of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement, a radically
misanthropic organization dedicated to helping the Trisolarians conquer earth. Acute readers
will notice that this group's ideology is a subtle parody of Maoism.
"Start a global rebellion!" they shout. "Long live the spirit of Trisolaris! We shall
persevere like the stubborn grass that resprouts after every wildfire! ... Eliminate human
tyranny!"
Little do they know that the Trisolarians are even worse than humans. As one of the aliens
points out to their leader, because of their world's utter unpredictability, "Everything is
devoted to survival. To permit the survival of the civilization as a whole, there is almost
no respect for the individual. Someone who can no longer work is put to death. Trisolarian
society exists under a state of extreme authoritarianism." Life for the individual consists
of "monotony and desiccation." That sounds a lot like Mao's China.
There is one scene in "The Three-Body Problem" that sticks in the mind. An adult and a
child stand looking at the grave of a Red Guard killed during the factional battles that
raged during the Cultural Revolution. "Are they heroes?" asks the child. The adult says no.
"Are they enemies?" The adult again says no. "Then who are they?" The adult replies:
"History."
True, the hero of the story is the foul-mouthed, chain-smoking Beijing cop Shi Qiang.
Chinese readers doubtless relish the scene when he lectures a pompous American general about
how best to save the world.
But the deeper meaning of the book is surely that Trisolaris is China. The three bodies in
contention are not suns but classes: rulers, intellectuals, masses. Right now, China is in
one of its stable phases. But, as the contending forces shift, chaos will sooner or later
return. Perhaps it already has, in Hong Kong.
If it spreads, I -- and history -- will win that bet.
The Three-Body Problem is a hard science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is
the first novel of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, but Chinese readers generally
refer to the whole series by the title of this first novel. The second and third novels in
the trilogy are titled The Dark Forest and Death's End. The title of the first novel refers
to the three-body problem in orbital mechanics. ...
The English translation by Ken Liu was published by Tor Books in 2014. It was the first
Asian novel ever to win a Hugo Award for Best Novel, in 2015 and was nominated for the 2014
Nebula Award for Best Novel.
(An amazing trilogy. Inspired by Arthur Clarke (*). Looks like Niall has read the first
book.)
* 'The Songs of Distant Earth' is a 1986 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C.
Clarke, based upon his 1958 short story of the same title. He stated that it was his
favourite of all his novels. ... The novel tells of a utopian human colony in the far future
that is visited by travellers from a doomed Earth, as the Sun has gone nova. The Songs of
Distant Earth explores apocalyptic, atheistic, and utopian ideas, as well as the effects of
long-term interstellar travel and extra-terrestrial life. (Wikipedia)
('Songs' is optimistic; 'Remembrance of
Earth's Past is not.)
For China, the three principle points of potential military friction with the U.S. are
Taiwan, South Korea-Japan, and the South China Sea. Apart from South Korea and Japan, where the
U.S. has significant ground and air forces already forward deployed, the main threat to China
is maritime power projected by American aircraft carrier battlegroups and amphibious assault
ships. The Chinese response was to develop a range of anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD)
capabilities designed to target American naval forces before they arrived in any potential
contested waters.
Traditionally, the U.S. Navy has relied on a combination of surface warships armed with
sophisticated air defense systems, submarines, and the aircraft carrier's considerable
contingent of combat aircraft to defend against hostile threats in time of war. China's
response came in the form of the DF-21D medium-range missile , dubbed the
"carrier killer." With a range of between 1,450 and 1,550 kilometers, the DF-21D employs a
maneuverable warhead that can deliver a conventional high-explosive warhead with a circular
error of probability (CEP) of 10 meters -- more than enough to strike a carrier-sized
target.
To compliment the DF-21D, China has also deployed the DF-26 intermediate-range missile , which
it has dubbed the "Guam killer," named after the American territory home to major U.S. military
installations. Like the DF-21, the DF-26 has a conventionally armed variant, which is intended
to be used against ships. Both missiles were featured in the 2015 military parade commemorating
the founding of the PRC.
As capable as they were, however, the DF-21D and DF-26 were not the shashoujian
weapons envisioned by Chinese military planners, representing as they did reciprocal
capability, as opposed to a game-changing technology. The unveiling of the true
shashoujian was reserved for last week's parade, and it came in the form of the DF-100
and DF-17 missiles.
The DF-100 is a vehicle-mounted supersonic cruise missile "characterized by a long range,
high precision and quick responsiveness," according to
the Chinese press . When combined with the DF-21/DF-26 threat, the DF-100 is intended to
overwhelm any existing U.S. missile defense capability, turning the Navy into a virtual sitting
duck. As impressive as the DF-100 is, however, it was overshadowed by the
DF-17 , a long-range cruise missile equipped with a hypersonic glide warhead, which
maneuvers at over seven times the speed of sound -- faster than any of the missiles the U.S.
possesses to intercept it. Nothing in the current U.S. arsenal can defeat the DF-17 -- not the
upgraded anti-missile ships, THAAD, or even the Ground Based Interceptors (GBI) currently
based in Alaska.
In short, in the event of a naval clash between China and the U.S., the likelihood of
America's fleet being sent to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is very high.
The potential loss of the Pacific Fleet cannot be taken lightly: it could serve as a trigger
for the release of nuclear weapons in response. The threat of an American nuclear attack has
always been the ace in the hole for the U.S. regarding China, given that nation's weak
strategic nuclear capability.
Since the 1980s, China has possessed a small number of obsolete liquid-fuel intercontinental
ballistic missiles as their strategic deterrent. These missiles have a slow response time and
could easily be destroyed by any concerted pre-emptive attack. China sought to upgrade its ICBM
force in the late 1990s with a new road-mobile solid fuel missile, the DF-31 . Over the course of the next
two decades, China has upgraded the DF-31, improving its accuracy and mobility while increasing
the number of warheads it carries from one to three. But even with the improved DF-31, China
remained at a distinct disadvantage with the U.S. when it came to overall strategic nuclear
capability.
While the likelihood that a few DF-31 missiles could be launched and their warheads reach
their targets in the U.S., the DF-31 was not a "nation killing" system. In short, any strategic
nuclear exchange between China and the U.S. would end with America intact and China
annihilated. As such, any escalation of military force by China that could have potentially
ended in an all-out nuclear war was suicidal, in effect nullifying any advantage China had
gained by deploying the DF-100 and DF-17 missiles.
Enter the
DF-41 , China's ultimate shashoujian weapon. A three-stage, road-mobile ICBM
equipped with between six and 10 multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV)
warheads, the DF-41 provides China with a nuclear deterrent capable of surviving an American
nuclear first strike and delivering a nation-killing blow to the United States in retaliation.
The DF-41 is a strategic game changer, allowing China to embrace the mutual assured destruction
(MAD) nuclear deterrence posture previously the sole purview of the United States and
Russia.
In doing so, China has gained the strategic advantage over the U.S. when it comes to
competing power projection in the Pacific. Possessing a virtually unstoppable A2/AD capability,
Beijing is well positioned to push back aggressively against U.S. maritime power projection in
the
South China Sea and the
Taiwan Straits .
Most who watched the Chinese military parade on October 1 saw what looked to be some
interesting missiles. For the informed observer, however, they were witnessing the end of an
era. Previously, the United States could count on its strategic nuclear deterrence to serve as
a restraint against any decisive Chinese reaction to aggressive American military maneuvers in
the Pacific. Thanks to the DF-41, this capability no longer exists. Now the U.S. will be
compelled to calculate how much risk it is willing to take when it comes to enforcing its
sacrosanct "freedom of navigation."
While the U.S. commitment to Taiwan's independence remains steadfast, its willingness to go
to war with China over the South China Sea may not be as firm. The bottom line is that China,
with a defense budget of some $250 billion, has successfully combined "Western technology with
Eastern wisdom," for which the U.S. has no response.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former
Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert
Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author ofseveral books,
most recently,Deal of the Century: How
Iran Blocked the West's Road to War (2018).
This Is How a War With China Could Begin
First, the lights in Taiwan go out.
By Nicholas Kristof
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- If the United States gets embroiled in a war with China, it may begin
with the lights going out here in Taipei.
Tensions are rising across the Taiwan Strait, and there's a growing concern among some
security experts that Chinese President Xi Jinping might act recklessly toward Taiwan in the
next few years, drawing the United States into a conflict....
[ Nuttier and nuttier but there we are, and as Les Gelb explained, the foreign policy
community at such times have become incapable of independent thought. ]
Mission Unaccomplished: Meet the press -- and see why it failed at several crucial points
during the Iraq War
By Leslie H. Gelb with Jeanne-Paloma Zelmati - Council on Foreign Relations
My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the
foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain
political and professional credibility. We "experts" have a lot to fix about ourselves, even
as we "perfect" the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and
embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common -- often wrong --
wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.
This Is How a War With China Could Begin
First, the lights in Taiwan go out.
By Nicholas Kristof
[ Though this essay is nutty, the implications are really frightening to me. We have
reached a point where New York Times columnists are imagining the bombing of China. This, to
my imagination, was precisely what was imagined during the height of the supposedly won Cold
War. ]
The atomic scientists should move their clock half the distance to mid night.
A side benefit of the US finding an excuse to terminate Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
(INF) Treaty of 1987 is to ring China with INF banned weapon systems!
The new, made up, cold war has two major fronts, Europe and the Pac Rim, whereas the
Soviet based [my] cold war only had Russia ringed from Germany Belgium UK and Spain.....
"... Can China then depend on widening internal demand to maintain its global edge? There are two reasons why not. The present authorities worry that a widening middle stratum could jeopardize their political control and seek to limit it.[a] ..."
"... The second reason, more important, is that much of the internal demand is the result of reckless borrowing by regional banks, which are facing an inability to sustain their investments. If they collapse, even partially, this could end the entire economic edge[b] of China. ..."
A structural crisis is chaotic. This means that instead of the normal standard set of
combinations or alliances that were previously used to maintain the stability of the system,
they constantly shift these alliances in search of short-term gains. This only makes the
situation worse. We notice here a paradox – the certainty of the end of the existing
system and the intrinsic uncertainty of what will eventually replace it and create thereby a
new system (or new systems) to stabilize realities .
Now, let us look at China's role in what is going on. In terms of the present system,
China seems to be gaining much advantage. To argue that this means the continuing functioning
of capitalism as a system is basically to (re)assert the invalid point that systems are
eternal and that China is replacing the United States in the same way as the United States
replaced Great Britain as the hegemonic power. Were this true, in another 20-30 years China
(or perhaps northeast Asia) would be able to set its rules for the capitalist
world-system.
But is this really happening? First of all, China's economic edge, while still greater
than that of the North, has been declining significantly. And this decline may well amplify
soon, as political resistance to China's attempts to control neighboring countries and entice
(that is, buy) the support of faraway countries grows, which seems to be occurring.
Can China then depend on widening internal demand to maintain its global edge? There are
two reasons why not. The present authorities worry that a widening middle stratum could
jeopardize their political control and seek to limit it.[a]
The second reason, more important, is that much of the internal demand is the result of
reckless borrowing by regional banks, which are facing an inability to sustain their
investments. If they collapse, even partially, this could end the entire economic edge[b] of
China.
In addition, there have been, and will continue to be, wild swings in geopolitical
alliances. In a sense, the key zones are not in the North, but in areas such as Russia,
India, Iran, Turkey, and southeastern Europe, all of them pursuing their own roles by a game
of swiftly and repeatedly changing sides. The bottom line is that, though China plays a
very big role in the short run, it is not as big a role as China would wish and that some in
the rest of the world-system fear. It is not possible for China to stop the disintegration of
the capitalist system. It can only try to secure its place in a future
world-system.
As far as Wallerstein's bottom line: The proof is in the pudding. That said, there seems to
be a tendency to regard Xi as all-powerful. IMNSHO, that's by no means the case, not only
because of China's middle class, but because of whatever China's equivalent of deplorables is.
The "wild swings in geopolitical alliances" might play a role, too; oil, Africa's minerals.
NOTES [a] I haven't seen this point made elsewhere. [b] Crisis, certainly. "Ending the
entire economic edge"? I'm not so sure.
The US launched a land based Tomahawk nuclear-capable intermediate range cruise missile less
than 3 weeks after the US withdrew from the INF Treaty. Clearly, the missile was under
development for some time prior to the test; the sea-based variant launched by naval vessels
armed with the Aegis systems can carry a W80 variable yield warhead (5-150 kilotons).
The land-based Tomahawk was also launched by the multipurpose Mark 41 launch system, which
is deployed at the Aegis Ashore facility in Romania and soon-to-be-opened Aegis Ashore
facility in Poland. This clearly demonstrates the the Ballistic Missile "Defense" systems
deployed in Romania and Poland by the US/NATO can also be used to launch offensive nuclear
weapons. Because the missiles are deployed in closed cannisters, it is impossible for
observers to verify if the cannisters contain interceptor missiles or cruise missiles.
Putin specifically warned about this possibility in 2016.
Several days ago, Putin told his security
council that the BMD deployments are/were "a direct and material breach of the INF
Treaty." The Russians believe the US was planning all along to use the BMD facilities to
target Russia with both offensive and defensive weapons (defensive in the sense that US/NATO
BMD can be used as a mop-up system to take out remaining Russian nuclear forces after a US
first strike). US Neocons may believe that this will give them leverage in any confrontation
with Russia. I think they are wrong, I think it will simply tempt the Russians to take out
these facilities early on in the event of any direct military conflict with the US/NATO.
Putin is now explicity making the point that Russia will have to consider these BMD
facilities as a direct threat to Russia and will respond symmetrically, with at "tit-for-tat"
response. This may also include Russian missiles in Cuba and Venezuela.
"... The 'hyper-aggressive nuts' don't even have new or original ideas. Even the hyper-aggressiveness isn't exactly new but simply an expression of megalomania. ..."
"... That aside, that land based Tomahawks are an idea from the height of the cold war, iirc in response to the russian SS-20 (which, thanks to the INF, is gone now). ..."
"... In light of that, and the recent US tests, Russian concerns that US land based missile defense in Romania and Poland with Mk.41 & Mk.57 type vertical launchers (or the old trucks) could use to fire US GLCM is exactly rather rational. ..."
"... US cruisers and destroyers with VLS can use the same launcher systems to launch an ESSM, SM-2/3, VL ASROCK or a Tomahawk. Why just from there? ..."
"... It's GLCM again, just vertically launched this time, and with by now more accurate GPS. ..."
"... The problem for the anti-china and neocon nuts IMO is hat China legally allowed has plenty medium range missiles and was not in the INF treaty. Thus the INF treaty was an obstacle for 'hyper-aggressive nuts' when going after China with medium range missiles of which China has plenty. ..."
"... As the by now severely demented Rudy Giuliani put is so clearly (if there is a political interest) the ' reality is now not truth '. ..."
"... Likely Boltonists see any treaty as an unacceptable limitation of the freedom to handle at whits, as an ' indispensable nation ', or to rule by arbitrary tweets or other solo acts like presidential decrees as far as Trump is concerned. ..."
"... The 'hyper-aggressive nuts' are focused but are geographically disoriented. To hit China they kicked Russia. ..."
"The Associated Press ran a brief article asserting that:
"The U.S. military has conducted a flight test of a type of missile banned for more than
30 years by a treaty that both the United
States and Russia abandoned this month, the Pentagon said.
The Trump administration has said it remains interested in useful arms control but
questions Moscow's willingness to adhere to its treaty commitments."
This was stated within the first paragraph. The author failed to mention that it was the
United States that unilaterally abandoned the treaty. Russia only abandoned the treaty after
the U.S. did, despite numerous Russian efforts to keep the treaty alive. Russia only abandoned
the INF treaty when it became the only party to it, and treaties are quite pointless when they
do not actually have more than one party as a signatory. Russia had in fact adhered to the
restrictions imposed by the treaty, vague and unproven Pentagon leveled accusations aside.
Let's be honest, both Russia and the United States have had the technology and the guided
missile systems in service to field the intermediate range land-based missiles prohibited by
the INF treaty. Both field such systems on their naval warships. The only thing that kept them
from fielding such weapons was the INF treaty itself. Now that formal framework of prohibition
is gone.
Now that we can acknowledge the fact that the INF Treaty no longer exists because the United
States unilaterally abandoned it, let's take a look at the missile that the U.S. military
tested." SF
---------------
OK, pilgrims, first we bailed out of the JCPOA, an agreement that was accomplishing what it
was intended to do in impeding Iranian progress toward their supposed goal of a deliverable
nuclear weapon. Our claim, resoundingly approved by Israel, is that the JCPOA nuclear deal did
not restrict Iran to a role as a "hermit kingdom" producer of pistachio nuts and carpets. This
policy of the US is ridiculously servile to the Zionist interest.
Now, WE (the US) have walked away from the INF Treaty, an agreement that had been in place
since the dark days of the Cold War. Its purpose was to prevent the deployment of land based
intermediate range nuclear tipped missiles and it served that purpose well.
But, pilgrims, in the era of the triumph of the Trumpian neocon view of the world, we must
prepare for war. WAR! Any advantage that can be pursued against possible enemies must be
pursued. Pompeo, Bolton and the other hyper-aggressive nuts want total world dominance. Sooo,
we canceled the INF and now have tested a land based version of the navy's Tomahawk which has a
range of over 300 miles.
as for " a land based version of the navy's Tomahawk " ...
The 'hyper-aggressive nuts' don't even have new or original ideas. Even the
hyper-aggressiveness isn't exactly new but simply an expression of megalomania.
That aside, that land based Tomahawks are an idea from the height of the cold war, iirc in
response to the russian SS-20 (which, thanks to the INF, is gone now).
To re-vive that dead old program can use developed technology and is thus rather cheap, as
far as the volume of US military budget goes.
In light of that, and the recent US tests, Russian concerns that US land based missile
defense in Romania and Poland with Mk.41 & Mk.57 type vertical launchers (or the old
trucks) could use to fire US GLCM is exactly rather rational.
US cruisers and destroyers with VLS can use the same launcher systems to launch an ESSM,
SM-2/3, VL ASROCK or a Tomahawk. Why just from there?
It's GLCM again, just vertically launched this time, and with by now more accurate
GPS.
IMO the only reason why the 'hyper-aggressive nuts' killed the INF was not that Russia had
good missiles (which they had also before INF) or missiles violating the INF.
The problem for the anti-china and neocon nuts IMO is hat China legally allowed has plenty
medium range missiles and was not in the INF treaty. Thus the INF treaty was an obstacle for
'hyper-aggressive nuts' when going after China with medium range missiles of which China has
plenty.
Now, thanks to not being in INF the US can have their own.
That the US could perhaps lie here to get that is sadly rather plausible, considering the
BS story about Iraqi WMD used as an excuse to attack the country.
As the by now severely demented Rudy Giuliani put is so clearly (if there is a political
interest) the ' reality is now not truth '.
Indeed! And Trump is a 'stable genius' (and not the opposite) and earned the millions he
had at 8 years by extremely successfully distributing newspapers.
The US, being in the INF, were not allowed to have the desired medium range missiles, thus
... they perhaps arbitrily accused Russia of violating the INF to have an excuse to kill the
treaty and, now legally, get for themselves the medium range missiles they wanted.
Absurdly they did about exactly what they accused Russia of - violate the INF practically
(and not just in spirit). Alas ...
Likely Boltonists see any treaty as an unacceptable limitation of the freedom to handle at
whits, as an ' indispensable nation ', or to rule by arbitrary tweets or other solo
acts like presidential decrees as far as Trump is concerned.
The 'hyper-aggressive nuts' are focused but are geographically disoriented. To hit China
they kicked Russia.
Who knows, maybe in a year the US will have an orange Whitehouse and a president for life
with a crown - or - from folks still living in the cold war - a revived Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI), a US Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) and perhaps Pershing
III?
Speaking after talks Wednesday with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto, Putin argued that the quick test
indicated the U.S. had begun work on the missile long before declaring its intention to withdraw from the pact.
"The Americans have tested this missile too quickly after having withdrawn from the treaty," Putin said. "That
gives us strong reason to believe that they had started work to adapt the sea-launched missile long before they
began looking for excuses to opt out of the treaty."
... ... ...
He said that for Russia that means "the emergence of new threats, to which we will react accordingly."
U.S. Ends Cold War Missile Treaty, With Aim of Countering China
Trump administration officials say that the treaty tied their hands on China and that Russia
was not complying with it, but its demise raised fears of a new arms race.
By David E. Sanger and Edward Wong
WASHINGTON -- The United States on Friday terminated a major treaty of the Cold War, the
Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement, and it is already planning to start testing a new
class of missiles later this summer.
But the new missiles are unlikely to be deployed to counter the treaty's other nuclear
power, Russia, which the United States has said for years was in violation of the accord.
Instead, the first deployments are likely to be intended to counter China, which has amassed
an imposing missile arsenal and is now seen as a much more formidable long-term strategic
rival than Russia....
March 14, 2019 - Following U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
(INF) Treaty later this year, the U.S. Department of Defense will begin testing new systems
that would previously have been prohibited.
According to comments by U.S. officials to the Associated Press, the United States will
begin testing two weapons -- both armed solely with a conventional payload. The tests are
expected to take place at or after August.
One project was described by the Associated Press, which spoke to Pentagon officials, as a
"low-flying cruise missile with a potential range of about 1,000 kilometers." The second
missile would be a "a ballistic missile with a range of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 kilometers."
...
(First published at Strategic Culture Foundation, I put it here to see what the Committee
thinks about it)
Moscow will not engage in an exhausting arms race, and the country's military spending
will gradually decrease as Russia does not seek a role as the "world gendarme," President
Vladimir Putin said. Moscow is not seeking to get involved in a "pointless" new arms race,
and will stick to "smart decisions" to strengthen its defensive capabilities, Putin said on
Friday during an annual extended meeting of the Defense Ministry board. "Intelligence,
brains, discipline and organization" must be the cornerstones of the country's military
doctrine, the Russian leader said. The last thing that Russia needs is an arms race that
would "drain" its economy, and Moscow sure does not want that "in any scenario," Putin
pointed out.
It's easy to forget it today, but the USSR was, in its time, an "exceptionalist" country. It
was the world's first socialist country – the " bright future "; it set an
example for all to follow, it was destined by History. It had a mission and was required by
History to assist any country that called itself "socialist". The USSR had bases and interests
all over the world. As the 1977 USSR Constitution said :
the Soviet state, a new type of state, the basic instrument for defending the gains of the
revolution and for building socialism and communism. Humanity thereby began the epoch-making
turn from capitalist to socialism.
A novus ordo seclorum indeed.
Russia, however, is just Russia. There is no feeling in Moscow that Russia must take the
lead any place but Russia itself. One of the reasons, indeed, why Putin is always talking about
the primacy of the UN, the independence of nation states, the impermissibility to interfere in
internal activities – the so-called " Westphalian "
position – is that
he remembers the exceptionalist past and knows that it led to a dead end . Moscow has no
interest in going abroad in search of internationalist causes.
Internationalism/exceptionalism and nationalism: the two have completely different
approaches to constructing a military. The first is obsessed with " power
projection ", " full spectrum superiority ", it
imagines that its hypertrophied interests are challenged all over the planet. Its wants are
expensive, indeterminate, unbounded. The other is only concerned with dealing with enemies in
its neighbourhood. Its wants are affordable, exact, finite. The exceptionalist/interventionist
has everything to defend everywhere; the nationalist has one thing to defend in one place. It
is much easier and much cheaper to be a nationalist: the exceptionalist/interventionist
USA spends
much more than anyone else but
always needs more ; nationalist Russia can cut its
expenditure .
The USSR's desire to match or exceed the USA in all military areas was a contributing factor
to the collapse of its alliance system and the USSR itself. Estimates are always a matter for
debate, especially in a command economy that hid its numbers (even when they were calculable),
but a common estimate is a
minimum of 15% of the USSR's production went to the military. But the true effort was
probably higher. The USSR was involved all over the world shoring up socialism's "bright
future" and that cost it at home.
Putin & Co's "bright future" is for Russia only and the world may do as it wants about
any example or counterexample it may imagine there. While Putin may occasionally indulge
himself by offering opinions about liberalism and oped writers gas on about the
Putin/Trump populism threat , Putin & Co are just trying to do what they think best for
Russia with, as their trust ratings suggest (in contrast with those of the rulers of the
"liberal" West), the support and agreement of most Russians.
The military stance of the former exceptionalist country is all gone. As the USSR has faded
away, so have its overseas bases and commitments: the Warsaw Pact is gone together with the
forward deployment of Soviet armies; there are no advisors in Vietnam or Mozambique; Moscow
awaits with bemusement the day next January when the surviving exceptionalist power and its
minions will have been in Afghanistan twice as long as the USSR was. The United States, still
exceptionalist, still imagining it is
spreading freedom and democracy, preventing war and creating stability , has bases
everywhere and thinks that it must protect "freedom of navigation" to and from China in the
South China Sea. It has yet to learn the futility of seeing oneself as The World's Example.
Putin & Co have learned: Russia has no World-Historical purpose and its military is just
for Russia. They understand what this means for Russia's Armed Forces:
Moscow doesn't have to match the US military; it just has to checkmate it.
And it doesn't have to checkmate it everywhere, only at home. The US Air Force can rampage
anywhere but not in Russia's airspace; the US Navy can go anywhere but not in Russia's waters.
It's a much simpler job and it costs much less than what Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev were
attempting; it's much easier to achieve; it's easier to plan and carry out. The
exceptionalist/interventionist has to plan for Everything; the nationalist for One Thing.
Study the enemy, learn what he takes for granted and block it. And the two must haves
of American conventional military power as it affects Russia are 1) air superiority and 2)
assured, reliable communications; counter those and it's checkmated: Russia doesn't have to
equal or surpass the US military across the board, just counter its must haves .
Russia's comprehensive and interlocking air defence weaponry is well known and well
respected: it covers the spectrum from defences against ballistic missiles to small RPVs, from
complex missile/radar sets to MANPADS; all of it coordinated, interlocking with many
redundancies. We hear US generals complaining about
air defence bubbles and studies referring to Russia's " anti-access/area-denial
(A2AD) exclusion zones ". Russian air defence has not been put to the full-scale test but
we have two good indications of its effectiveness. The first was the coordinated RPV attack on
Russian bases in Syria last year in which seven were
shot down and six taken over , three
of them landed intact . Then, in the FUKUS attack of April 2018, the Russians say the
Syrian AD system (most of which is old but has benefited from Russian coordination) shot
down a large number of the cruise missiles. ( FUKUS' claims
are not believable ).
In the past two or three decades US air power has operated with impunity; it has assumed
that all GPS-based systems (and there are many) will operate as planned and that communications
will be free and clear. Not against Russia. With those certainties removed, the American war
fighting doctrine will be left scrabbling.
But AD and EW are not the only Russian counters. When President Bush pulled the USA out of
the ABM Treaty in
2001 , Putin warned that Russia would have to respond. Mutual Assured Destruction may
sound crazy but there's a stability to it: neither side, under any circumstance, can get away
with a first strike; therefore neither will try it. Last year we met
the response : a new ICBM, a hypersonic re-entry vehicle, a nuclear-powered cruise missile
with enormous flight time and a similar underwater cruise missile. No defence will stop them
and so MAD returns. A hypersonic anti-shipping missile will keep the US Navy out of Russian
waters. And, to deal with the US Army's risible ground forces in
Europe , with or without NATO's other feeble forces
, Russia has re-created the
First Guards Tank Army . Checkmate again.
No free pass for US air power, strained and uncertain communications, a defeated ground
attack and no defence against Russian nuclear weapons. That's all and that's enough.
And that is how Moscow does it while spending much less money than Washington. It studies
Washington's strengths and counters them: "smart decisions". Washington is starting to realise
Russia's military power but it is blinded and can only see its reflection in the mirror: the
so-called "
rising threat from Russia " would be no threat to a Washington that stayed at home.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred
battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also
suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every
battle.
he is of course correct in his over all views. russian missile and EW technology is already,
today, at least a generation ahead of what the pentagon fields for combat. rendering
effective pentagon military power projection neutered against both russia and china as well
as any ally they choose to support (think syria for sure, iran?, venezuela?)
the problem washington faces is they sold out the federal government decades ago to
banking and corporate interest which as time has proven repeatedly are NOT aligned with the
best interests of the american citizenry, and like anyone who sups with the devil a bargain
is a bargain, once taken there is no going back.
the problem for washington is that banking and corporate interests require plunder to
operate properly as currently structured. maximize short term gain for private ownership
while either put off long terms costs (pollution etc) well into the future or like in 2008
socialize the losses across the entire tax payer (a euphemism for serf) base while handily
keeping all those fed vomited bailouts private.
as russia, china, iran, venezuela erect signs backed up by force saying.."this is a
plunder free zone" and, what with unencumbered assets becoming ever harder to locate for
anglo american capitalism a crisis is emerging as forward motion (real growth) slows to a
crawl or goes below zero which renders all the debt entangled corporations, especially
governments and citizens susceptible to gravity once the trigger of ''no confidence''' hits
the public consciousness. increasing debt is directly correlated to decreasing growth need to
sustain the debt load. like unsuccessfully dieting a vicious circle.
all russia and china have to do to prevail over washington and its empire at this point is
WAIT.... while keeping their swords bright and their domestic intentions true (by taking care
of their own).
gravity once widespread public no confidence emerges will do all heavy lifting.
Excellent analysis, Patrick. It shows what can be accomplished when you don't blow your whole
wad on force projection and seeking full spectrum dominance at the same time. Seeking
dominant capability at our borders and territorial waters is doable, but projecting that all
over the world is a losing proposition. The Russian strategy reminds me of the Swiss
defensive model.
BTW, while the Russian bears and our Grizzlies are both brown bears, they are different
species.
I've always been intrigued by Switzerland -- more guns than anywhere but pretty peaceful;
really understands neutrality (which is actually a pretty cold-blooded position). I remember
reading some time ago that Switzerland General Guisan (hah! name just came to me, ultimate
senility is at least a week away!) told the Germans that, if they invaded, the Swiss would
blow the tunnels thereby rendering Switzerland useless to an invader.
Never seen so many measelshafts as there. (You old Cold Warriors might recognise the term
from Germany back in The Day (not entirely sure of the spelling).
But definitely a country that minds its own business but makes sure its more expensive to
conquer than it's worth. Finland is (or was) another example. (Which is why it's so
disappointing to see the current rulers in Helsinki sucking up to NATO.)
Well, many of us will live to see whether that's correct or not. My assumption is that China
is so arrogant (Middle Kingdom means between Heaven and Earth) that they really don't care
what the rest of us do as long as business happens.
Got me there.
The western alliance - since the fall of the USSR - has been pretty useless if not downright
dangerous.
As for China, they may have gone too far in that "inscrutable oriental" act and begun to
believe their own BS.
Throughout its long history China has never tried to dominate foreign countries. It never
tried to conquer Japan, for example, which had some very productive silver and gold mines. On
the other hand, the Mongols tried twice (unsuccessfully) to invade Japan during their short
period of dominance. China did try meddle in Korean politics and use Korea as a buffer zone,
though a few times the Koreans threw them out. China also tried to secure buffer zones in the
west and south. Even now, though, they seem to feel that they are destined to be the world's
middle country, and they don't seem to have a hankering to invade or directly control foreign
areas to gain Lebensraum, even though they have a huge population. And they have no tradition
of global colonialism. It is not in the culture or the economic history.
As for the New Silk Road, it does not seem to be as self-serving and manipulative as the
DoS and Pompeo are constantly claiming. China has an ancient continuous culture, and the
Chinese seem to know full well by now that lasting prosperity only happens when all parties
prosper. Mutual dependence and mutual recognition are a deep part of Chinese and all east
Asian cultures, though the Japanese samurai ethic briefly went berserk and disregarded that
wisdom back in the 1930s! The Chinese spirit of innovation-within-tradition and dynamic
business management (including state management) is also likely to keep them confident in
their own ability to be creative and cutting edge, so they will probably be less likely to
try to suppress other economies the way Trump is trying to do. I imagine Chinese leaders are
hoping that mutual prosperity and interdependence will make ideologies like "full spectrum
dominance" risible relics of the past. Culture is long, turbulence happens.
Moscow will not engage in an exhausting arms race, and the country's military spending will
gradually decrease as Russia does not seek a role as the "world gendarme," President
Vladimir Putin said
While Vladimir Putin is one of the most astute observers of foreign policy in the world
(running circles around Obama and Trump), he is also a politician. I sincerely doubt that
Russia gradually plans on decreasing spending on their military in any meaningful way. That
is for home consumption because about 35-40 percent of Russians live on $300 per month or
less. Putin's popularity is also dropping even though it remains quite high (Paul Goble:
Window on Eurasia -- New Series: Nearly 40 Percent of Russians Subsist on Less than...
https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/02/nearly-40-percent-of-russians-subsist.html?spref=tw):
Thirty-seven percent of Russians life on 19,000 rubles or less a month, Rosstat says, a
figure that works out to a subsistence of ten US dollars or a less a day, 23.2 percent live
on less than 15,000 rubles a month (under seven dollars a day); and 12 percent have incomes
under 10,000 rubles a month (five dollars a day).
I'm coming to think that you are that rare species of a POLITE troll. Russians like VVP, they
trust him and buy the package. And they get it that Russia is under attack (they aren't
living in a news bubble. They see Western stuff.)
Nobody in the West comes anywhere close to his numbers.
PS Paul Goble just prints anti-Putin stuff and is mostly entertainment.
After 8 years of the governance of Boris Yeltsin & the Free Market Reformers, 30% of
Russians were living on $1.50/day or less as their country unstoppably descended into social
catastrophe & strategic irrelevance.
What happened to the USSR and it's empire should serve as a warning to the USA. We have two
huge oceans defending us, yet we spend more to maintain our far flung empire than the USSR
ever did. One day, the taxpayers of this country are no longer going to pay for an empire
that they don't profit from.
thanks for the analysis - a shame the general did not expand on what Russian capabilities iN
EW were eye watering.
Interesting "The first was the coordinated RPV attack on Russian bases in Syria last year
in which seven were shot down and six taken over, three of them landed intact." According to
the article, the drones were controlled from 100 km distant. This really doesnt sound like
jihadi technology. So very interesting that Russia was able to take over the RPVs which were
either US or Israeli...
The US (with those two oceans as its eastern and western boundaries) is a maritime power.
We are also still a sufficiently important maritime power that we have some level of
responsibility for maintaining freedom of the seas (as with the issues with the pirates
operating out of Puntland in southern Somalia in the late 2000s), a situation that has
existed (in some form) since the Roman Republic made the Med "Mare Nostrum."
Russia has always been (mostly) a land power.
Given this, the US (even if it does not "seek to fight monsters" in Nietzsche's terms) has
the Force Projection task thrust upon it in a way Russia doesn't.
Even if we sought to be non-interventionist (as I think we should), we still have more on
our plate than Russia. (The PRC has the same inherent problem.)
Since we have a force projection mission thrust upon us as a maritime power, full spectrum
dominance (in at least the areas where our ships operate) is an implied task.
So, I think the two thoughts I have about this article are:
1) we have broader defense needs than the Russians, based on being a maritime power;
and
2) since our plate is already full, it makes little sense to add to that burden.
Britain is an island. Australia, while designated a continent, is also an island. Please
compare their "maritime power" status to ours, their defense spending as a percentage of gdp
to ours, and their number of foreign bases to ours, and explain.
Please compare those things to similar sized maritime nations and evaluate this in the
context of the former preeminence of the Royal Navy and its adjunct forces.
For extra credit consider the likelihood that the Royal Navy is to some degree an adjunct
of the US Navy,
As, for example, the history of the Western Roman Empire indicates (with the possible
exception of the Five Good Emperors and the early Tetrarchy during and immediately following
the reign of Diocletian), authoritarian states have some problems with succession.
Putin seems to have more of a "read" than any other world leader on the global stage right
now, but the answer to who follows him is likely be: "To the strongest."
Putin has been a smarter, more discerning leader than most presently on the world stage
and that has lent credibility. He has an advantage, as a retired LTC in the old KGB of having
some level of training and experience in both geo-politics and reading people and assessing
strengths and weaknesses.
Even given that, Russia has a decided advantage over many places in terms of natural
resources and in controlling what may be thought of as "global key terrain" (Mackinder's
"Heartland").
They have a kind of lasting Jominian advantage. With BRI/OBOR, they are somewhat in the
position of the guy in the Western who owns the land the Railroad is going to come through
(or, possibly, not).
Given its size, position and history, it is questionable if Russia is ever "finished," but
while it has come back from its dire position 20 years ago, it still is notably weaker than
it was in the 1980s. As Mr. Armstrong's article indicates that may matter less than fact it
appears strong enough to advance its own interests.
"... " China by contrast has historically conducted statecraft based on the concept of a civilization state – under which its strength is not measured by the weakness and subjugation of others but by its internal achievements. " ..."
"... In my view the Usa had an excellent opportunity to enact in a positive way after WW2 but blew it. The main reason was the failure to live up to the above quoted characterisation of the Chinese. To encourage potential achievers in the best sense of the word. ..."
"... Instead the Us oligarchy held back independent and creative thinking and brainwashed the population, in a way that weakened them. Jfk tried to encourage his countrymen but other forces prevailed. ..."
A.B. Abrams: In the introduction to this work I highlight that a fundamental shift in world
order was facilitated by the modernization and industrialization of two Eastern nations –
Japan under the Meiji Restoration and the USSR under the Stalinist industrialization program.
Before these two events the West had retained an effective monopoly on the modern industrial
economy and on modern military force. Russia's image is still affected by the legacy of the
Soviet Union – in particular the way Soviet proliferation of both modern industries and
modern weapons across much of the region was key to containing Western ambitions in the Cold
War. Post-Soviet Russia has a somewhat unique position – with a cultural heritage
influenced by Mongolia and Central Asia as well as by Europe. Politically Russia remains
distinct from the Western Bloc, and perceptions of the country in East Asia have been heavily
influenced by this. Perhaps today one the greatest distinctions is Russia's eschewing of the
principle of sovereignty under international law and its adherence to a non-interventionist
foreign policy. Where for example the U.S., Europe and Canada will attempt to intervene in the
internal affairs of other parties – whether by cutting off parts for
armaments ,
imposing economic sanctions or even launching military interventions under humanitarian
pretexts – Russia lacks a history of such behavior which has made it a welcome presence
even for traditionally Western aligned nations such as the Philippines, Indonesia and South
Korea.
While the Western Bloc attempted to isolate the USSR from East and Southeast Asia by
supporting the spread of anticommunist thought, this pretext for shunning Russia collapsed in
1991. Today the West has had to resort to other means to attempt to contain and demonize the
country – whether labelling it a human rights abuser or threatening its economic and
defense partners with sanctions and other repercussions. The success of these measures in the
Asia-Pacific has varied – but as regional economies have come to rely less on the West
for trade and grown increasingly interdependent Western leverage over them and their foreign
policies has diminished.
Even when considered as a Western nation, the type of conservative Western civilization
which Russia may be seen to represent today differs starkly from that of Western Europe and
North America. Regarding a Russia Pivot to Asia, support for such a plan appears to have
increased from 2014 when relations with the Western Bloc effectively broke down. Indeed, the
Russia's future as a pacific power could be a very bright one – and as part of the up and
coming northeast Asian region it borders many of the economies which appear set to dominate in
the 21 st century – namely China, Japan and the Koreas. Peter the Great is
known to have issued in a new era of Russian prosperity by recognizing the importance of
Europe's rise and redefining Russia as a European power – moving the capital to St
Petersburg. Today a similar though perhaps less extreme pivot Eastwards towards friendlier and
more prosperous nations may be key to Russia's future.
The Saker: We hear many observers speak of an informal but very profound and even
game-changing partnership between Putin's Russia and Xi's China. The Chinese even speak of a "
strategic comprehensive partnership of coordination for the new era ". How would you
characterize the current relationship between these two countries and what prospects do you see
for a future Russian-Chinese partnership?
A.B. Abrams: A Sino-Russian alliance has long been seen in both the U.S. and in Europe as
one of the greatest threats to the West's global primacy and to Western-led world order. As
early as 1951 U.S. negotiators meeting with Chinese delegations to end the Korean War were
instructed to focus on the differences in the positions of Moscow and Beijing in an attempt to
form a rift between the two. Close Sino-Soviet cooperation seriously stifled Western designs
for the Korean Peninsula and the wider region during that period, and it was repeatedly
emphasized that the key to a Western victory was to bring about a Sino-Soviet split. Achieving
this goal by the early 1960s and bringing the two powers very near to a total conflict
significantly increased prospects for a Western victory in the Cold War, with the end of the
previously united front seriously undermining nationalist and leftist movements opposing
Western designs from Africa and the Middle East to Vietnam and Korea. Both states learned the
true consequences of this in the late 1980s and early 1990s when there was a real risk of total
collapse under Western pressure. Attempts to bring an end to China's national revolution
through destabilization failed in 1989, although the USSR was less fortunate and the results
for the Russian population in the following decade were grave indeed.
Today the Sino-Russian partnership has become truly comprehensive, and while Western experts
from Henry Kissinger to the late Zbigniew Brzezinski among others have emphasized the
importance of bringing about a new split in this partnership this strategy remains unlikely to
work a second time. Both Beijing and Moscow learned from the dark period of the post-Cold War
years that the closer they are together the safer they will be, and that any rift between them
will only provide their adversaries with the key to bringing about their downfall. It is
difficult to comprehend the importance of the Sino-Russian partnership for the security of both
states without understanding the enormity of the Western threat – with maximum pressure
being exerted on multiple fronts from finance and information to military and cyberspace. Where
in the early 1950s it was only the Soviet nuclear deterrent which kept both states safe from
very real Western plans for massive nuclear attacks, so too today is the synergy in the
respective strengths of China and Russia key to protecting the sovereignty and security of the
two nations from a very real and imminent threat. A few examples of the nature of this threat
include growing investments in social engineering through social media – the results of
have been seen in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Ukraine, a lowering threshold for nuclear weapons use
by the United States – which it currently trains Western allies outside the NPT to
deploy, and even reports from Russian and Korean sources of investments in biological warfare
– reportedly being tested in
Georgia, Eastern Europe and South Korea .
The partnership between Russia and China has become truly comprehensive, and is perhaps best
exemplified by their military relations. From 2016 joint military exercises have involved the
sharing of extremely
sensitive information on missile and early warning systems – one of the most well
kept defense secrets of any nuclear power which even NATO powers do not share with one another.
Russia's defense sector has played a key role in the modernization of the Chinese People's
Liberation Army, while Chinese investment has been essential to allowing Russia to continue
research and development on next generation systems needed to retain parity with the United
States. There is reportedly cooperation between the two in developing next generation weapons
technologies for systems such as hypersonic cruise and anti aircraft missiles and new strategic
bombers and fighter jets which both states plan to field by the mid-2020s. With the combined
defense spending of both states a small fraction of that of the Western powers, which
themselves cooperate closely in next generation defense projects, it is logical that the two
should pool their resources and research and development efforts to most efficiently advance
their own security.
Cooperation in political affairs has also been considerable, and the two parties have
effectively presented a united front against the designs of the Western Bloc. In 2017 both
issued strong warnings to the United States and its allies that they would not tolerate an
invasion of North Korea – which was followed by the
deployment of advanced air defense systems by both states near the Korean border with
coverage of much of the peninsula's airspace. Following Pyongyang's testing of its
first nuclear delivery system capable of reaching the United States , and renewed American
threats against the East Asian country, China and Russia staged near simultaneous
exercises near the peninsula using naval and marine units in a clear warning to the U.S.
against military intervention. China's Navy has on several occasions deployed to the
Mediterranean for joint drills with Russian forces – each time following a period of high
tension with the Western Bloc over Syria.
In April 2018, a period of particularly high tensions between Russia and the Western Bloc
over Western threats both to take military action against the Syrian government and to
retaliate for an alleged but unproven Russian chemical weapons attack on British soil, the
Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe traveled to Russia and more explicitly stated that the
Sino-Russian partnership was aimed at countering Western designs. Referring to the Sino-Russian
defense partnership as "as stable as Mount Tai" he
stated : "the Chinese side has come to show Americans the close ties between the Armed
Forces of China and Russia, especially in this situation. We have come to support you." A week
later China announced
large-scale live fire naval drills in the Taiwan Strait – which according to several
analysts were scheduled to coincide with a buildup of Western forces near Syria. Presenting a
potential second front was key to deterring the Western powers from taking further action
against Russia or its ally Syria. These are but a few examples Sino-Russian cooperation, which
is set to grow only closer with time.
The Saker: The US remains the most formidable military power in Asia, but this military
power is being eroded as a result of severe miscalculations of the US political leadership. How
serious a crisis do you think the US is now facing in Asia and how do you assess the risks of a
military confrontation between the US and the various Asian powers (China, the Philippines, the
DPRK, etc,).
A.B. Abrams: Firstly I would dispute that the United States is the most formidable military
power in the region, as while it does retain a massive arsenal there are several indicators
that it lost this position to China during the 2010s. Looking at combat readiness levels, the
average age of weapons in their inventories, morale both publicly and in the armed forces, and
most importantly the correlation of their forces, China appears to have an advantage should war
break out in the Asia-Pacific. It is important to remember that the for the Untied States and
its European allies in particular wars aren't fought on a chessboard. Only a small fraction of
their military might can be deployed to the Asia-Pacific within a month of a conflict breaking
out, while over 95% of Chinese forces are already on the region and are trained and armed
almost exclusively for war in the conditions of the Asia-Pacific. In real terms the balance of
military power regionally is in China's favor, and although the U.S. has tried to counter this
with a military 'Pivot to Asia' initiative from 2011 this has ultimately failed due to both the
drag from defense commitments elsewhere and the unexpected and pace at which China has
expanded and
modernized its armed forces.
For the time being the risk of direct military confrontation remains low, and while there
was a risk in 2017 of American and allied action against the DPRK Pyongyang has effectively
taken this option off the table with the development of a viable and growing arsenal of
thermonuclear weapons and associated delivery systems alongside the modernization of its
conventional capabilities. While the U.S. may have attempted to call a Chinese and Russian
bluff by launching a limited strike – which seriously risked spiraling into something
much larger – it is for the benefit of all regional parties including South Korea that
the DPRK now has the ability to deter the United States without relying on external support.
This was a historically unprecedented event, and as military technology has evolved it has
allowed a small power for the first time to deter a superpower without relying on allied
intervention. Changes in military technology such as the proliferation of the nuclear tipped
ICBM make a shooting war less likely, but also alters the nature of warfare to place greater
emphasis on information war, economic war and other new fields which will increasingly decide
the global balance of power. Where America's answer to the resistance of China and North Korea
in the 1950s to douse them with napalm, today winning over their populations through soft
power, promoting internal dissent, placing pressure on their living standards and ensuring
continued Western dominance of key technologies has become the new means of fighting.
That being said, there is a major threat of conflict in the Asia-Pacific of a different
nature. Several organizations including the United Nations and the defense ministries of
Russia, Singapore and Indonesia among others have warned of the dangers posed by Islamic
terrorism to stability in the region. Radical Islamism, as most recently attested to by Saudi Arabia's crown prince , played a key
role in allowing the Western Bloc to cement its dominance over the Middle East and North Africa
– undermining Russian and Soviet aligned governments including Algeria, Libya, Egypt and
Syria – in most cases with direct Western support. CIA Deputy Director Graham Fuller in
this respect referred to the agency's "policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping
them against our adversaries." Several officials, from the higher brass of the Russian, Syrian
and Iranian militaries to the former President of
Afghanistan and the President
of Turkey , have all alleged Western support for radical terror groups including the
Islamic State for the sake of destabilizing their adversaries. As the Asia-Pacific has
increasingly slipped out of the Western sphere of influence, it is likely that this asset will
increasingly be put into play. The consequences of the spread of jihadism from the Middle East
have been relatively limited until now, but growing signs of danger can be seen in Xinjiang,
Myanmar, the Philippines and Indonesia. It is this less direct means of waging war which
arguably poses the greatest threat.
The Saker: Do you think that we will see the day when US forces will have to leave South
Korean, Japan or Taiwan?
A.B. Abrams: Other than a limited contingent of Marines recently deployed to guard
the American Institute , U.S. forces are not currently stationed in Taiwan. The massive
force deployed there in the 1950s was scaled down and American nuclear weapons removed in 1974
in response to China's acceptance of an alliance with the United States against the Soviet
Union. Taiwan's military situation is highly precarious and the disparity in its strength
relative to the Chinese mainland grows considerably by the year. Even a large American military
presence is unlikely to change this – and just 130km from the Chinese mainland they would
be extremely vulnerable and could be quickly isolated from external support in the event of a
cross straits war. We could, however, see a small American contingent deployed as a 'trigger
wire' – which will effectively send a signal to Beijing that the territory is under
American protection and that an attempt to recapture Taiwan will involve the United States.
Given trends in public opinion in Taiwan, and the very considerable pro-Western sentiments
among the younger generations in particular, it is likely that Taipei will look to a greater
rather than a lesser Western military presence on its soil in future.
Japan and particularly South Korea see more nuanced public opinion towards the U.S., and
negative perceptions of an American military presence may well grow in future – though
for different reasons in each country. Elected officials alone, however, are insufficient to
move the American presence – as best demonstrated by the short tenure of Prime Minister
Hatoyama in Japan and the frustration of President Moon's efforts to restrict American
deployments of THAAD missile
systems in his first year. It would take a massive mobilization of public opinion –
backed by business interests and perhaps the military – to force such a change. This
remains possible however, particularly as both economies grow increasingly reliant on China for
trade and as the U.S. is seen to have acted increasingly erratically in response to challenges
from Beijing and Pyongyang which has undermined its credibility. As to a voluntary withdrawal
by the United States, this remains extremely unlikely. President Donald Trump ran as one of the
most non-interventionist candidates in recent history, but even under him and with considerable
public support prospects for a significant reduction in the American presence, much less a
complete withdrawal, have remained slim.
The Saker: Some circles in Russia are trying very hard to frighten the Russian public
opinion against China alleging things like "China want to loot (or even conquer!) Siberia",
"China will built up its military and attack Russia" or "China with its huge economy will
simply absorb small Russia". In your opinion are any of these fears founded and, if yes, which
ones and why?
A.B. Abrams: A growth in Sinophobic sentiment in Russia only serves to weaken the nation and
empower its adversaries by potentially threatening its relations with its most critical
strategic partner. The same is applicable vice-versa regarding Russophobia in China. Given the
somewhat Europhilic nature of the Russian state in a number of periods, including in the 1990s,
and the considerable European soft influences in modern Russia, there are grounds for building
up of such sentiment. Indeed Radio Free Europe, a U.S. government funded nonprofit broadcasting
corporation with the stated purpose of "advancing the goals of U.S. foreign policy," notably
published sinophobic content aimed at depicting the Russian people as
victims of Chinese business interests to coincide with the Putin-XI summit in June 2019.
However, an understanding of the modern Chinese state and its interests indicates that it does
not pose a threat to Russia – and to the contrary is vital to Russia's national security
interests. While Russia historically has cultural ties to the Western nations, the West has
shown Russian considerable hostility throughout its recent history – as perhaps is most
evident in the 1990s when Russia briefly submitted itself and sought to become part of the
Western led order with terrible consequences. China by contrast has historically conducted
statecraft based on the concept of a civilization state – under which its strength is not
measured by the weakness and subjugation of others but by its internal achievements. A powerful
and independent Russia capable of protecting a genuine rules based world order and holding
lawless actors in check is strongly in the Chinese interest. It is clear that in Russia such an
understanding exists on a state level, although there is no doubt that there will be efforts by
external parties to turn public opinion against China to the detriment of the interests of both
states.
The idea that China would seek to economically subjugate Russia, much less invade it, is
ludicrous. It was from Europe were the major invasions of Russian territory came – vast
European coalitions led by France and Germany respectively with a third American led attack
planned and prepared for but stalled by the Soviet acquisition of a nuclear deterrent. More
recently from the West came sanctions, the austerity program of the 1990s, the militarization
of Eastern Europe, and the demonization of the Russian nation – all intended to subjugate
and if possible shatter it. Even at the height of its power, China did not colonize the
Koreans, Vietnamese or Japanese nor did it seek to conquer Central Asia. Assuming China will
have the same goals and interests as a Western state would if they were in a similar position
of strength is to ignore the lessons of history, and the nature of the Chinese national
character and national interest.
The Saker: The Russian military is currently vastly more capable (even if numerically much
smaller) than the Chinese. Does anybody in China see a military threat from Russia?
A.B. Abrams: There may be marginalized extreme nationalists in China who see a national
security from almost everybody, but in mainstream discourse there are no such perceptions. To
the contrary, Russia's immense contribution to Chinese security is widely recognized –
not only in terms of technological transfers but also in terms of the value of the joint front
the two powers have formed. Russia not only lacks a history of annexing East Asian countries or
projecting force against them, but it is also heavily reliant on China in particular both to
keep its defense sector active and to undermine Western attempts to isolate it. Russian
aggression against China is unthinkable for Moscow – even if China did not possess its
current military strength and nuclear deterrence capabilities. This is something widely
understood in China and elsewhere.
I would dispute that Russia's military is vastly more capable than China's own, as other
than nuclear weapons there is a similar level of capabilities in most sectors in both
countries. While Russia has a lead in many key technologies such as hypersonic missiles, air
defenses and submarines to name a few prominent examples, China has been able to purchase and
integrate many of these into its own armed forces alongside the products of its own defense
sector. Russia's most prominent fighter jet for example, the Flanker (in all derivatives from
Su-27 to J-11D), is in fact fielded in larger numbers by China than by Russia itself –
and those in Chinese service have access to both indigenous as well as Russian munitions and
subsystems. Furthermore, there are some less critical but still significant sectors where China
does appear to retain a lead – for example it deployed combat jets equipped with a new
generation of active electronically scanned array radars and air to air missiles from 2017
(J-20 and in
2018 J-10C ) – while Russia has only done so this in July 2019 with the
induction of the MiG-35. Whether this is due to a Chinese technological advantage, or to a
greater availability of funds to deploy its new technologies faster, remains uncertain.
Russia's ability to provide China with its most vital technologies, and China's willingness to
rely so heavily on Russian technology to comprise so much of its inventory, demonstrates the
level of trust between the two countries
The Saker: Do you think that China could become a military threat to other countries in the
region (especially Taiwan, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc.)?
A.B. Abrams: I would direct you to a quote by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Bin Mohamed
from March this year. He stated: "we always say, we have had China as a neighbor for 2,000
years, we were never conquered by them. But the Europeans came in 1509, in two years, they
conquered Malaysia." This coming from a nationalist leader considered one of the most
sinophobic in Southeast Asia, whose country has an ongoing territorial dispute with China in
the South China Sea, bears testament to the nature of claims of a Chinese threat. It is
critical not to make the mistake of imposing Western norms when trying to understand Chinese
statecraft. Unlike the European states, China is not and has never been dependent on conquering
others to enrich itself – but rather was a civilization state which measured its wealth
by what it could its own people could produce. A harmonious relationship with India, Vietnam,
the Philippines and others in which all states' sovereign and territorial integrity is
respected is in the Chinese interest.
A second aspect which must be considered, and which bears testament to China's intentions,
is the orientation of the country's armed forces. While the militaries of the United States and
European powers such as Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and France among others are heavily
skewed to prioritize power projection overseas, China's military has made disproportionately
small investments in power projection and is overwhelmingly tailored to territorial defense.
While the United States has over 300 tanker aircraft deigned to refuel its combat jets midair
and attack faraway lands, China has just three purpose-built tankers – less than
Malaysia, Chile or Pakistan. The ratio of
logistical to combat units further indicates that China's armed forces, in stark contrast
to the Western powers, are heavily oriented towards defense and fighting near their
borders.
This all being said, China does pose an imminent threat to the government in Taipei –
although I would disagree with your categorization of Taiwan as a country. Officially the
Republic of China (ROC- as opposed to the Beijing based People's Republic of China), Taipei has
not declared itself a separate country but rather the rightful government of the entire Chinese
nation. Taipei remains technically at war with the mainland, a conflict would have ended in
1950 if the U.S. had not placed the ROC under its protection. The fast growing strength of the
mainland has shifted the balance of power dramatically should the conflict again break out into
open hostilities. China has only to gain from playing the long game with Taiwan however –
providing scholarships and jobs for its people to live on the mainland and thus undermining the
demonization of the country and hostility towards a peaceful reunification. Taiwan's economic
reliance on the mainland has also grown considerably, and these softer methods of bridging the
gaps between the ROC and the mainland are key to facilitating unification. Meanwhile the
military balance in the Taiwan Strait only grows more favorable for Beijing by the year –
meaning there is no urgency to take military action. While China will insist on unification, it
will seek to avoid doing so violently unless provoked.
The Saker: In conclusion: where in Asia do you see the next major conflict take place and
why?
A.B. Abrams: The conflict in the Asia-Pacific is ongoing, but the nature of conflict has
changed. We see an ongoing and so far highly successful de-radicalization effort in Xinjiang
– which was taken in direct response to Western attempts to turn the province into 'China's Syria or
China's Libya,' in the words of Chinese state media, using similar means. We see a harsh
Western response to
the Made in China 2025 initiative under which the country has sought to compete in key
technological fields formerly monopolized by the Western Bloc and Japan – and the result
of this will have a considerable impact on the balance of economic power in the coming years.
We see direct economic warfare and technological competition between China and the United
States – although the latter has so far refrained from escalating too far due to the
potentially devastating impact reprisals could have. We further see an information war in full
swing, with Sinophobic stories often citing 'anonymous sources' being propagated by Western
media to target not only their own populations – but also to influence public opinion in
Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Influence over third parties remains vital to isolating China and
cementing the Western sphere of influence. Use of social media and social engineering, as the
events of the past decade have demonstrated from the Middle East in 2011 to Hong Kong today,
remains key and will only grow in its potency in the coming years. We also see a major arms
race, with the Western Bloc investing heavily in an all new generation of weapons designed to
leave existing Chinese and allied defenses obsolete – from laser air defenses to
neutralize China's nuclear deterrent to sixth generation stealth fighters, new heavy bombers,
new applications of artificial intelligence technologies and new hypersonic missiles.
All these are fronts of the major conflict currently underway, and the Obama and Trump
administrations have stepped up their offensives to bring about a new 'end of history' much
like that of the 1990s – only this time it is likely to be permanent. To prevail, China
and Russia will need to cooperate at least as closely if not more so as the Western powers do
among themselves.
The Saker: thank you very much for your time and answers!
That being said, there is a major threat of conflict in the Asia-Pacific of a different
nature. Several organizations including the United Nations and the defense ministries of
Russia, Singapore and Indonesia among others have warned of the dangers posed by Islamic
terrorism to stability in the region. Radical Islamism, as most recently attested to by
Saudi Arabia's crown prince, played a key role in allowing the Western Bloc to cement its
dominance over the Middle East and North Africa – undermining Russian and Soviet
aligned governments including Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Syria – in most cases with
direct Western support. CIA Deputy Director Graham Fuller in this respect referred to the
agency's "policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our
adversaries." Several officials, from the higher brass of the Russian, Syrian and Iranian
militaries to the former President of Afghanistan and the President of Turkey, have all
alleged Western support for radical terror groups including the Islamic State for the sake
of destabilizing their adversaries. As the Asia-Pacific has increasingly slipped out of the
Western sphere of influence, it is likely that this asset will increasingly be put into
play. The consequences of the spread of jihadism from the Middle East have been relatively
limited until now, but growing signs of danger can be seen in Xinjiang, Myanmar, the
Philippines and Indonesia. It is this less direct means of waging war which arguably poses
the greatest threat.
There is hardly such a thing called "Islamic Terrorism." In most egregious cases, such as
IS, etc., it can be shown that those lowlifes have been the mercenaries of the evil West and
their accursed implant in the ME (and nowadays the hindutvars too), collectively the avowed
enemies of true monotheism, Islam. I am including the recent Colombo attacks here.
How can any so-called "muslim" who is a tool-of-evil of the enemies of Islam, be a true
muslim? How then can it be termed "Islamic Terror"? Perhaps "Islamic Apostate Terror" would
be more suitable.
Of course, there are many other non-IS muslims who are called "terrorists." The
Palestinians, the Kashmiris, etc. For us muslims, they are simply freedom fighters.
Finally, there are a few muslims who do kill in the name Islam the Charlie Hebdo killers,
Bombay\Dhaka attackers, etc. Some of them are justified (due to intense provocations) and
others not at all. I will leave it for others to judge which falls under which category.
Perhaps the listed order will help decipher that.
It must be conceded, when it comes to setting the narrative of pure deceit, the West (and
its minions, the Jooscum and their lickspittle, the hindutvars), like in all things bad, can
be satanically good. We muslims are being decimated in the propaganda war.
We still got our True Monotheism though. The pagan/godless enemies of the Almighty One are
doomed to fail against it. God willing.
The American system ran on immigration that kept discontent about massive inequality under
control because a substantial proportion of the lowest SES were immigrants just glad to be in
the US. The tAmerican ruling class decided they could make more money by offshoring
everything that could be offshored and mass immigration to keep wags from going up in the non
offshorable parts of the economy.
China and America's venal globalising elite had converging agendas, but could not fool the
common people of America and their tribune . Even the military had began to get alarmed about
the economic growth and technological progress of China, which had been benefiting from
officially sanctioned preferential treatment by the US since Carter.
Free ride is over for China, we will see China's economic and military strength
progressively tested. What America built it can break.
China was made an economic superpower by the US elites. Not because they felt sorry for China
and wanted to speed up conversion to democracy by switching them to capitalist way of doing
business first.
They made them an economic superpower, because the US elites have lost their marbles. They
simply didn't see it coming. They wanted to turn China into one giant cheap sweatshop in
order to exploit their population with a low paying manufacturing jobs, which were never
supposed to make China reach.
But they did, because no matter how much the lost generation of the western elites were
foaming at their mouths about knowledge based economy, value added economy, high tech jobs
and the other crap, it is obvious that manufacturing remains a basis for any strong economy.
That doesn't look like it's going to change even when you add robots to the mixture.
I think that Napoleon was right when he warned the world about waking up the sleeping
dragon. First they made them an economic superpower, and now they want to contain them
militarily. Good luck with that.
There is a reason why China wants to build the silk road. Silk road implies land. The US
military has never been any good at land warfare. Neither where their predecessors –
the British. China, on the other hand, showed in Korea that even then, with a backward army,
equipped with handouts from the Soviet Union, they can pretty much trash the US army.
With the silk road initiative, China will seize the control of the entire Euro-Asian land
mass – the most populous and economically productive region of the world and will be
more than happy to let the US play pirates on the seas.
Abrams is giving the West too much credit for the Sino-Soviet rift of the late 5os and 60s.
That was NOT the doing of the CIA or Western Europe. It was 90% the fault of Mao who tried
to shove Khrushchev aside as the head of world communism. Because Stalin had treated Mao
badly, Krushchev wanted to make amends and treated Mao with respect. But Mao turned out to be
a total a-hole. There are two kinds of people: Those who appreciate friendly gestures and
those who seek kindness as 'weakness'.
It's like Hitler saw Chamberlain's offer as weakness
and pushed ahead. Being kind is nice, but one should never be kind to psychopaths, and
Khrushchev was nice to the wrong person.
Mao only understood power. He sensed Khrushchev as
'weak' and acted as if he wanted to be the new Stalin. He also made international statements
that made the US-USSR relations much worse. He berated Khrushchev for seeking co-existence
with the West and pressed on for more World Revolution.
He also ignored Soviet advice not to
attempt radical economic policies (that were soon to bring China to economic ruin -- at least
Stalin's collectivization led to rise of industry; in contrast, Mao managed to destroy both
agriculture and heavy industry).
When Stalin was alive, he didn't treat Mao with any respect,
and Mao disliked Stalin but still respected him because Mao understood Power. With Stalin
gone, Khrushchev showed Mao some respect, but Mao felt no respect for Khrushchev who was
regarded as a weakling and sucker.
It was all so stupid. China and Russia could have gotten along well if not for Mao's
impetuosity. Of course, Khrushchev could be reckless, contradictory, and erratic, and his
mixed signals to the West also heightened tensions. Also, he was caught between a rock and a
hard place where the Eastern Bloc was concerned. He wanted to de-Stalinize, but this could
lead to events like the Hungarian Uprising.
Anyway, Putin and Xi, perhaps having grown up in less turbulent times, are more stable and
mature in character and temperament than Mao and Khrushchev. They don't see the Russo-China
relations as a zero sum game of ego but a way for which both sides can come to the table
halfway, which is all one can hope for.
@Priss Factor You are probably right about Hitler seeing (Neville) Chamberlain as weak.
But Hitler was a dupe for Britains much smarter and devious elites, who successfully played
him to do their bidding. Hitler, along with the major members of the nazis, had been
significantly influenced by Neville's elder cousin who spurred the nazis towards 'the
ultimate solution'.
Instead of being weak in the manner Hitler may have thought, Neville saved Hitler from his
own generals.
In historical turns , when Britain has appeared weak, it mostly is a deliberate faint.
Be it in Gallipoli, St Petersburg in 1919, Norway or Singapore in WW2.
Commendable contribution by Mr Abrams to enlighten the confused western establishment.
" China by contrast has historically conducted statecraft based on the concept of a
civilization state – under which its strength is not measured by the weakness and
subjugation of others but by its internal achievements. "
In my view the Usa had an excellent opportunity to enact in a positive way after WW2 but
blew it. The main reason was the failure to live up to the above quoted characterisation of
the Chinese. To encourage potential achievers in the best sense of the word.
Instead the Us oligarchy held back independent and creative thinking and brainwashed the
population, in a way that weakened them.
Jfk tried to encourage his countrymen but other forces prevailed.
Americans cannot understand our relations with China by looking at events just the past 75
years. During the century before, European imperial powers and the United States treated
China as a open borders business opportunity backed by foreign military force. China was
infested by mini-colonies to profit from China's riches. The "Opium Wars" shock decent
Americans.
This is just think tank swamp vapor. No real analysis, no real recommendation on adaption of the USA to the collapse of global neoliberal
system (aka the USA empire)
At the heart of the alignment between China and Russia is their shared interest in undermining U.S. influence globally. The two
countries are united in their mutual displeasure with the United States and the U.S.-dominated international order that they feel
disadvantages them. But while Russia and China may have initially banded together in discontent, their repeated engagement on areas
of mutual interest is fostering a deeper and enduring partnership.
It is clear that China will pose the greatest challenge to U.S. interests for the foreseeable future, but Beijing's increasing
collaboration with Moscow will amplify that challenge.
... ... ...
Washington must come to terms with this China-Russia alignment and work to address and manage it. To contain the depth of alignment,
Washington must look for opportunities to strain the seams in the Russia-China relationship. Russia and China may be drawing closer,
but their interests -- and especially their approaches -- are not identical. Russia and China compete in the Middle East, for example,
for military sales and nuclear energy deals. And their very different approaches to Europe could be a source of strain. In communicating
with Beijing, Washington should underscore how Russian interference in these countries could generate instability that threatens
China's growing economic interests.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is focused on combating China's unfair economic practices, a worthy undertaking. But any trade
war "victory" will be incomplete if Washington does not address Beijing's challenge, in collaboration with Moscow, to the very fabric
of the rules-based order that underpins continued U.S. global leadership and prosperity. Washington will be ineffective if it seeks
to go it alone. Pushing back against the illiberal influence of an aligned Russia and China will require the collective heft of Allies
and partners. The time is ripe to tackle this issue with America's European Allies. Europe has grown more attuned to -- and concerned
about -- the threat that China poses and shares the U.S. imperative to compete with Russia and China.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor is a senior fellow and director of the Center for New American Security's Transatlantic Security Center.
Contents of the article correlate extremely poorly with the title... I don't see even a semblance of a "containment plan" other
than a vague outline that US should ask EU countries something as of yet unspecified...
The evidence that Israel produces nuclear weapons was revealed more than thirty years ago by
Mordechai Vanunu , who had worked in the Dimona plant: published by The Sunday Times on October
5, 1986, after being screened by leading nuclear weapons experts. Vanunu, kidnapped by the
Mossad in Rome and transported to Israel, was sentenced to 18 years of hard jail time and,
after being released in 2004, subject to severe restrictions.
Israel has today (though without admitting it) an arsenal estimated at 100-400 nuclear
weapons, including new generation mini-nukes and neutron bombs, and produces plutonium and
tritium in such quantities as to build hundreds more.
The Israeli nuclear warheads are ready to launch on ballistic missiles, such as the Jericho
3, and on F-15 and F-16 fighter bombers supplied by the USA, to which the F-35 are now
added.
As confirmed by the numerous IAEA inspections, Iran has no nuclear weapons and commits not
to produce them, according to the agreement under strict international control.
However – writes former US Secretary of State Colin Powell on March 3, 2015 in an
email that has come to light –
"the boys in Tehran know Israel has 200 nuclear weapons, all targeted on Tehran, and we
have thousands".
The US European allies, which formally continue to support the agreement with Iran, are
basically aligned with Israel. Germany supplied Israel with six Dolphin submarines, modified so
as to launch nuclear cruise missiles, and approved the supply of three more.
Germany, France, Italy, Greece and Poland participated, with the USA, in the Blue Flag 2017,
the largest international aerial warfare exercise in Israel's history. Italy, linked to Israel
by a military cooperation agreement (Law No. 94, 2005), participated in the exercise with
Tornado fighters of the 6th Wing of Ghedi, assigned to carry US B-61 nuclear bombs (which will
soon be replaced by B61-12). The US participated with F-16 fighters of the 31st Fighter Wing of
Aviano, assigned to the same function.
The Israeli nuclear forces are integrated into the NATO electronic system, within the
framework of the "Individual Cooperation Program" with Israel, a country which, although not a
member of the Alliance, has a permanent mission to NATO headquarters in Brussels.
According to the plan tested in the US-Israel Juniper Cobra 2018 exercise, US and NATO
forces would come from Europe (especially from the bases in Italy) to support Israel in a war
against Iran. It could start with an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, like the one
carried out in 1981 on Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq. In the event of Iranian retaliation,
Israel could use a nuclear weapon by starting a chain reaction with unpredictable outcomes.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rh6OBut_bHk
Source: PandoraTV
*
This article was originally published by Il Manifesto.
Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on
Globalization.
The idiots in DC are literally talking about nuclear war with Russia right now in a defense
spending/policy hearing on CSPAN. Sickening. I'm not sure why I even turned on the TV.
The
"premise" is that Russia launches a "tactical" low yield weapon, and the consensus is that
we would not "measure" it and respond in kind, but start an all out nuclear war.
Everyone knows that actual discussions regarding policy are done in closed door
meetings (and several reps have referred to this happening at a later time).
So are we at that point in Idiocracy, where we believe our propaganda has some effect on
our enemy? Is it 1950? FFS
Last year, the nation was confronted with a brief reminder of how Cold War-era nuclear panic
played out, after a state employee in Hawaii mistakenly sent out an emergency alert declaring
that a "ballistic missile threat" was "inbound." The message didn't specify what kind of
missile -- and, in fact, the United States Army Space and Missile Defense Command at two sites
in Alaska and California may have some capability to shoot down a few incoming ballistic
missiles -- but panicked Hawaii residents didn't feel protected. They reacted by careening cars
into one another on highways, pushing their children into storm drains for protection and
phoning their loved ones to say goodbye -- until a second message, 38 minutes later,
acknowledged it was an error.
Hypersonics pose a different threat from ballistic missiles, according to those who have
studied and worked on them, because they could be maneuvered in ways that confound existing
methods of defense and detection. Not to mention, unlike most ballistic missiles, they would
arrive in under 15 minutes -- less time than anyone in Hawaii or elsewhere would need to
meaningfully react. How fast is that, really? An object moving through the air produces an
audible shock wave -- a sonic boom -- when it reaches about 760 miles per hour. This speed of
sound is also called Mach 1, after the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach. When a projectile flies
faster than Mach's number, it travels at supersonic speed -- a speed faster than sound. Mach 2
is twice the speed of sound; Mach 3 is three times the speed of sound, and so on. When a
projectile reaches a speed faster than Mach 5, it's said to travel at hypersonic speed.
One of the two main hypersonic prototypes now under development in the United States is
meant to fly at speeds between Mach 15 and Mach 20, or more than 11,400 miles per hour. This
means that when fired by the U.S. submarines or bombers stationed at Guam, they could in theory
hit China's important inland missile bases, like Delingha, in less than 15 minutes. President
Vladimir Putin has likewise claimed that one of Russia's new hypersonic missiles will travel at
Mach 10, while the other will travel at Mach 20. If true, that would mean a Russian aircraft or
ship firing one of them near Bermuda could strike the Pentagon, some 800 miles away, in five
minutes. China, meanwhile, has flight-tested its own hypersonic missiles at speeds fast enough
to reach Guam from the Chinese coastline within minutes.
One concept now being pursued by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency uses a
conventional missile launched from air platforms to loft a smaller, hypersonic glider on its
journey, even before the missile reaches its apex. The glider then flies unpowered toward its
target. The deadly projectile might ricochet downward, nose tilted up, on layers of atmosphere
-- the mesosphere, then the stratosphere and troposphere -- like an oblate stone on water, in
smaller and shallower skips, or it might be directed to pass smoothly through these layers. In
either instance, the friction of the lower atmosphere would finally slow it enough to allow a
steering system to maneuver it precisely toward its target. The weapon, known as Tactical Boost
Glide, is scheduled to be dropped from military planes during testing next year. Under an
alternative approach, a hypersonic missile would fly mostly horizontally under the power of a
"scramjet," a highly advanced, fanless engine that uses shock waves created by its speed to
compress incoming air in a short funnel and ignite it while passing by (in roughly one
two-thousandths of a second, according to some accounts). With its skin heated by friction to
as much as 5,400 degrees, its engine walls would be protected from burning up by routing the
fuel through them, an idea pioneered by the German designers of the V-2 rocket.
The unusual trajectories of these missiles would allow them to approach their targets at
roughly 12 to 50 miles above the earth's surface, in an attacker's sweet spot. That's below the
altitude at which ballistic missile interceptors -- such as the costly American Aegis
ship-based system and the Thaad ground-based system -- are now designed to typically operate,
yet above the altitude that simpler air defense missiles, like the Patriot system, can reach.
They would zoom along in the defensive void, maneuvering unpredictably, and then, in just a few
final seconds of blindingly fast, mile-per-second flight, dive and strike a target such as an
aircraft carrier from an altitude of 100,000 feet.
Officials will have trouble, moreover, predicting exactly where any strike would land.
Although the missiles' launch would probably be picked up by infrared-sensing satellites in its
first few moments of flight, Griffin says they would be roughly 10 to 20 times harder to detect
than incoming ballistic missiles as they near their targets. And during their flight, due to
their maneuverability, the perimeter of their potential landing zone could be about as big as
Rhode Island. Officials might sound a general alarm, but they'd be clueless about exactly where
the missiles were headed. "We don't have any defense that could deny the employment of such a
weapon against us," Gen. John E. Hyten, commander of United States Strategic Command, told the
Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2018. The Pentagon is just now studying what a
hypersonic attack might look like and imagining how a defensive system might be created; it has
no settled architecture for it, and no firm sense of the costs.
Developing these new weapons hasn't been easy. A 2012 test was terminated when the skin
peeled off a hypersonic prototype, and another self-destructed when it lost control. A third
hypersonic test vehicle was deliberately destroyed when its boosting missile failed in 2014.
Officials at Darpa acknowledge they are still struggling with the composite ceramics they need
to protect the missiles' electronics from intense heating; the Pentagon decided last July to
ladle an extra $ 34.5 million into this effort this
year.
The task of conducting realistic flight tests also poses a challenge. The military's
principal land-based site for open-air prototype flights -- a 3,200-acre site stretching across
multiple counties in New Mexico -- isn't big enough to accommodate hypersonic weapons. So fresh
testing corridors are being negotiated in Utah that will require a new regional political
agreement about the noise of trailing sonic booms. Scientists still aren't sure how to
accumulate all the data they need, given the speed of the flights. The open-air flight tests
can cost up to $100 million.
The Air Force's portion of this effort is being managed from its largest base, Eglin,
located in the Florida panhandle, under the direction of the 96 th Test Wing, whose
official slogan is "Make It Happen." But the most recent open-air hypersonic-weapon test was
completed by the Army and the Navy in October 2017, using a 36,000-pound missile to launch a
glider from a rocky beach on the western shores of Kauai, Hawaii, toward Kwajalein Atoll, 2,300
miles to the southwest. The 9 p.m. flight created a trailing sonic boom over the Pacific, which
was expected to top out at an estimated 175 decibels, well above the threshold at which noise
causes physical pain. The effort cost $160 million, comparable to 6 percent of the total
hypersonics budget proposed for 2020.
The RAND Corporation recently published a document entitled
Overextending
and Unbalancing Russia. Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options
. The study is the
collective effort of experienced diplomats, including former Assistant Secretary of State for
Europe and US Ambassador to the European Union James Dobbins; a professor (Brookings Institution,
American Enterprise Institute, National Defence University) and military intelligence branched
lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, Raphael Cohen; and seven other RAND researchers who
specialise in international relations, the military industry, intelligence, politics, and
technology.
It is a practical recommendation for how the
US can use Russia's weakness and vulnerability to further limit its political and economic
potential.
So what, exactly, are these influential political
analysts suggesting to the American establishment?
Their full spectrum of operations is divided into
four sections – economic, geopolitical, ideological and informational, and military measures. It is
clear that the experts approached the development of their strategy rationally by measuring the
potential costs for the US itself.
The economic section consists of four options that
Russia has already been directly affected by in previous years. The first of these is expanding the
production and export of US energy resources, which would affect global prices and therefore limit
Russia's profits. The second is strengthening sanctions, where the involvement of other countries
in such a process is seen as essential. Next is helping Europe find new gas suppliers, including
for LNG supplies. And, finally, encouraging migration from Russia to other countries, especially
with regard to skilled workers and educated young people. It is assumed that the first three
options would be the most beneficial to the US, although imposing deeper sanctions could bring
certain risks.
In the section on geopolitical measures, the
US experts propose six geopolitical scenarios aimed at weakening Russia.
They don't just
involve the Russian Federation, either, but neighbouring countries as well. Each scenario has
certain risks, costs, and an expected impact.
According to the Americans,
helping
Ukraine by supplying the country with weapons would exploit Russia's greatest vulnerability
.
But any increase in the supply of US weapons and advice to Ukraine would need to be
carefully calibrated in order to increase the costs to Russia of supporting its existing
commitments without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would
have significant advantages.
Syrian Democratic Forces trainees, representing an equal number of Arab and Kurdish
volunteers, stand in formation at their graduation ceremony in northern Syria, August 9, 2017.
This is the first option. The RAND experts believe
that this will be the most beneficial, but that its possible realisation will also involve high
risks.
The second option is to increase support
to the Syrian rebels.
This could jeopardise other US policy priorities, however, such
as combating radical Islamic terrorism, and could destabilise the entire region even further. It
might not even be possible, given the radicalisation, fragmentation, and decline of the Syrian
opposition.
The RAND experts obviously understand all the
possible dangers involved in this scenario, but, reading between the lines, it is easy to see that
this option is basically implying the use of terrorist groups in the geopolitical interests of the
US. There is nothing new about this method in and of itself, but it can be rather costly to
implement and comes with considerable risks, and, in the best case scenario, the likelihood of
success is moderate. It could also upset America's traditional allies, as happened during the Iraq
invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
The third option is promoting
liberalisation in Belarus.
The authors admit that this is unlikely to succeed,
however, and could provoke a strong response from Russia, which would lead to a general worsening
of the security situation in Europe and be a setback for US policy. As with the first option, it
comes with high risk, but the benefits could also be considerable. Needless to say that what is
really being referred to here is a colour revolution in the Republic of Belarus. The country's
leadership should pay attention to this recommendation by the RAND Corporation and ask the US
diplomats in Minsk for comment.
Expanding ties in the South Caucasus,
which competes economically with Russia, is the fourth option,
but it would be
difficult to implement because of geography and history.
The fifth scenario is reducing Russia's
influence in Central Asia,
which could also prove difficult and disproportionately
expensive for the US.
And the sixth, and final, scenario is
organising an uprising in Transnistria and expelling Russian troops, which would be a blow to
Russia's prestige.
This could also have the opposite effect, however, since Moscow
would save money, but it could well lead to additional costs for the US and its allies.
Muscovites protesting the war in Ukraine and Russia's support of separatism in the Crimea on
the Circular Boulevards in Moscow on March 15, 2014
It should be noted that all six scenarios are
aimed at Russia's neighbours. They are a kind of re-working of the old Anaconda strategy unleashed
on Russia's borders.
The section on ideological and informational measures
is aimed at the Russian Federation's domestic policies and is essentially interfering in the
country's affairs. There are just four scenarios, but they speak for themselves:
undermining faith in the electoral system; creating the idea that the political elite does not
serve the interests of society; instigating protests and non-violent resistance; and undermining
Russia's image abroad.
Tellingly, the proposed military measures against
Russia have the largest number of options and are separated into three strategic areas – air, sea,
and land.
It states that repositioning bombers to within
striking distance of key Russian strategic targets would have a high likelihood of success and
would undoubtedly attract Moscow's attention and cause unease. The costs and risks associated with
this option would be fairly low, as long as the bombers are based out of range of most of Russia's
ballistic and ground-based cruise missiles.
Marines assigned to the Thunderbolts of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 251 remove a
training AGM-88 HARM from an F/A-18C Hornet on the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier
USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71).
Reposturing fighter jets so that they are closer to
their targets than bombers. Although the RAND experts believe that such actions could worry Moscow
more than the option with the bombers, the probability of success is low but the risks are high.
Since each aircraft would have to fly several sorties during a conventional conflict because of low
payload, there is a risk that they could be destroyed on the ground and their deployment airfields
could be shut down early on.
Deploying additional tactical nuclear weapons to
parts of Europe and Asia could increase Russia's worry, which could lead to a significant increase
in investment in its air defences. In combination with the 'bomber' option, it has a high
probability of success, but deploying a large number of these weapons could make Moscow react in
ways that go against the interests of the US and its allies.
Repositioning US and allied ballistic missile defence
systems to better deter Russian ballistic missiles would also make Moscow uneasy, but it would
probably be the least effective option since Russia has plenty of missiles that could be used for
any upgrades. US and allied targets would also remain at risk.
A U.S. sailor aboard the guided missile destroyer USS Mustin (DDG 89) fires a torpedo at a
simulated target during Valiant Shield 2014 in the Pacific Ocean September 18, 2014.
The report also suggests developing new
low-observable, long-range bombers or significantly increasing the number of those types that are
already causing unease in Moscow. There is also mention of high numbers of autonomous or remotely
piloted strike aircraft.
As the RAND experts point out,
the key risk
of these options is an arms race, which could lead to cost-imposing strategies directed against the
United States.
For example, investing in ballistic missile defence systems and space-based
weapons would alarm Moscow, but Russia could defend itself against such developments by taking
measures that would probably be considerably cheaper than the cost of these systems to the United
States.
With regard to a maritime confrontation, RAND
suggests increasing the presence of US and allied navies in those zones considered potentially
dangerous because of Russia. It is probably safe to assume that this is referring to the Baltic
Sea, the Arctic, and the Black Sea/Mediterranean Basin. The report also mentions increasing
investment in research and developing new types of weapons that could strike Russian nuclear
submarines. At the same time, it would be a good idea for the US itself to increase the fleet of
submarines in its nuclear triad. And, finally, with regard to the Black Sea, the report suggests
using NATO to develop an access denial strategy – probably through the deployment of long-range,
anti-ship missiles – in order to increase Russia's defence spending in Crimea.
On land, the report's authors believe that there
should be an increase in the number of European NATO troops deployed directly on the Russian
border. They also emphasise the importance of increasing the size and scale of NATO exercises in
Europe, which would send a clear signal to Russia. Another option is to develop intermediate-range
missiles but not deploy them, which would force Russia to upgrade its missile programme (an
additional cost). And, finally, the report suggests investing in new technologies (weapons based on
new physical principles such as lasers) aimed at countering Russian air defence systems.
Exercise Artemis Strike was a German-led tactical live-fire exercise with live Patriot and
Stinger missiles at the NATO Missile Firing Installation in Chania, Greece, from October 31 to
November 9, 2017
As can be seen, all four sections are complementary
in their diversity. The Pentagon has already been working on some innovations in the last few years
as part of the
Third Offset Strategy
, while
the current and new budget suggests that, one way or another, the US will continue to build up its
military power.
Together with other advisory documents for
high-level decision makers in the US, this report by RAND experts is evidence of a large-scale
campaign being carried out against Russia.
It is surprising, however, that all of the
recommendations, especially those included in the military section, are virtually pointing to the
preparation of a war with Russia. It calmly talks about what the US can do about existing arms
limitation treaties, how to use NATO, and how to use Ukraine in the war with Russia, especially on
land and in the Black Sea theatre of operations. There is no doubt that the recommendations
themselves were passed on to US decision-making centres a long time before April 2019, when the
monograph was published. All that remains is to monitor the implementation of these scenarios and
take the appropriate countermeasures.
"... Across-the-board rivalry with China is becoming an organising principle of US economic, foreign and security policies. ..."
"... An effort to halt China's economic and technological rise is almost certain to fail. Worse, it will foment deep hostility in the Chinese people. In the long run, the demands of an increasingly prosperous and well-educated people for control over their lives might still win out. But that is far less likely if China's natural rise is threatened. ..."
"... The tragedy in what is now happening is that the administration is simultaneously launching a conflict between the two powers, attacking its allies and destroying the institutions of the postwar US-led order. ..."
The disappearance of the Soviet Union left a big hole. The "war on terror" was an inadequate replacement. But China ticks all boxes.
For the US, it can be the ideological, military and economic enemy many need. Here at last is a worthwhile opponent. That was the
main conclusion I drew from this year's Bilderberg meetings.
Across-the-board
rivalry with China is becoming
an organising principle of US economic, foreign and security policies.
Whether it is Donald Trump's organizing principle is less important. The US president has the gut instincts of a nationalist and
protectionist. Others provide both framework and details. The aim is US domination. The means is control over China, or separation
from China.
Anybody who believes a rules-based multilateral order, our globalised economy, or even harmonious international relations, are
likely to survive this conflict is deluded. The astonishing
white paper on the
trade conflict
, published on Sunday by China, is proof. The -- to me, depressing -- fact is that on many points Chinese positions are right.
The US focus on
bilateral imbalances is economically illiterate. The view that theft of intellectual property has caused huge damage to the US
is
questionable . The proposition that China has grossly violated its commitments under its 2001 accession agreement to the World
Trade Organization is hugely exaggerated.
Accusing China of cheating is hypocritical when almost all trade policy actions taken by the Trump administration are in breach
of WTO rules, a fact implicitly conceded by its determination
to destroy the
dispute settlement system .
A dispute over the terms of market opening or protection of intellectual property might be settled with careful negotiation. Such
a settlement might even help China, since it would lighten the heavy hand of the state and promote market-oriented reform.
But the issues are now too vexed for such a resolution. This is partly because of the bitter breakdown in negotiation. It is still
more because the US debate is increasingly over whether integration with China's state-led economy is desirable. The fear over Huawei
focuses on national security and technological autonomy.
[Neo]liberal commerce is increasingly seen as "trading with the enemy".
A framing of relations with China as one of zero-sum conflict is emerging. Recent remarks by Kiron Skinner, the US state department's
policy planning director (a job once held by cold war strategist George Kennan) are revealing. Rivalry with Beijing,
she suggested at a
forum organised
by New America , is "a fight with a really different civilisation and a different ideology, and the United States hasn't had
that before".
She added that this would be "the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian". The war with Japan
is forgotten.
But the big point is her framing of this as a civilizational and racial war and so as an insoluble conflict. This cannot be accidental.
She is also still in her job. Others present the conflict as one over ideology and power.
Those emphasising the former point to President Xi Jinping's Marxist rhetoric and the reinforced role of the
Communist party . Those emphasising the latter point to China's rising economic might. Both perspectives suggest perpetual conflict.
This is the most important geopolitical development of our era. Not least, it will increasingly force everybody else to take sides
or fight hard for neutrality. But it is not only important. It is dangerous. It risks turning a manageable, albeit vexed, relationship
into all-embracing conflict, for no good reason. China's ideology is not a threat to liberal democracy in the way the Soviet Union's
was. Rightwing demagogues are far more dangerous.
An effort to halt China's economic and technological rise is almost certain to fail. Worse, it will foment deep hostility in the
Chinese people. In the long run, the demands of an increasingly prosperous and well-educated people for control over their lives
might still win out. But that is far less likely if China's natural rise is threatened.
Moreover, the rise of China is not an important cause of western malaise. That reflects far more the indifference and incompetence
of domestic elites. What is seen as theft of intellectual property reflects, in large part, the inevitable attempt of a rising economy
to master the technologies of the day. Above all, an attempt to preserve the domination of 4 per cent of humanity over the rest is
illegitimate.
This certainly does not mean accepting everything China does or says. On the contrary, the best way for the west to deal with
China is to insist on the abiding values of freedom, democracy, rules-based multilateralism and global co-operation. These ideas
made many around the globe supporters of the US in the past.
They still captivate many Chinese people today. It is quite possible to uphold these ideas, indeed insist upon them far more strongly,
while co-operating with a rising China where that is essential, as over protecting the natural environment, commerce and peace.
A blend of competition with co-operation is the right way forward. Such an approach to managing China's rise must include co-operating
closely with like-minded allies and treating China with respect.
The tragedy in what is now happening is that the administration is simultaneously launching a conflict between the two powers,
attacking its allies and destroying the institutions of the postwar US-led order.
Today's attack on China is the wrong war, fought in the wrong way, on the wrong terrain. Alas, this is where we now are.
"... However, nothing in the actual piece talks about security concerns. (I point this out because I perceive a trend towards such misleading summaries and headlines which contradict what the actual reporting says.) ..."
"... These companies do not have security concerns over Huawei. But the casual reader, who does not dive down into the actual piece, is left with a false impression that such concerns are valid and shared. ..."
"... South China Morning Post ..."
"... This move by Google-USG is mostly a propaganda warfare move. Huawei doesn't depend on smartphone sales to survive. It's American market was already small, while China's domestic market is huge. China is not Japan. ..."
"... Trump's heavy handed move against Huawei will backfire. The optic is unsettling; the US looks to be destroying a foreign competitor because it is winning. ..."
"... Until the reserve currency issue favoring the "exceptional" nation changes, the economic terrorism will continue.. ..."
"... What is funny in all these stories, is that there is little to no Huawei equipment (not the end-user smart phone, home router and stuff, but backbone routers, access equipment,..) anywhere in the US -- they are forbidden to compete. Most telcos are quite happy to sell in the US, as the absence of these Chinese competitors allows for healthy margins, which is no longer true in other markets. ..."
"... The US is trying desperately to quash tech success / innovation introduced by others who are not controlled by (or in partnership with) the US, via economic war, for now just politely called a trade war - China no 1 adversary. ..."
"... Attacking / dissing / scotching trade between one Co. (e.g. Huawei) and the world is disruptive of the usual, conventional, accepted, exchange functioning, and throws a pesky spanner in the works of the system. Revanchard motives, petty targetting, random pot-shots, lead to what? ..."
"... The war against Huawei is only one small aspect within the overall Trade War, which is based on the false premise of US economic strength. Most of the world wants to purchase material things, not financial services which is the Outlaw US Empire's forte and most of the world can easily forego. Trump's Trade War isn't going as planned which will cause him to double-down in a move that will destroy his 2020 hopes. ..."
However, nothing in
the actual piece talks about security concerns. (I point this out because I perceive a trend towards such misleading summaries
and headlines which contradict what the actual reporting says.)
The British processor company ARM, which licenses its design to Huawei, cites U.S. export controls as the reason to stop cooperation
with Huawei:
The conflict is putting companies and governments around the world in a tough spot, forcing them to choose between alienating
the United States or China .
Arm Holdings issued its statement after the BBC reported the firm had told staff to suspend dealings with Huawei.
An Arm spokesman said some of the company's intellectual property is designed in the United States and is therefore " subject
to U.S. export controls ."
Additionally two British telecom providers quote U.S. restrictions as reason for no longer buying Huawei smartphones:
BT Group's EE division, which is preparing to launch 5G service in six British cities later this month, said Wednesday it would
no longer offer a new Huawei smartphone as part of that service. Vodafone also said it would drop a Huawei smartphone from
its lineup. Both companies appeared to tie that decision to Google's move to withhold licenses for its Android operating software
from future Huawei phones.
These companies do not have security concerns over Huawei. But the casual reader, who does not dive down into the actual
piece, is left with a false impression that such concerns are valid and shared.
That the Trump administration says it has security reasons for its Huawei ban does not mean that the claim is true. Huawei
equipment is as good or bad as any other telecommunication equipment, be it from Cisco or Apple. The National Security Agency
and other secret services will try to infiltrate all types of such equipment.
After the sudden ban on U.S. entities to export to Huawei, chipmakers like Qualcomm temporarily stopped their relations with
Huawei. Google said that it would no longer allow access to the Google Play store for new Huawei smartphones. That will diminish
their utility for many users.
The public reaction in China to this move was quite negative. There were many calls for counter boycotts of Apple's i-phones
on social media and a general anti-American sentiment.
The founder and CEO of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei, tried to counter that. He gave a
two hour interview (vid, 3 min excerpt with subtitles)
directed at the Chinese public. Ren sounds very conciliatory and relaxed. The Global Times and the South China Morning
Post only have shortexcerpts
of what he said. They empathize that Huawei is well prepared and can master the challenge:
I do not believe this is precisely what will happen. Huawei already has its licenses purchased. In addition they could decide
to disrespect the IP if this was the case.
Huaweis's suppliers in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan (ROC), and Britain are examining if they can continue to make business with
Huawei, while some have already declared a suspension in cooperation.
The issue is that these non-American companies nonetheless use some American components of technology, and if they proceed
they will be sanctioned by the US themselves.
It is the same reason why Russia's Sukhoi did not in the end sell its SSJ-100 airliners to Iran -- East Asian tech companies
can hardly be expected to be more gung-ho on defying the US than Russia's leading defense plant......
@p #2 - Huawei surely has their processors *as of now*.
That - if USA would not ban Huawei (HiSilicon) processors, because of using that ARM technology. Thing is, Huawei would be
isolated from next-generation ARM processors. They are locked now in their current generation.
Even Qualcomm today, for what I know, bases their processors on ARM's "default" schemes, instead of doing their development
"from scratch", in a totally independent way. It would push for slow but steady decline as "top" smartphone vendor into "el cheapo"
niche.
Boeing is the counter-part in the contest to destroy Huawei. China has great leverage over Boeing's future. It is the nation with
the biggest market now and downstream for 10-20 years. China need planes, thousands of them.
As for Huawei's chief doubting the prowess of the Chinese students, he only needs to look at the rapidity of the conversion
of his nations' economy to a 98% digital economy. All that conversion was done by local, entrepreneurial innovators in the software
and hardware tech sector. It happened only in China and completely by Chinese young people who had phones and saw the future and
made it happen.
It has been Chinese minds building Chinese AI on Chinese Big Data.
Yes, they need Russian technologists and scientists. Those Russian minds in Russia, in Israel, in South Korea are proven difference
makers.
The need China now has will meet the solution rapidly. For five years, the Double Helix of Russia-China has been coming closer
in education and R&D institutes in both nations. China investors and Chinese sci-tech personnel are in the sci-tech parks of Russia,
and Russians are in similar facilities in China. More will happen now that the Economic War against China threatens.
Huawei will have solutions to replace all US components by the end of the year. It will lose some markets. but it will gain
hugely in the BRI markets yet to be developed.
In the long run, the US makers will rue the day Trump and his gang of Sinophobes and hegemonists took aim at Huawei and China's
tech sector.
This move by Google-USG is mostly a propaganda warfare move. Huawei doesn't depend on smartphone sales to survive. It's American
market was already small, while China's domestic market is huge. China is not Japan.
Besides, it's not like Europe is prospering either. Those post-war days are long gone.
And there's no contradiction between what the CEO said and the Government line: both are approaching the same problem from
different points of view, attacking it from different fronts at the same time. "Patriotism" is needed insofar as the Chinese people
must be prepared to suffer some hardships without giving up long term prosperity. "Nationalism" ("politics") is toxic insofar
as, as a teleological tool, it is a dead end (see Bannon's insane antics): the Chinese, after all, are communists, and communists,
by nature, are internationalists and think beyond the artificial division of humanity in Nation-States.
Talking Digital and security in the same sentence is laughable.... NOTHING Digital is 'secure',,, never has,,, never will.
Digital destroys everything it touches. At present, excepting for now the low wage States, it is destroying economies ever
so slowly one sector at a time. This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with the dying West, especially the
USA which is trying desperately to save what's left of its production whether it be 5G, Steel plants or Nord Stream. The West
created China when it happily allowed and assisted Western corporations to move the production there in order to hide the inflation
that was being created for wars and welfare and now has to deal with the fallout which eventually will be their undoing.
A full-blown trade war was probably inevitable, driven by geopolitical concerns as much or more than economics.
One wonders what each of China and US has been doing to prepare. It seems like the answer is "very little" but since it's USA
that is driving this bus, I would think that USA would've done more to prepare (than China has).
PS It's not just Boeing. China also supplies the vast majority of rare earth minerals.
Her captivity and probable imprisonment in the US explain his attitude. She is a high profile pawn. The US must convict her
in order to justify what they have done to her so far. She may not serve time, in the US prisons, but she will be branded a guilty
person, guilty of violating the Empire's rules (laws).
Imagine Ivanka in the same situation. Her daughter singing in Mandarin would be little help. The Trump Family will be a number
one target for equal treatment long after "45" leaves office.
The US Empire is wild with Power. All of that Power is destructive. And all the globe is the battlefield, except USA. But History
teaches that this in-equilibrium will not last long.
We've seen how Europe caved to US pressure to stop trading with Iran. Now Japan and others are caving to pressure to stop trading
with China. There is already pressure and negotiation to stop Nordstream. And all of the above leads to questions about Erdogan's
resolve.
Trump's heavy handed move against Huawei will backfire. The optic is unsettling; the US looks to be destroying a foreign competitor
because it is winning.
The ramifications of trade war with China (where the supply and manufacturing chain of most consumer electronics is these days)
is disruptive. Trump has created uncertainty for many manufacturers since there is Chinese part content is just about everything
these days. Some manufacturers might relocate production to the US but most will try to simply decouple from the US entirely.
Exposure to the US is really the problem not exposure to China.
The trade war with Iran was also unlikely to persist. But it has persisted, and deepened as European poodles pretended to resist
and then pretended not to notice that they didn't.
A new Bloomberg opinion piece agrees with that view
No, it doesn't b. You say USA trade war will fail because it lacks international support. Bloomberg says USA should get international
support to make it more effective. The difference is that it is highly likely that USA will get international support. It already
has support from Japan.
USA has proven that it can effectively manipulate it's poodle allies. Another example is Venezuela where more than two dozen
countries recognized Guido only because USA wanted them to.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
It's not Trump but the US Deep State that causes US allies to fall in line. Any analysis that relies on Trump as President
is bound to fail as his public persona is manipulated to keep Deep State adversaries (including the US public) off-balance.
Like President's before him, Trump will take the blame (and the credit) until another team member is chosen to replace him
in what we call "free and fair elections".
What is funny in all these stories, is that there is little to no Huawei equipment (not the end-user smart phone, home router
and stuff, but backbone routers, access equipment,..) anywhere in the US -- they are forbidden to compete. Most telcos are quite
happy to sell in the US, as the absence of these Chinese competitors allows for healthy margins, which is no longer true in other
markets.
So the Huawei ban hits first and foremost the US' partners.
China can only undo the US-exceptionalsim if and when it can visibly project military power. The only way to achieve
that is tt has to make great haste in building a few fleets of aircraft carriers, fregats and destroyers, etc. It must
build a grand, visibly magnificent Chinese Navy.
Modi wins in India, another victory for the world oligarchs. Exactly mimicking conditions in the U$A. Media and governmental
capture by the uber wealthy...
The US is trying desperately to quash tech success / innovation introduced by others who are not controlled by (or in partnership
with) the US, via economic war, for now just politely called a trade war - China no 1 adversary.
Afaik, the entire smart-phone industry is 'integrated' and 'regulated' by FTAs, the WTO, the patent circuit, the Corps. and
Gvmts. who collaborate amongst themselves.
Corps. can't afford to compete viciously because infrastructure, aka more encompassing systems or networks (sic) are a pre-requisite
for biz, thus, Gvmts. cooperate with the Corps, and sign various 'partnerships,' etc.
sidebar. Not to mention the essential metals / components provenance, other topic. see
Attacking / dissing / scotching trade between one Co. (e.g. Huawei) and the world is disruptive of the usual, conventional,
accepted, exchange functioning, and throws a pesky spanner in the works of the system. Revanchard motives, petty targetting, random
pot-shots, lead to what?
As I wrote in the Venezuela thread, major US corps are already belt tightening by permanently laying off managers, not already
cut-to-the-bone production staff, and another major clothing retailer is closing its 650+ stores. And the full impact of Trump's
Trade War has yet to be felt by consumers. As Wolff, Hudson and other like-minded economists note, there never was a genuine recovery
from 2008, while statistical manipulation hides the real state of the US economy. One thing that cannot be hidden is the waning
of revenues collected via taxes which drives the budget deficit--and the shortfall isn't just due to the GOP Congress's tax cuts.
The war against Huawei is only one small aspect within the overall Trade War, which is based on the false premise of US economic
strength. Most of the world wants to purchase material things, not financial services which is the Outlaw US Empire's forte and
most of the world can easily forego. Trump's Trade War isn't going as planned which will cause him to double-down in a move that
will destroy his 2020 hopes.
Data for 2019 is probably slightly different, but the trends should keep on. That data also does not separate Android-based
phones from non-Android phones. So, segmenting Android into Google and China infrastructures would mean
1) Huawei retains a $152B market - China
2) Huawei retains an unknown share in $87B market - APAC
3) Huawei loses a $163,9B market - all non-China world.
At best Huawei looses 40,7% of world market. That if all APAC population would voluntarily and uniformly drop out of Google
services into Huawei/China services (which they would not). At worst Huawei retains 37,7% of the marker (if APAC population would
uniformly follow Google, which they would not either).
Presumably, RF has been falsely accused in Salisbury. Presumably, RF and Syria have been
falsely accused in Douma. Presumably, Russia and Syria have been falsely accused over Khan
Seikhoun. Presumably, RF has been falsely accused and PUNISHED over the athletes drug doping.
Presumably, RF has been falsely accused over MH17 tragedy. Presumably, the US/EU/NATO/GCC
know all this, and still they carry on?
There can be only ONE reaction from President Putin.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
NO MORE MR NICE GUY.
How this translates into action is up to him and the Russian people. Godspeed to the
mighty Russian Federation, who have become MORE Christian than the US. (I observe this as a
British Indian Hindu).
This reminds me of the moment when the Gita is revealed to Arjuna by Lord Krishna, on the
verge of a war he had done everything to avoid. Lord Krishna revealed how Arjuna had to do
his duty, his dharma, no matter what his attachment. Godspeed President Putin and the RF
military leaders and brave soldiers!
"If President Trump had ever read Mackinder -- and there's no evidence he did -- one might
assume that he's aiming at a new anti-Eurasia integration pivot centered on the Persian Gulf.
And energy would be at the heart of the pivot.
If Washington were able to control everything, including "Big Prize" Iran, it would be
able to dominate all Asian economies, especially China. Trump even said were that to happen,
"decisions on the GNP of China will be made in Washington."...
...Arguably the key (invisible) takeaway of the meetings this week between Foreign
Ministers Sergey Lavrov and Wang Yi, and then between Lavrov and Pompeo, is that Moscow made
it quite clear that Iran will be protected by Russia in the event of an American showdown.
Pompeo's body language showed how rattled he was.
What rattled Pomp: "Any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies, be it
small-scale, medium-scale or any other scale, will be treated as a nuclear attack on our
country. The response will be instant and with all the relevant consequences,"
Trump may not have read Mackinder but Kissinger sure would have.
steven t johnson , Apr 28, 2019 11:37:43 AM |
link
<
Rhisiart Gwilym@30 seems to think that Putin boasting means it's real. This is incorrect.
There is a great deal of historical experience with new weapons. About the only one that was
unanswerable was the chariot and heavy cavalry (with armored rider.) But that was because of
the difficulty in finding large enough horses. The bow spread rapidly. Iron weapons spread
more slowly, although it is easier to transport iron ore than to raise cavalry horses. But
not even iron weapons made the Hittites invincible. They beat the Egyptians, but their empire
still fell, and Egypt's didn't. >
In more recent times, again, the usual experience of new weapons is that they always take
much time to incorporate successfully. And they never make the old armies obsolete. The
modern weapon that came closest to actually winning the war was, as near as I can tell, the
submarine, at least against island nations needing large imports. (Submarine warfare against
Japanese shipping is unsung, but was quite important as I understand it.) The machine gun,
the hydraulic recoil artillery, the flamethrower, the grenade, the barbed wire, the tank, the
plan...none of them compensated for weakness. In the end, however much the new weapons
changed, skilled leadership and determined soldiers who kept their morale could compensate.
And none of these weapons ever compensated for the caste arrogance of incompetent officers or
the demoralization of conscripts used as cannon fodder.
Now that is reality. This reality will crush a Putin press conference.
@steven t johnson #1
I don't know for a fact that the new Russian weapon systems are real, but the technological
breakthroughs behind them are very believable.
Instead of a "magic" stealth capability via ginormous spending as the F-35 is supposed to be
able to do - on top of which it can do via jump jet, carrier based, air superiority, ground
attack, etc etc all at once, the Russian systems are based on a single nuclear engine plus
some civilian grade autonomous guidance capability.
The tidal torpedo is this engine, running underwater, and autonomously guided. The Russian
military has always had very interesting underwater tech including the fastest sub ever
actually built plus the hyperspeed underwater missile/torpedo - which actually creates an
underwater air bubble and travels in it, a tech which the US, I believe, has no idea how to
replicate.
The hyperspeed missile, the same nuclear engine at max power.
The world-spanning cruise missile, the same nuclear engine at long duration plus
autonomous vehicle tech including GLONASS and terrain following - which existing Russian
anti-ship and cruise missile systems must already have.
We do know that Russian tech is very advanced in terms of rocketry; Russian nuclear
systems have also been progressing for decades - unlike in the US where 3 Mile Island stopped
pretty much all nuclear tech development, outside of bombs, for 4 decades.
From my view, it is very possible that this engine exists.
I'd also note that the new systems are primarily deterrence. Yes, a hyperspeed nuclear
missile could be used for first strike, but none of these systems are really useful for
colonialist domination or beating down of "terrorists" with AK47s and sandals.
The new systems aren't for land control - which all of your examples are used for. They're
intended for deterrence/defense.
Land control weapons are different because they require enormous scale.
The theory of air superiority as demonstrated by WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq1, Iraq2,
Afghanistan, Syria, Libya etc is a good example where the theory is that the ability to
destroy the enemy's industry and "will to fight" would be able to replace the need to
actually field soldiers and armies.
American hagiography falsely believes it is the strategic bombing in WW2 that defeated the
Germans; the reality was clearly 20 million dead Russians, millions of live ones in tanks
which eventually took down the Wehrmacht at its peak.
Vietnam was an outright failure - ginormous amounts of bombs, napalm and Agent Orange
failed to break the Vietnamese people's will to fight.
Korea - it worked until it didn't. The US bombed the crap out of the entire country but
ultimately the Chinese manpower turned the tide (note many of these Chinese "volunteers" were
ex-Nationalists sent out to die).
Iraq1 worked - a quick demonstration strike against a 3rd rate military that thought it
was 2nd rate, but Iraq2 showed that just taking down the official military isn't enough to
actually win on the ground.
Afghanistan - ditto. Bombs everywhere for 17+ years, and the Taliban is stronger than ever
before.
Libya - I suspect Gaddafi never thought he'd get stabbed in the back like he did, and was
woefully unprepared, but again US and French/British bombers were used to take down
strongpoints so that the various tribes could roll into town.
Lastly Syria: the presence of Russian military tech stopped the one-sided use of airpower,
and a literal handful of Russian attack jets turned the tide for the entire conflict despite
hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry poured into Syria by the UAE, Qatar, Turkey and
Saudi Arabia.
It seems the lessons you are trying to teach are simply the wrong ones: Japanese
shipping/American submarines - the reality was that Japan didn't have the manpower or the
oil. Japan had 73 million people in 1940 vs. the US @132M (Germany had 90M). Japan was
significantly behind industrially, economically and technologically. Yes, the US was
participating in Europe - but Japan was also attacking China (population 825M).
For that matter, it is very clear that Japan had significant provocation prior to Pearl
Harbor in the form of an oil embargo imposed by the US US State Dept web site
documenting embargo on Japan (sound familiar? US sanctions aren't anything new)
"... The real test for having an “unprecedentedly high level” relationship would be to coordinate diplomatic campaigns against U.S. policies. Working together they are more likely to split off American allies and friends from unpopular initiatives, such as unilateral sanction campaigns. ..."
"... Lets all mindlessly repeat the platitudes of Thinktankistan entities like CATO... Russian economy is smaller than new York... Russian relies on oil sales and doesn't make anything.... These sock puppets must think we are imbeciles. ..."
"... He's an Atlantacist fool. Senior fellow at the CATO institute, pretty much says it all. His style is to drop the odd truth-bomb (like criticizing the ill-advised NATO expansion and US geopolitical belligerence) but he still sticks to the main planks of Euro-Atlantic narratives. ..."
...Beijing and Moscow share one very big objective: resist U.S. dominance. Washington
expanded NATO up to Russia's borders; America's navy patrols the Asia-Pacific and treats those
waters as an American lake. Elsewhere there is no issue upon which Washington fails to
sanctimoniously pronounce its opinion and piously attempt to enforce its judgment.
Unfortunately, for quite some time Washington has seemed determined to give both China and
Russia good cause for discontent. Instead, in response, Washington should do its best to
eliminate behaviors which bring its two most important competitors together. Then the United
States wouldn't need to worry what Presidents Putin and Xi were saying to one another
.
Thus, Washington has done much to bring its two leading adversaries together. However,
hostility is a limited basis for agreement. There is no military alliance, despite Chinese
participation in a Russian military exercise last fall. Neither government is interested in
going to war with America and certainly not over the other’s grievances. A shared sense
of threat could change that, but extraordinarily sustained and maladroit U.S. policies would be
required to create that atmosphere.
When the two countries otherwise act for similar purposes, it usually is independently, even
competitively, rather than cooperatively. For instance, both are active in Cuba, contra
Washington’s long-failed policy of starving the regime into submission. Beijing and
Moscow also are both supporting Venezuela’s beleaguered Maduro government. However, China
and Russia appear to be focused on advancing their own government’s influence, even
against that of the other.
Both nations have a United Nations Security Council veto, though the PRC traditionally has
preferred to abstain, achieving little, rather than cast a veto. However, working together they
could more effectively reshape allied proposals for UN action. They could do much the same in
other multilateral organizations, though usually without having a veto.
The real test for having an “unprecedentedly high level” relationship would
be to coordinate diplomatic campaigns against U.S. policies. Working together they are more
likely to split off American allies and friends from unpopular initiatives, such as unilateral
sanction campaigns. Europe is more likely to cooperate if the PRC, valued for its economic
connections, joined Russia, still distrusted for its confrontation with Ukraine and
interference in domestic European politics. So far this former communist “axis” has
been mostly an inconvenience for the United States, rather than a significant hindrance,
Still, that could change if the Trump administration makes ever more extraordinary
assertions of unilateral power. Washington officials appear to sense the possibilities, having
periodically whined about cooperation between China and Russia, apparently ill-prepared for any
organized opposition to U.S. policies.
... ... ...
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to
President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire
.
"China appears poised to absorb Russia’s sparsely populated east."
Good Lord, but when does this endless BS end? Seriously, no-one really believes this
yet these clowns and fools keep trotting out these absurd canards.
"In a sense, the Putin-Xi meeting was much ado about nothing. The relationship
revolves around what they are against, which mostly is the United States. They would have
little to talk about other than the latest grievance about America to express or American
activity to counter."
Yeah sure... no reason why Putin and Xi wouldn't want to talk about economic links
given that Russia-China trade is now over $100B per year equivalent.... a figure reached
more than 5 years earlier than Western "experts" had predicted, and which is growing very
strongly.
Lets all mindlessly repeat the platitudes of Thinktankistan entities like CATO...
Russian economy is smaller than new York... Russian relies on oil sales and doesn't make
anything.... These sock puppets must think we are imbeciles.
Orwell predicted "It is a warfare of limited aims between
combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause
for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference."
He's an Atlantacist fool. Senior fellow at the CATO institute, pretty much says it
all. His style is to drop the odd truth-bomb (like criticizing the ill-advised NATO
expansion and US geopolitical belligerence) but he still sticks to the main planks of
Euro-Atlantic narratives.
"... A lot of money not only in the USA but from the vassal states is and was at stake thus when Trump came along with his anti-imperial rhetoric ..."
"... Whatever Candidate Trump may or may not thought about a militaristic foreign policy, once in office he was properly tutored in the realities of the game. He now realizes that the MIC exists purely through the sufferance of external "enemies"; that "Full-Spectrum Dominance" means what it says; that America Numba One is non-negotiable; that Israel sets ME policy for the US; and that there is no limit to the DoD budget. Any policy changes outside of those parameters is tolerated and here we are plus ça change, etc., etc. ..."
President Bush withdrew the United States unilaterally from the Antiballistic Missile
Treaty, correct? Now, this treaty was related, because it forbid the deployment of so-called
missile defense in a way that either side, American or Russian, could think that it had such
great missile defense, it had a first strike capability. And everybody agreed nobody should
think that. Mutually assured destruction had kept us safe in the nuclear age. But if Russia
or the United States gets a first strike capability, then you don't have assured mutual
destruction, and some crazy person might be tempted to risk it. So how did the Russians react
to that? They began to develop–as I said before, when we began to deploy missile
defense–a new generation of weapons. In other words, you're getting this classic
action, reaction, action, reaction that drove the previous nuclear arms race, and now it's
happening again.
Decisions on whether to go to nuclear war are down to less than 5 minutes. That's the reason
the Doomsday clock is closer to midnight than ever before. And Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton will
be making the decisions.
Since the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire Washington has been worried that its
existence as an imperial capital was in danger due to the rise of the small government right.
A lot of money not only in the USA but from the vassal states is and was at stake thus when
Trump came along with his anti-imperial rhetoric the entire Washington Establishment rose as
one and screamed "off with his head" so Trump had to mollify everyone by more warlike
rhetoric and allying himself with the Saudis and the neo-fascists in Israel and it looks like
he will finish out his term.
Detente will never come no matter who wins next year and no one
wants nuclear war but we could step into it as Cohen warns.
But I believe today that military
leaders have shown how adept they were in avoiding conflict in Syria so I'm more hopeful than
Cohen.
Whatever Candidate Trump may or may not thought about a militaristic foreign policy, once
in office he was properly tutored in the realities of the game. He now realizes that the MIC
exists purely through the sufferance of external "enemies"; that "Full-Spectrum Dominance"
means what it says; that America Numba One is non-negotiable; that Israel sets ME policy for
the US; and that there is no limit to the DoD budget. Any policy changes outside of those
parameters is tolerated and here we are plus ça change, etc., etc.
China has risen explosively, from being clearly a "Third World" country forty years ago to
become a very serious and rapidly advancing competitor to America. Anyone who has seen today's
China (I recently spent two weeks there, traveling muchly) will have been astonished by the
ubiquitous construction, the quality of planning, the roads and airports and high-speed rail,
the sense of confidence and modernity. Compare this with America's rotting and dangerous
cities, swarms of homeless people, deteriorating education, antique rail, deindustrialized
midlands, loony government, and ahe military sucking blood from the economy like some vast
leech, and America will seem yesterday's country. The phrase "national suicide" comes to
mind.
A common response to these observations from thunder-thump patriots is the assertion that
the Chinese can't invent anything, just copy and steal. What one actually sees is a combination
of rapid and successful adoption of foreign technology (see Shanghai maglev below) and,
increasingly, cutting edge science and technology. More attention might be in order.
This year. A couple of decades ago, Chinese students in the US often refused to return to a
backward and repressive country. It now appears that Asia is where the action is and they want
to be part of it.
All those things you mentioned are micro-innovations, not macro ones.
China hasn't come up with a game-changer like the internet.
But we must keep in mind that most of the West hasn't been all that innovative either.
Rather, there have been spurts and sudden explosions followed by little activity.
Look at the Greeks. So creative long long ago but what happened to that fire during
Byzantine yrs? And what are Greeks today? And Italians? And Renaissance was mostly about few
parts of Northern Italy. Italy made some great films in the 20th century but hasn't been a
key player in much of anything.
And most European peoples haven't been all that innovative. It was only pockets of places
in UK, France, and Germany mostly in the modern era. What big thing came out of Poland,
Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and etc? There are surely exceptions, but they weren't major
players.
Innovations are about sparks. Sparks of inspiration, ingenuity. But for sparks to catch
fire, there has to be dry wood. The problem for East Asia was it tended to suppress
spark-mentality and, besides, the wood was wet with tradition and customs.
But then, a nation that defines itself by genius and innovation alone will fail too. Why?
Because only a tiny number of people are genius or innovative. Most people are 'lame'. If a
nation comes to define itself mainly by wealth, smarts, and genius, then most people will
have no value. Also, the top smarties will identify mainly with smarties in other parts of
the world than with their own 'lame' folks. This is why Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and
Singapore are going the wrong path. They've emphasized excellence so much that only elites
have value, and these elites feel closer to Western elites than with their own 'lame' masses
who are to be replaced like white folks in US and EU.
Certain sectors are doing better than ever. Also, US continues to be the top magnet of
talent around the world.
But in other ways, it is falling apart.
Much of US will end up worse but much of it will get richer.
US will be like a hyper Latin American nation with great riches and great poverty.
A common response to these observations from thunder-thump patriots is the assertion
that the Chinese can't invent anything, just copy and steal.
Well, let's do a thought exercise and simply assume that this is 100% true, that the
Chinese can't invent anything, just copy, steal and maintain what whites invent. Does that
change your opinion that China will overtake the West? It shouldn't.
The West is slowly (at least for now) imploding. We are importing the 3rd world, while we
demonize whites. The West has managed to avoid dramatic decline because whites were still a
large majority of the citizens. That is changing. Whites are less than 50% of births in the
United States. Non-whites account for 1 in 3 births in England. Muslims account for at least
20% of births in France with Sub-Saharan Africans making up between 5% and 10% of the
births.
We'll reach a tipping point at some point where things start to noticeably decline. China
doesn't need to outdo the West. It just has to avoid declining with the West. If China simply
maintains the technology and societal organization of the West while the West falls into
tribal warfare – hot or cold – China will become the dominate power.
@Anon I'd agree with that.
But under that scenario, China will still become the dominant world power. We're on our way
to be a sort-of Brazil of the North. Well, Brazil doesn't do much on the world stage.
We simply won't have the money or talent to maintain a global military and cultural
presence. Then again, we'll probably still be run by Jews, so we'll like remain a presence in
the Middle East.
"... "If that was to happen and no energy source can cover the decline rate, wouldn't the world be pretty fucked economically thereafter? Hence one can assume or take a wild ass guess that the decline after peak would resemble something like Venezuela. So not a smooth short % decline rate." ..."
"... Realistically the global economy is already in a tight spot. It started back in 2000 when Oil prices started climbing from about $10/bbl in 1998 to about $30/bbl in 2000. Then the World Major Central banks dropped interest which ended triggering the Housing Boom\Bust and carried Oil prices to $147/bbl. Since then Interest rates have remained extremely low while World Debt has soared (expected to top $250T in 2019). ..."
"... Probably the biggest concern for me is the risking risks for another World war: The US has been targeting all of the major Oil exporters. The two remaining independent targets are Venezuela & Iran. I suspect Venzuela will be the next US take over since it will be a push over compared to Iran. ..."
"If that was to happen and no energy source can cover the decline rate, wouldn't the world be pretty fucked economically
thereafter? Hence one can assume or take a wild ass guess that the decline after peak would resemble something like Venezuela.
So not a smooth short % decline rate."
Energy is the economy, The economy cannot function without energy. Thus its logical that a decline in energy supply will reduce
the economy. The only way for this not to apply is if there are efficiency gains that offset the decline. But at this point the
majority of cost effective efficiency gains are already in place. At this point gains become increasing expensive with much smaller
gains (law of diminishing returns). Major infrastructure changes like modernizing rail lines take many decades to implement and
also require lots of capital. Real capital needed will be difficult to obtain do to population demographics (ie boomers dependent
on massive unfunded entitlement & pensions).
Realistically the global economy is already in a tight spot. It started back in 2000 when Oil prices started climbing from
about $10/bbl in 1998 to about $30/bbl in 2000. Then the World Major Central banks dropped interest which ended triggering the
Housing Boom\Bust and carried Oil prices to $147/bbl. Since then Interest rates have remained extremely low while World Debt has
soared (expected to top $250T in 2019).
My guess is that global economy will wipe saw in the future as demographics, resource depletion (including Oil) and Debt all
merge into another crisis. Gov't will act with more cheap and easy credit (since there is no alterative TINA) as well as QE\Asset
buying to avoid a global depression. This creating a wipesaw effect that has already been happening since 2000 with Boom Bust
cycles. This current cycle has lasted longer because the Major central banks kept interest rates low, When The Fed started QT
and raising rate it ended up triggering a major stock market correction In Dec 2018. I believe at this point the Fed will no longer
seek any further credit tightening that will trip the economy back into recession. However its likely they the global economy
will fall into another recession as consumers & business even without further credit tighting by CB (Central Banks) Because they've
been loading up on cheap debt, which will eventually run into issues servicing their debt. For instance there are about 7M auto
loans in delinquency in March of 2019. Stock valuations are largely driven by stock buybacks, which is funded by debt. I presume
companies are close to debt limit which is likely going to prevent them from purchase more stock back.
Probably the biggest concern for me is the risking risks for another World war: The US has been targeting all of the major
Oil exporters. The two remaining independent targets are Venezuela & Iran. I suspect Venzuela will be the next US take over since
it will be a push over compared to Iran. I think once all of remaining independent Oil Exports are seized that is when the
major powers start fighting each other. However is possible that some of the proxy nations (Pakastan\India),(Israel\Iran), etc
trigger direct war between the US, China, and Russia at any time.
Notice that the US is now withdrawing from all its major arms treaties, and the US\China\Russia are now locked into a Arms
race. Nuclear powers are now rebuilding their nuclear capacity (more Nukes) and modernizing their deployment systems (Hypersonic,
Very large MIRV ICBMS, Undersea drones, Subs, Bombers, etc.
My guess is that nations like the US & China will duke it out before collapsing into the next Venezuela. If my assessment is
correct, The current state of Venezuela will look like the garden of Eden compared to the aftermath of a full scale nuclear war.
Currently the Doomsday clock (2019) is tied with 1953 at 2 minutes:
1953 was the height of the cold war. I presume soon the Doomsday clock will be reduced to less than 2 Minutes later this
year, due to recent events in the past few weeks.
"the world's nuclear nations proceeded with programs of "nuclear modernization" that are all but indistinguishable from
a worldwide arms race, and the military doctrines of Russia and the United States have increasingly eroded the long-held taboo
against the use of nuclear weapons."
" The current international security situation -- what we call the "new abnormal" -- has extended over two years now.
It's a state as worrisome as the most dangerous times of the Cold War, a state that features an unpredictable and shifting
landscape of simmering disputes that multiply the chances for major military conflict to erupt."
Many people I talk to seem to think American foreign policy has something to do with
democracy, human rights, national security, or maybe terrorism or freedom, or niceness, or
something. It is a curious belief, Washington being interested in all of them. Other people
are simply puzzled, seeing no pattern in America's international behavior. Really, the
explanation is simple.
Ahhh..yes..nothing like the handiwork of the shitstains,morons ,leprechauns, cnts and
cckskkers in the USA State Department over the last few decades that COUL:D have fostered
fundamental sanity in international relations but did not do so:
"A nuclear catastrophe in the making?
No one should underestimate the danger of what would be the first-ever war between
nuclear-armed states. Since the 2001-2002 war crisis, which saw a million Indian troops
deployed on the Pakistan border for nine months, both countries have developed hair-trigger
strategies, with a dynamic impelling rapid escalation. In response to India's Cold Start
strategy, which calls for the rapid mobilization of Indian forces for a multi-front invasion
of Pakistan, Islamabad has deployed tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons. India has, in
return, signaled that any use by Pakistan of tactical nuclear weapons will break the
"strategic threshold," freeing India from its "no first use" nuclear-weapon pledge, and be
met with strategic nuclear retaliation.
All this would play out in a relatively small, densely populated area. The center of
Lahore, Pakistan's second largest city with a population in excess of 11 million, lies little
more than 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from the Indian border. The distance from New Delhi to
Islamabad is significantly less than that between Berlin and Paris or New York and Detroit
and would be travelled by a nuclear-armed missile in a matter of minutes.
A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would not only kill tens of millions in
South Asia. A 2008 simulation conducted by scientists who in the 1980s alerted the world to
the threat of "nuclear winter" determined that the detonation of a hundred Hiroshima-scale
nuclear weapons in an Indo-Pakistani war would, due to the destruction of large cities,
inject so much smoke and ash into the upper atmosphere as to trigger a global agricultural
collapse. This, they predicted, would lead to a billion deaths in the months that followed
South Asia's "limited" nuclear war."
"... When the Soviet Empire collapsed, America appeared poised to establish the first truly world empire. The developed countries were American vassals in effect if not in name, many of them occupied by American troops: Among others, Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Latin America, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. The US had by far the dominant economy and the biggest military, controlled the IMF, NATO, the dollar, SWIFT, and enjoyed technological superiority.. Russia was in chaos, China a distant smudge on the horizon. ..."
"... Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating the planet. The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice. ..."
"... A major purpose of the destruction of Iraq was to get control of its oil and put American forces on the border of Iran, another oil power. The current attempt to starve the Iranians aims at installing a American puppet government. The ongoing coup in Venezuela seeks control of another vast oil reserve. It will also serve to intimidate the rest of Latin America by showing what can happen to any country that defies Washington. Why are American troops in Nigeria? Guess what Nigeria has. ..."
"... America cannot compete with China commercially ..."
"... Beijing's advantages are too great: A huge and growing domestic market, a far larger population of very bright people, a for-profit economy that allows heavy investment both internally and abroad, a stable government that can plan well into the future. ..."
"... Increasingly America's commercial power is as a consumer, not a producer. Washington tells other countries, "If you don't do as we say, we won't buy your stuff." ..."
"... As America's competitiveness declines, Washington resorts to strong-arm tactics. It has no choice. A prime example is the 5G internet, a Very Big Deal, in which Huawei holds the lead. Unable to provide a better product at a better price, Washington forbids the vassals to deal with Huawei–on pain of not buying their stuff. In what appears to be desperation, the Exceptional Nation has actually made a servile Canada arrest the daughter of Huawei's founder. ..."
When the Soviet Empire collapsed, America appeared poised to establish the first truly world
empire. The developed countries were American vassals in effect if not in name, many of them
occupied by American troops: Among others, Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Latin America,
Saudi Arabia, and Australia. The US had by far the dominant economy and the biggest military,
controlled the IMF, NATO, the dollar, SWIFT, and enjoyed technological superiority.. Russia was
in chaos, China a distant smudge on the horizon.
Powerful groups in Washington, such as PNAC, began angling towed aggrandizement, but the
real lunge came with the attack on Iraq. Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating
the planet. The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice.
The world runs on oil. Controlling the supply conveys almost absolute power over those
countries that do not have their own. (For example, the Japanese would soon be eating each
other if their oil were cut off.) Saudi Arabia is an American protectorate,and, having seen
what happened to Iraq, knows that it can be conquered in short order if it gets out of line.
The U. S. Navy could easily block tanker traffic from Hormuz to any or all countries.
A major purpose of the destruction of Iraq was to get control of its oil and put American
forces on the border of Iran, another oil power. The current attempt to starve the Iranians
aims at installing a American puppet government. The ongoing coup in Venezuela seeks control of
another vast oil reserve. It will also serve to intimidate the rest of Latin America by showing
what can happen to any country that defies Washington. Why are American troops in Nigeria?
Guess what Nigeria has.
Note that Iraq and Iran, in addition to their oil, are geostrategically vital to a world
empire. Further, the immensely powerful Jewish presence in the US supports the Mid-East wars
for its own purposes. So, of course, does the arms industry. All God's chillun love the
Empire.
For the Greater Empire to prevail, Russia and China, the latter a surprise contender, must
be neutralized. Thus the campaign to crush Russia by economic sanctions. At the same time
Washington pushes NATO, its sepoy militia, ever eastward, wants to station US forces in Poland,
plans a Space Command whose only purpose is to intimidate or bankrupt Russia, drops out of the
INF Treaty for the same reasons, and seeks to prevent commercial relations between Russia and
the European vassals (e.g., Nordstream II).
China of course is the key obstacle to expanding the Empire. Ergo the trade war. America
has to stop China's economic and technological progress, and stop it now, as it
will not get another chance.
The present moment is an Imperial crunch point. America cannot compete with China
commercially or, increasingly, in technology. Washington knows it. Beijing's advantages are too
great: A huge and growing domestic market, a far larger population of very bright people, a
for-profit economy that allows heavy investment both internally and abroad, a stable government
that can plan well into the future.
America? It's power is more fragile than it may seem. The United States once dominated
economically by making better products at better prices, ran a large trade surplus, and barely
had competitors. Today it has deindustrialized, runs a trade deficit with almost everybody,
carries an astronomical and uncontrolled national debt, and makes few things that the world
can't get elsewhere, often at lower cost.
Increasingly America's commercial power is as a consumer, not a producer. Washington tells
other countries, "If you don't do as we say, we won't buy your stuff." The indispensable
country is an indispensable market. With few and diminishing (though important) exceptions, if
it stopped selling things to China, China would barely notice, but if it stopped buying, the
Chinese economy would wither. Tariffs, note, are just a way of not buying China's stuff.
Since the profligate American market is vital to other countries, they often do as ordered.
But Asian markets grow. So do Asian industries.
As America's competitiveness declines, Washington resorts to strong-arm tactics. It has no
choice. A prime example is the 5G internet, a Very Big Deal, in which Huawei holds the lead.
Unable to provide a better product at a better price, Washington forbids the vassals to deal
with Huawei–on pain of not buying their stuff. In what appears to be desperation, the
Exceptional Nation has actually made a servile Canada arrest the daughter of Huawei's
founder.
The tide runs against the Empire. A couple of decades ago, the idea that China could compete
technologically with America would have seemed preposterous. Today China advances at startling
speed. It is neck and neck with the US in supercomputers, launches moonlanders, leads in 5G
internet, does leading work in genetics, designs world-class chipsets (e.g., the Kirin 980 and
920) and smartphones. Another decade or two of this and America will be at the trailing
edge.
The American decline is largely self-inflicted. The US chooses its government by popularity
contests among provincial lawyers rather than by competence. American education deteriorates
under assault by social-justice faddists. Washington spends on the military instead of
infrastructure and the economy. It is politically chaotic, its policies changing with every new
administration.
The first rule of empire is, "Don't let your enemies unite." Instead, Washington has pushed
Russia, China, and Iran into a coalition against the Empire. It might have been brighter to
have integrated Iran tightly into the Euro-American econosphere, but Israel would not have let
America do this. The same approach would have worked with Russia, racially closer to Europe
than China and acutely aware of having vast empty Siberia bordering an overpopulated China. By
imposing sanctions of adversaries and allies alike, Washington promotes dedollarization and
recognition that America is not an ally but a master.
It is now or never. If America's great but declining power does not subjugate the rest of
the world quickly, the rising powers of Asia will swamp it. Even India grows. Either sanctions
subdue the world, or Washington starts a world war. Or America becomes just another
country.
To paraphrase a great political thinker, "It's the Empire, Stupid."
"Washington has pushed Russia, China, and Iran into a coalition against the Empire."
Turkey may soon join them, then Iraq might revolt. South Korea has tired of the
warmongering and may join too, which is why Washington is giving them the lead in dealing
with North Korea. But a united Korea identifes more with China than the USA, so the USA wants
to block that idea. The Germans are unhappy too, with all the warmongering, immigration, and
American arrogance.
Sorry Fred, but you're too late. It's all over. Just that your maniacal rulers, i.e. Pompeo,
Bolton et al can't see it. Or, Cognitive Dissonance being painful, refuse to.
Warsaw recently was a case in point. The two biggest European countries, Germany and France
refused to even send a senior representative. All people did was listen in an embarrassed
silence while Pompeo tried to make like a latter day Julius Cesear. At the same time, Russia,
Turkey and Iran met in Sochi, and worked out how they were going to take the next solving the
mess in Syria, the way they want it.
Incidentally, you could also go onto YouTube and watch RT's subtitled [also horrible voice
over, but you can't have everything I guess] of President Putin's "Address to Parliament and
the Nation". It runs for close to 1.5 hours. You will hear the problems Russia has, how Putin
addresses the concerns of the people, their complaints re poor access in country areas to
medicine, and his orders on how this is to be fixed.
But you will also hear the moves forward, that Russia now has a trade surplus [remember
those?] and can afford all the programs it needs. It's the world leading exporter of Wheat,
and other commodities are catching up.
Then he will tell you and show videos of the latest 2 defense weapons – and they are
things America cannot defend against. He also in light of the US withdrawing from the INF
treaty made a very clear statement, should the US be so stupid as to think it can use Europe
as it's war ground, and have Europeans get killed instead of Americans. "Put Intermediate
sites in Europe and use just one, and not only will we fire on the European site that sent
it, but we will also take out the "decision making centre", wherever this is".
Ponder that for a while. There is nothing US can do. The dollar is slowly being rejected and
dumped. The heartland is reamed out after billions took the productive facilities and put
them in China [so kind]. The homeless and desperate are growing in numbers.
It's all over, Fred. Time to start planning what to do when the mud really hits the fan.
Can't argue with that! Usually, I read Fred for amusement, but this is all spot on. I
particularly liked:
The American decline is largely self-inflicted. The US chooses its government by
popularity contests among provincial lawyers rather than by competence. American education
deteriorates under assault by social-justice faddists. Washington spends on the military
instead of infrastructure and the economy.
Incredible. US government cooks up lies to invade and wreck Iraq, destroy Libya, and subvert
Syria. It pulled off a coup in Ukraine with Neo-Nazis. US and its allies Saudis and Israel
gave aid, direct and indirect, to ISIS and Al-Qaida to bring down Assad or turn Syria upside
down.
But, scum like Pompeo puts forth hard-line stance against terrorists. What a bunch of vile
phonies and hypocrites.
It might have been brighter to have integrated Iran tightly into the Euro-American
econosphere, but Israel would not have let America do this. The same approach would have
worked with Russia, racially closer to Europe than China and acutely aware of having vast
empty Siberia bordering an overpopulated China.
Russia is more than racially closer, Russia is culturally much closer and by culturally I
don't mean this cesspool of new "culture". But, as you brilliantly noted:
The US chooses its government by popularity contests among provincial lawyers rather
than by competence.
Britain's time of full spectrum dominance (well trade, industry and navy really) did not
emerge fully formed from isolation as did America. England and the UK played balance of power
politics. The US can still do that for a very long time, given some basic diplomatic sense.
India, China & Pakistan present an interesting triangle. Indonesia and Vietnam are no
friends of China. Nigeria is heading for 400m people and will want to exert its own power,
not take instructions from Peking, etc, etc. Balance of power requires more fluidity than the
US has shown to date. Seeing Russia as an hereditary enemy illustrates this failure.
Can the US make the changes necessary to play balance of power politics?
The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice.
.
Not to notice (or rather, not to notice one's own noticing) what the majority doesn't
notice (OK: they don't notice that they notice, actually) is part of humankind's cerebral
package too.
You once called it the law of the pack. It can be given innumerable names -- just it doesn't
change.
The American decline is largely self-inflicted.
.
It's what follows ripe democracy, invariably -- meanjng that it can arguably not be
helped.
@Godfree Roberts
Finally a bright spot in an otherwise depressingly-fairly-truthful article. Less Government
spending is a GOOD thing, I mean, unless you are a flat-out Communist, of course ohhhhh .
And yes, the scale is WAY off. How could those 0.8 to 2.05% numbers seem even close to
reality to anyone who has a clue. I can't vouch for China, but the US number is off by a
factor of 20 to 25 . Come on, Godfree, you're (a tad bit) better than that!
That's not a bad article in general, but, as usual, Mr. Reed doesn't really have that
analytical mind to know what's really been, and is, going on.
1) There were PLENTY of Americans, many of them even politicians who wanted a "peace
dividend" after the Cold War was won. G.H.W Bush and the neocons put the kibosh on that. The
current version of empire-building didn't have to be. The Israeli-influenced neocons are most
of the reason for the post-Cold-War empire building.
2) It's not ALL about oil anymore – it seems to be a diminishing factor, what with
the US producing more oil than it imports, at this point. Mr. Reed could use a dose of
Zerohedge.com, as, along with their gloom-and-doom, they have opened my eyes to the American
meddling around the world to keep support of the Reserve Currency, the US dollar. Lots of the
countries in which the US causes trouble were trying to get out of the dollar world with
their trade.
3) Related to (2) here, China and Russia both want to eliminate the use of the dollar in
trade, including with each other. That bothers a lot of people who understand how bad the
outlook for the US economy really is, and what it would mean for the dollar to no longer be
used around the world for trade.
4) American government has handed China a completely one-sided deal (FOR China) in trade
since the mid-1990's and Bill Clinton. It's time to end that, which is what the trade war is
about. I don't dispute that American could be in a whole lot more pain over it than the
Chinese, but it's like medicine – take it now, or suffer even more later.
America? It's power is more fragile than it may seem. The United States once
dominated economically by making better products at better prices, ran a large trade
surplus, and barely had competitors. Today it has deindustrialized, runs a trade deficit
with almost everybody, carries an astronomical and uncontrolled national debt, and makes
few things that the world can't get elsewhere, often at lower cost.
@peterAUS I agree ..
Canada is "not" under America's boot. As a Canadian I respect the security America provides
Canada on the world stage but it would be a cold day in hell when i would submit to an
America with a gun in his hand. And im pretty sure our best buddies in jolly ol England might
have something to say. This isnt a pissing match. Empire is a fickle bitch.
@Bruce County Pretty
much.
As far as Australia and New Zealand are concerned it's crystal clear. Somebody has to provide
security for our way of life here; before it was United Kingdom, now it's USA.
Hehe definitely preferable to China.
Or Japan.
Or anyone here in Pacific.
If Americans want to deploy a full corps, whatever, no prob. Again, as far as "fair
skinned" English speaking citizens here are concerned. I'd even say it applies to Polynesians
around.
Now, can't say it applies to our Mohammedan citizens, and definitely not to Chinese.
It's amusing to see Westerners around here keen on replacing USA empire with Chinese. Hehe
talking about self-hate.
Granted, there are people among them who really believe in all that propaganda coming from
Beijing. Well better than taking Prozac or similar, I guess, so all good.
"Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating the planet. The astonishing thing is
that some people don't notice." That is pretty astonishing, given that most of the columns on
sites like this & even in more MSM-style publications rehash this theme ad infinitum. It
may, in fact, be more a matter of people simply getting tired of hearing it over and over
that leads them to shrug and turn to something different. It's not news anymore. How many
columns can anyone squeeze out of the same threadbare topic. Many years ago, during first
Cold War, it was still somewhat daring to expose this partially hidden truth; but now it's
old hat on both the left & right.No one really needs someone to tell them again what
everyone already knows, that's easy – but what to do about it, that's the hard part!
@Philip Owen This is
a subset of government spending and only covers R&D.
It doesn't cover corporate R&D spending, though I'm guessing that in that regard, the
two countries are even. If anyone has the numbers I'd be grateful if they'd share them.
"... The Trump administration announced on February 1 that the country was suspending its participation in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF treaty) for 180 days pending a final withdrawal. Vladimir Putin, in a meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu, announced on Saturday that the Russian Federation is also suspending its participation in the treaty in a mirror response to Washington's unilateral decision. ..."
"... "Two years before making public unfounded accusations against Russia of alleged INF Treaty violations, Washington not only took a decision, but also started preparations to production of missiles of intermediate and shorter range banned by the Treaty. Starting already June 2017, the program of expansion and upgrade of production facilities with the aims of developing intermediate and shorter range missiles banned by the Treaty was launched at Raytheon's plant in the city of Tucson, Arizona. The plant is a major diversified enterprise of the US aerospace industry that produces almost all types of missile weapons. Over the past two years the space of the plant has increased by 44% – from 55,000 to 79,000 square meters, while the number of employees is going to rise by almost 2,000 people, according to official statements. Almost at the same time as production facilities expanded, on November 2017, Congress provided the first tranche amounting to $58 mln to Pentagon, directly pointing at the development of a land-based missile of intermediate range. Consequently, the nature and time of the works demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the US administration decided to withdraw from the INF Treaty several years before unfounded accusations against Russia of violating the Treaty were made public." ..."
"... "The (US) has announced research and development works, and we will do the same. I agree with the Defense Ministry's proposals to start the work on 'landing' Kalibr missiles and developing a new area to create a land-based hypersonic missile with intermediate range." ..."
The Trump administration announced on February 1 that the country was suspending its participation in the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF treaty) for 180 days pending a final withdrawal. Vladimir Putin, in a
meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu, announced on Saturday that the Russian Federation
is also suspending its participation in the treaty in a mirror response to Washington's unilateral decision.
The INF treaty was signed by the US and the USSR in 1987 at the height of negotiations that had begun years earlier and directly
involved the leaders of the two countries. The treaty entered into force in 1988, eliminating missiles with a range of 500-1,000
kilometers (short to medium range) and 1,000-5,500 km (intermediate range). The treaty has always concerned land-based launchers
and never sea- or air-launched missiles, a legacy of a bygone era where most nuclear warheads were positioned on missiles launched
from the mainland. In subsequent years, thanks to technological advances, solutions like submarines, stealth bombers and the possibility
of miniaturizing nuclear warheads became increasingly important in the military doctrines of both the US and Russia, nullifying the
basis on which the INF treaty was initially signed, which was to avert a direct confrontation between Washington and Moscow on the
European continent.
The INF treaty, together with the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks/Treaty (SALT treaty), signed by Washington and Moscow on the
issue of long-range missiles, aimed to create a safer global environment by seeking to avoid the prospect of a nuclear exchange.
It was also aimed at reducing the number of nuclear warheads owned by the US and the USSR, as well as generally reducing proliferation
in line with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In particular, the INF treaty guaranteed a lasting peace on the European continent
through Washington not deploying nuclear weapons in Europe aimed at the USSR and Moscow in turn not deploying systems capable of
eliminating these European-based US missiles. The initial promoters of an INF agreement were obviously the European countries, who
would have found themselves in the middle of a nuclear apocalypse in the event of war between Moscow and Washington.
With 1970s technology, the time between the launch and impact of a missile with a range of 500-5500 km was about 10-12 minutes;
that was the amount of time Moscow and Washington's leaders had during the Cold War to decide whether to retaliate and thereby launch
WWIII. With today's technology, the time to decide would probably be reduced to less than 5 minutes, making it all the more difficult
to avert a nuclear exchange in the event of an accident or miscalculation. The INF treaty was thus a life-insurance policy for humanity
that decreased the statistical probability of nuclear provocation or of an accident.
During the Cold War, the
concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) was central to the nuclear doctrines of the two great powers. The INF treaty served
the purpose of taking concrete steps towards greatly reducing the possibility of mutually assured destruction.
With the unilateral withdrawal from the treaty by the US, all these safeguards and guarantees are lost, with all the consequences
that ensue from such a reckless as dangerous act.
The American and European mainstream media have applauded the withdrawal from the INF, in the same way that they have applauded
Trump whenever he has been pro-war. Former CIA and military personnel, as well as the former CEO's of major arms manufacturers, have
been eager to share their views as "experts", literally invading television programs and thereby showing why they are paid lots of
money to lobby for the military-industrial complex. They praised Trump's move, blaming Moscow for the ending of the treaty, but in
the end revealing the covert geopolitical reason why Washington decided to end the deal, namely, the fact that China is not bound
by the same treaty.
These vaunted experts on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News alluded to the danger of Washington being bound by such a treaty while Beijing
was not, thereby limiting Washington's options in the Asia-Pacific. Trump and his staff view the INF treaty as an intolerable imposition
that ties America's hands in its efforts to contain China.
US foreign policy, especially under this administration, sees every kind of agreement, past or future, as a concession, and therefore
a sign of weakness. Trump and his generals drafted the National Defense Posture, stating that the time of
great-power competition is back and that Washington's peer competitors were Moscow and Beijing. The return of great-power competition
is an excuse to "strengthen the military", as Trumps loves to say, and his decision is in line with the new defense posture review
Trump approved, seeking to confront every adversary in any domain by all means. The newly announced Space Force is a reflection of
this, seeking to put weapons in space in violation of all existing treaties. At the same time, the development of tactical nuclear
weapons also expands the use of nuclear weapons in certain circumstances, pushing the envelope on the prohibition on the use of nuclear
weapons. These new programs will end up draining even more money from taxpayers to fill the coffers of shareholders, CEOs and lobbyists
for the big arms manufacturers.
To justify the withdrawal from the INF, the military-industrial complex, which drives US foreign policy, needed a suitable justification.
Of course in a time of anti-Russia hysteria, the choice was obvious. Since 2014, the attention of so-called US experts has been focused
on the 9M729 missile in particular, an evolution of the 9M728, used by the Iskander-K weapons system, a Russian technological gem
with few equals.
NPO Novator, the company that produces the 9M729, reassures that the missile does not violate the INF treaty and has a range shorter
than the 500 km limit (470 km). Moscow even organized an exhibition open to the public, with the missile on display along with its
main features, inviting Washington to officially send its experts to view the characteristics of the 9M729. Washington refused, knowing
full well that the missile does not violate the the INF, preferring instead to use the 9M729 as an excuse to abandonment the treaty.
Washington will suspend its participation in the treaty within 180 days, and Moscow has responded with an identical measure. With
hysteria surrounding Russia (Russiagate) and the impossibility of Trump and Putin engaging in dialogue following the complete sabotaging
of relations between Moscow and Washington, it is almost impossible that a fruitful dialogue can be created to seal a new agreement
in the remaining 180 days. This, however, is not even the basic objective of the Trump administration. Unofficially, Trump says that
he would rather include Beijing in the agreement with Moscow. But knowing that this goal is impossible to achieve, he is pursuing
his broader objective of withdrawing the US from all major treaties, including the INF treaty.
In the specific case of withdrawing from the INF, there is little need to raise a big hue and cry as was the case with the Paris
Agreement, as the media-intelligence-military apparatus has a lot to gain from this. This just goes to show how the MSM and their
rolled-out "experts" thrive on war and the money that is to be made from it. There is a major psyop going on to convince the American
public that the withdrawal from the INF treaty, and the resulting arms race with
major nuclear-armed countries, is apparently the best way to keep America safe!
The withdrawal from the INF treaty opens the gates for a new nuclear-arms race that will bring great advantages to arms industries,
with great returns for shareholders, executives and CEOs, all paid for by the American taxpayer. It is more than probable that the
official defense budget in 2020, having to cover for the development of weapons previously prohibited by the INF treaty, could be
more than 800 billion dollars, seeing an increase of tens of billions of dollars in the space of 12 months.
Moscow has for several years been accusing the US of malfeasance regarding various aspects of nuclear-weapons agreements. Russia's
defence minister stated to Tass
News Agency:
"Two years before making public unfounded accusations against Russia of alleged INF Treaty violations, Washington not only
took a decision, but also started preparations to production of missiles of intermediate and shorter range banned by the Treaty.
Starting already June 2017, the program of expansion and upgrade of production facilities with the aims of developing intermediate
and shorter range missiles banned by the Treaty was launched at Raytheon's plant in the city of Tucson, Arizona. The plant is
a major diversified enterprise of the US aerospace industry that produces almost all types of missile weapons. Over the past two
years the space of the plant has increased by 44% – from 55,000 to 79,000 square meters, while the number of employees is going
to rise by almost 2,000 people, according to official statements. Almost at the same time as production facilities expanded, on
November 2017, Congress provided the first tranche amounting to $58 mln to Pentagon, directly pointing at the development of a
land-based missile of intermediate range. Consequently, the nature and time of the works demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that
the US administration decided to withdraw from the INF Treaty several years before unfounded accusations against Russia of violating
the Treaty were made public."
The unilateral withdrawal by George W. Bush from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) in 2002, citing the need for the
US to protect itself from countries belonging to the Axis of Evil (Iran, Iraq, North Korea), was an excuse to deploy the Aegis system
(land- or sea-based) in strategic areas around the Russian Federation, so as to diminish Moscow's deterrent capacity for a nuclear
second strike.
The Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System (Aegis BMD) is designed to be able to theoretically intercept Russian missiles in their
initial boost phase, the period when they are the most vulnerable. Moscow has been openly questioning the rationale for the Aegis
system deployed in Romania. According to Russian military experts, the possibility of reprogramming the system from defensive to
offensive, replacing the conventional warheads used for intercepting missiles with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, could be undertaken
within an hour, without the Russian Federation possibly being aware of it. Putin has cited this specific case and its technical possibility
more than once when pointing out that the US is already in violation of the INF treaty by deploying such systems in Romania.
The US unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty in 2002 in order to be able to disguise the deployment of an offensive system
under the guise of an
ABM system for the purported purposes of defending against Iran, thereby de facto violating the INF treaty, an excess of arrogance
and presumption. Such perfidy caused Putin to make his famous 2007 Munich speech, where he warned the US and her allies of the consequences
of reneging on such treaties and agreements. Deploying defensive systems close to the Russian border that can easily be converted
into offensive ones with a nuclear capacity was a red line that could not be crossed.
At the time the West ignored Putin's warnings, dismissive of the Russian leader. But only a few months ago, the Russian Federation
finally showed the world that the warnings issued in 2007 were not empty bluster. Hypersonic weapons, a submarine drone and other
cutting-edge systems were presented by Putin in March 2018, shocking Western military planners and analysts who had not taken Putin
seriously back in 2007. These new technological breakthroughs provide Russia with the ability to eliminate targets by kinetic, conventional
or nuclear means. Such offensive deployments near the Russian border as the ABM systems in Romania can now be eliminated within the
space of a few minutes, with no possibility of being intercepted.
"The (US) has announced research and development works, and we will do the same. I agree with the Defense Ministry's proposals
to start the work on 'landing' Kalibr missiles and developing a new area to create a land-based hypersonic missile with intermediate
range."
Putin has already put his military cards on the table, warning 10 years ago what would happen if Washington continued in its duplicitous
direction. As Putin said in March 2018: "They did not listen to us in 2007. They will listen to us now".
The consequences of withdrawing from the INF treaty fall most heavily on the shoulders of the Europeans. Federica Mogherini indicated
deep concern over Washington's decision, as well as the new super-weapons that were either being tested or were already operational
in Russia, causing consternation amongst the Western military establishment that had thought that Putin was bluffing in March 2018
when he spoke about hypersonic weapons.
The US military-industrial complex is rejoicing at the prospect of money rained down as a result of this withdrawal from the INF
treaty. But in Europe (with the exception of Romania and Poland), nobody is too keen to welcome US missiles that have no defense
against Russian hypersonic weapons. NATO's trans-Atlantic arms lobby will try to push as many European countries as possible towards
a new Cold War, with US weapons deployed and aimed at Moscow. It will be fun to see the reactions of European citizens facing the
prospect of being annihilated by Russian missiles simply to please the CEOs and shareholders of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. No
doubt there will be some European politicians in countries like Poland keen to scream about the "Russian threat", ready to throw
tens of billions worth of Polish taxpayers' money into useless and ineffective projects for the purposes of pleasing their American
friends.
Are US generals even aware of how idiotic it is for the US to withdraw from the INF for Washington? Moscow is already ahead in
the development of such systems, both land-based but above all sea- and air-launched, without forgetting the hypersonic variants
of its conventional or nuclear missiles. Washington has a huge gap to close, exacerbated by the fact that in spite of heavy spending
over many years, there is little to show for it as a result of massive corruption in the research-and-development process. This is
not to mention the fact that there are few European countries willing to host offensive missile systems aimed at Russia. In reality,
there is little real advantage for Washington in withdrawing from the INF treaty, other than to enrich arms manufacturers. It diminishes
US military options strategically while expanding those of Beijing and Moscow, even as the latter oppose Washington's unilateral
withdrawal from the treaty.
The hope of expanding the INF treaty to include the US, Russia, China and the EU appears slim due to Washington's intransigence.
Washington only aims to increase expenditure for the development of weapons prohibited by the treaty, and in strategic terms, improbably
hopes to find some Asian and European countries willing to host these systems aimed against China and Russia.
The world is certainly more dangerous following Washington's decision, heading in a direction where there are less and less rules
while there are more nuclear powers. For decades, the United States has been trying to achieve nuclear supremacy by overcoming the
limitations of MAD, whereby Washington would be able to carry out a decapitating nuclear first strike without worrying about an opponent's
ability to launch a retaliatory second strike. It is precisely this type of thinking that is bringing humanity closer to the brink
of destruction from a nuclear accident or miscalculation. The miniaturization of nuclear warheads and the apparently limited nature
of "tactical nukes" further encourages the justification for using such weapons.
Moscow's decision in 2007 to develop state-of-the-art weapons and focus on new technologies like hypersonic missiles guarantees
that Russia and her allies have an effective deterrent against the attempts of the US to alter the nuclear balance of power, which
otherwise threatens the future of humanity.
The withdrawal from the INF treaty is another worrying sign of the willingness of the US to push the world to the brink of catastrophe,
simply for the purposes of enriching the CEOs and shareholders of it arms manufacturers through a nuclear arms race.
"... "Constrained by the treaty's provisions, the United States has been prevented from deploying new weapons to counter China's efforts to cement a dominant position in the Western Pacific and keep American aircraft carriers at bay. China was still a small and unsophisticated military power when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of a rapidly-weakening Soviet Union, negotiated the INF agreement." ..."
"... Over the past two years, the American military establishment has grown increasingly alarmed at the rapidity of China's technological development, which the United States sees as a threat not only to the profitability of its corporations, but the dominance of its military. ..."
"... As the latest US Worldwide Threat Assessment warns, "For 2019 and beyond, the innovations that drive military and economic competitiveness will increasingly originate outside the United States, as the overall US lead in science and technology shrinks" and "the capability gap between commercial and military technologies evaporates." ..."
"... The United States hopes that, by leveraging its military, it will be able to contain the economic rise of China and shore up US preeminence on the world stage. ..."
"... Nearly 75 years ago, the United States, after having "scorched and boiled and baked to death," in the words of General Curtis Lemay, hundreds of thousands of civilians in a genocidal "strategic bombing" campaign over Japan, murdered hundreds of thousands more with the use of two nuclear weapons: an action whose primary aim was to threaten the USSR. ..."
"... But ultimately, the continued existence of the Soviet Union served as a check on the genocidal impulses of US imperialism. ..."
"... Despite the triumphalist claims that the dissolution of the Soviet Union would bring about a new era of peace, democracy and the "end of history," it has brought only a quarter-century of neocolonial wars. ..."
"... the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria have not achieved their intended purpose. Having spent trillions of dollars and killed millions of people, the global position of US imperialism is no better than when it launched the "war on terror" in 2001. ..."
"... Now, the United States is upping the ante: setting "great-power conflict" with Russia and China on the order of the day. In its existential struggle for global hegemony, US imperialism is going for broke, willing to employ the most reckless and desperate means, up to and including the launching of nuclear war. ..."
In an article that fully backs the White House's accusations against Russia, the New
York Times ' David Sanger, a conduit for the Pentagon, spells out with perfect lucidity
the real reasons why the United States is leaving the INF treaty:
"Constrained by the treaty's provisions, the United States has been prevented from deploying
new weapons to counter China's efforts to cement a dominant position in the Western Pacific and
keep American aircraft carriers at bay. China was still a small and unsophisticated military
power when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of a rapidly-weakening Soviet
Union, negotiated the INF agreement."
Sanger's own words make perfectly clear why the United States wants to leave the treaty,
which has nothing to do with Russia's alleged violations: Washington is seeking to ring the
island chain surrounding the Chinese mainland with a hedge of nuclear missiles. But Sanger
somehow expects, without so much as a transition paragraph, his readers to believe the hot air
spewed by Pompeo about Russia's "bad behavior."
Over the past two years, the American military establishment has grown increasingly alarmed
at the rapidity of China's technological development, which the United States sees as a threat
not only to the profitability of its corporations, but the dominance of its military.
Two decades ago, at the height of the dotcom bubble, China was little more than a cheap
labor platform, assembling the consumer electronics driving a revolution in communications,
while American companies pocketed the vast bulk of the profits. But today, the economic balance
of power is shifting.
Chinese companies like Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo are capturing an ever-greater portion of the
global smartphone market, even as their rivals Samsung and Apple see their market share slip.
The Shenzhen-based DJI is the uncontested global leader in the consumer drone market. Huawei,
meanwhile, leads its competitors by over a year in the next-generation mobile infrastructure
that will power not only driverless cars and "smart" appliances, but the "autonomous" weapons
of the future.
As the latest US Worldwide Threat Assessment warns, "For 2019 and beyond, the innovations
that drive military and economic competitiveness will increasingly originate outside the United
States, as the overall US lead in science and technology shrinks" and "the capability gap
between commercial and military technologies evaporates."
It is the economic decline of the United States relative to its global rivals that is
ultimately driving the intensification of US nuclear war plans. The United States hopes that,
by leveraging its military, it will be able to contain the economic rise of China and shore up
US preeminence on the world stage.
But a consensus is emerging within the US military that Washington cannot bring its rivals
to heel merely with the threat of totally obliterating them with its massive arsenal of
strategic missiles. Given the fleet of nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines possessed by
both Russia and China, this option, even ignoring the effects of nuclear winter, would result
in the destruction of the largest cities in the United States.
Rather, the US is working to construct a "usable," low-yield, "tactical" nuclear arsenal,
including the construction of a new nuclear-capable cruise missile. This week, a new low-yield
US nuclear warhead went into production, with a yield between half and one third of the "little
boy" weapon that leveled the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and hundreds of times smaller than the
United States' other nuclear weapons systems.
The Trump administration's Nuclear Posture Review, released last year, envisions using such
weapons to turn the tide in conflicts that begin with conventional weapons, under the pretense
(whether the Pentagon believes it or not) that such wars will stop short of full-scale nuclear
exchanges.
Nearly 75 years ago, the United States, after having "scorched and boiled and baked to
death," in the words of General Curtis Lemay, hundreds of thousands of civilians in a genocidal
"strategic bombing" campaign over Japan, murdered hundreds of thousands more with the use of
two nuclear weapons: an action whose primary aim was to threaten the USSR.
But ultimately, the continued existence of the Soviet Union served as a check on the
genocidal impulses of US imperialism.
Despite the triumphalist claims that the dissolution of the Soviet Union would bring about a
new era of peace, democracy and the "end of history," it has brought only a quarter-century of
neocolonial wars.
But the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria have not achieved their intended
purpose. Having spent trillions of dollars and killed millions of people, the global position
of US imperialism is no better than when it launched the "war on terror" in 2001.
Now, the United States is upping the ante: setting "great-power conflict" with Russia
and China on the order of the day. In its existential struggle for global hegemony, US
imperialism is going for broke, willing to employ the most reckless and desperate means, up to
and including the launching of nuclear war.
Trump's comment about missile defense "improvements" in the SOTU; following the attention the war media gave to the missile
defense agency (MDA) report recently released imply some mixing of theory around missile defense with offensive weapons. A concept
that is misguided if not frightening!
In Europe MDA is deploying two aegis ashore weapon systems, one operating in Rumania and one to be built (2020) in Poland the
sensors are SPY-1 for foreign sales (not the latest greatest as upgraded SPY 1 on US Navy ships to be replaced by SPY-6 on new
Arleigh Burke destroyers). The interceptors are SM-2 vertical launch again not the greatest as US Navy going SM 3 and later SM
6.
With Patriot for close in and EU systems not sure I would call ABM in Europe not worthy of defeating much more complex threats
than Saddam SCUDs.
No rapid pentagon move to design new Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles.
Pershing II was dismantled in 1989, no similar missile is readily available and given the botch job on MX I doubt one will
be forth coming in the mid range future.
However, late versions of Tomahawk could be adapted to ground launchers and motivators already carrying US Army Tactical Ballistic
systems. That was the deployments in England and Belgium that caught the most protests prior to INF treaty.
The main claim of Russian violation is a cruise missile that could be modified like the US could modify Tomahawk .
INF is Asia need to think about that!
likbez , February 8, 2019 12:14 am
First of all, INF was tremendously beneficial for the USA, as the USSR has to destroy more missiles then the USA: 654 SS-20
missiles were build by the USSR. These and the 499 associated mobile launchers were destroyed by May 1991.
Now the problem for the USA is that other countries who did not sign this treaty are developing such systems. First of all
China. So this is probably the main consideration as for the USA.
But the devil is always in detail: the USA re-opens its forces in Europe and Japan to direct attack by this type of ground-based
missiles from Russian territory. Which now will be more sophisticated and difficult to intercept then famous SS-20 (Saber or Invisible)
with its unprecedented for its time accuracy of 450 meters.
So the shadow of SS-20 is again all over Western Europe. From military point of view the chances of surviving WWIII of any
European country with the USA bases in case WWIII starts dropped significantly
On Russia part, the fact that the USA unilaterally withdraw from the treaty that cost Russia so much is like a slap in the
face. That why Russia already demanded from the USA the destruction of all attack drones and all Tomahawks-compatible silos, which
means all negotiations ended.
Russian MIC is less well fed then the USA MIC and as such is definitely more happy then the USA MIC. They also probably has
some nasty asymmetrical surprise already on the drawing boards to compensate for the humiliation.
Most probably this response will became a huge headache for future US presidents. As if Putin is replaced by a hard-core
nationalist of Trump-style and temperament that will increase dangers of WWIII.
So, in a way, history repeats and Trump now is taking measures that are clearly in Russia favor (as one would expect from the
"Russia stooge" ;-) : Kaliningrad to Berlin distance is 328 miles. Distance from Kamchatka to Okinawa is 630 miles. The INF Treaty
prohibits ranges 310–620 mi and 620–3,420 miles and did not cover air- or sea-launched missiles which are the USA forte. And mobile
ground-based intermediate missiles are Russian forte: they already have the technology and variety of mobile launchers including
railcar based. .
So all huge advantages negotiated by Reagan team went into dumpster.
The US military-industrial complex is rejoicing at the prospect of money
rained down as a result of this withdrawal from the INF treaty. But in Europe (with the
exception of Romania and Poland), nobody is too keen to welcome US missiles that have no
defense against Russian hypersonic weapons. NATO's trans-Atlantic arms lobby will try to push
as many European countries as possible towards a new Cold War, with US weapons deployed and
aimed at Moscow. It will be fun to see the reactions of European citizens facing the prospect
of being annihilated by Russian missiles simply to please the CEOs and shareholders of Lockheed
Martin and Raytheon. No doubt there will be some European politicians in countries like Poland
keen to scream about the "Russian threat", ready to throw tens of billions worth of Polish
taxpayers' money into useless and ineffective projects for the purposes of pleasing their
American friends.
Are US generals even aware of how idiotic it is for the US to withdraw from the INF for
Washington? Moscow is already ahead in the development of such systems, both land-based but
above all sea- and air-launched, without forgetting the hypersonic variants of its conventional
or nuclear missiles. Washington has a huge gap to close, exacerbated by the fact that in spite
of heavy spending over many years, there is little to show for it as a result of massive
corruption in the research-and-development process. This is not to mention the fact that there
are few European countries willing to host offensive missile systems aimed at Russia. In
reality, there is little real advantage for Washington in withdrawing from the INF treaty,
other than to enrich arms manufacturers. It diminishes US military options strategically while
expanding those of Beijing and Moscow, even as the latter oppose Washington's unilateral
withdrawal from the treaty.
The hope of expanding the INF treaty to include the US, Russia, China and the EU appears
slim due to Washington's intransigence. Washington only aims to increase expenditure for the
development of weapons prohibited by the treaty, and in strategic terms, improbably hopes to
find some Asian and European countries willing to host these systems aimed against China and
Russia.
The world is certainly more dangerous following Washington's decision, heading in a
direction where there are less and less rules while there are more nuclear powers. For decades,
the United States has been trying to achieve nuclear supremacy by overcoming the limitations of
MAD, whereby Washington would be able to carry out a decapitating nuclear first strike without
worrying about an opponent's ability to launch a retaliatory second strike. It is precisely
this type of thinking that is bringing humanity closer to the brink of destruction from a
nuclear accident or miscalculation. The miniaturization of nuclear warheads and the apparently
limited nature of "tactical nukes" further encourages the justification for using such
weapons.
Moscow's decision in 2007 to develop state-of-the-art weapons and focus on new technologies
like hypersonic missiles guarantees that Russia and her allies have an effective deterrent
against the attempts of the US to alter the nuclear balance of power, which otherwise threatens
the future of humanity.
The withdrawal from the INF treaty is another worrying sign of the willingness of the US to
push the world to the brink of catastrophe, simply for the purposes of enriching the CEOs and
shareholders of it arms manufacturers through a nuclear arms race.
"... This seems entirely in line with the wishes of the antirussianitic mainstream establishment. Part of the reason is to re-establish the social mass-brain controls against American society believed to have obtained during the coldest Cold War. The establishment wants to re-impose social discipline to contain or suppress discontent during our upcoming Revolution of Falling Expectations. ..."
"... Does anyone know what the real impetus for this withdrawal is? Who gains and how? ..."
"... In general, however, the main reason is US economy whose main two pillars are US Dollar and perceived, largely inflated, US military omnipotence, and US fading as a "hegemon" is not taken lightly by increasingly irrational D.C. It needs some kind of "triumph", so we are entering the period of geopolitical volatility until US "elites", in full accordance to Kubler-Ross Grief Model, transition from Anger to Depression (in process) and eventually to Bargaining and Acceptance ..."
"... How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?Only one. But the light bulb has to want to change. ..."
Russia does not have military bases near US territory, where a large
number of intermediate and shorter range missiles could be deployed
This phrase alone discredits the whole piece by South Front which increasingly begins to
remind sites similar to Russia-Insider, hell bent on fund raising instead of sound
analysis.
Russia DOES have bases near the United States within (West) coastal range--those
"bases" are called Kamchatka Peninsula. Of course, Russia can recall 1980s experience of
planning to position her RSD-10 Pioneer (one example is currently in the US in Smithsonian) at
Chuckotka, thus covering all of Canada and most North West and parts of mid-West of the US.
One of the arguments which convinced the American side to negotiate.
So, the article is a
complete click-bait pseudo-analysis. This is not to mention the fact that national security
is built and exists across all platforms and forces.
Having a single piece of territory technically in range is not the same thing as surrounding
a country's borders with missile emplacements. And the very best scenario for intercepting a missile is when its fired from a single known
location, rather than a flurry from all sides.
Literally if you take the two closest points the tip of Washington state to the coast of
Kamchatka you are the very limit of the treaty ranges.
How is it possible that the Russian nation renounced the most death dealing ideology in human
history and fear and loathing for all things Russian in the Brit and American deep states and
on the American political left increased exponentially?
Trump was elected, in part, for trying to bring accountability to those responsible for that
development, but that's all gone, along with any prospect for a near term exit into normalcy.
It looks like Cold War as far as the eye can see. Trump himself put this in evidence by the
gaping hole in his SOTU he left with the omission of exactly how the American future is going
to pay for the welfare - warfare state that continues to burgeon on his watch.
Just from a technological point of view, the INF treaty and probably similar treaties are
becoming obsolete. So many nations are now developing effective missiles including hypersonic
cruise missiles and launching capabilities that are bound to be in violation of this treaty.
The improvement in air defense capabilities are bound to violate the ABM treaty at some
point.
We all surely have the desire to keep developing these technologies. That desire is
obviously stronger than our desire to negotiate new treaties to address this increase in
lethality.
Amazing to me that a GOP senator would cheer about the breakup of a treaty signed by and
pushed for by President Reagan:
"Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., cheered the president's decision to withdraw
from the treaty, saying out that the Russians have violated the treaty
for years and China has stockpiled "thousands of missiles.""
This sure feels like it goes against the spirit of Trump's sometime-voiced wistful wish that
" wouldn't it be nice if we had good relations with Russia?"
This seems entirely in line with the wishes of the antirussianitic mainstream
establishment. Part of the reason is to re-establish the social mass-brain controls against
American society believed to have obtained during the coldest Cold War. The establishment
wants to re-impose social discipline to contain or suppress discontent during our upcoming
Revolution of Falling Expectations.
Has the RussiaGov been testing and bending what is permitted under the INF treaty?
Can anyone offer a fact-based well-argued answer offered in a spirit of truth? And if the
RussiaGov has been doing that, would it be in response to NATO expansion and hostility right
up to Russia's border?
Could this be Russo-American kabuki so they both can set eachother free to both address
IMF missilization by a rising China which never did sign that treaty?
One thing for sure, there is no missile defense against a hypersonic missile. Or a fleet
of hypersonic missiles.
If any wannabe-officeseeker considers Cold War 2.0 a bad thing to get started and a bad
thing to stay in, such officeseeker(s) will have to run on discussions with Russia to stand
down the violations-if-any on both sides and then re-instate the IMF. Because any
officeseeker elected withOUT that stated intention will have trouble seeking to intend it
after getting elected. Whereas any officeseeker overtly running ON that intention is free to
pursue it and advance it if elected in whole or in part because of it.
1. China and her primarily intermediate-range missiles in the region -- in a futile attempt to
"re-negotiate" -- China may fold, but...
2. Russia will not, in fact, Russia already called the bluff, but the US also needs to
threaten Russia from Europe while simultaneously putting Europe under the thumb.
3.In general, however, the main reason is US economy whose main two pillars are US Dollar
and perceived, largely inflated, US military omnipotence, and US fading as a "hegemon" is not
taken lightly by increasingly irrational D.C. It needs some kind of "triumph", so we are
entering the period of geopolitical volatility until US "elites", in full accordance to Kubler-Ross Grief Model, transition from Anger to Depression (in process) and eventually to
Bargaining and Acceptance. Granted US economy functions. US will have to learn to live as ONE
OF the great power and maybe (just maybe) become a normal country dealing with own serious
problems--there are many of those for sure.
EUrope has more overall people and more overall economic activity than the US has. EUrope
does not have to be under any thumb which the current Lords of EUrope do not exactly want
EUrope to be under.
EUrope is legally free to dissolve NATO from its end any time it likes. If they want to
have their own "after-NATO" defense organization, they can set it up just for their side of
the Atlantic, which is the Eastern Side. They could call it NEATO . . . for North East
Atlantic Treaty Organization. NEATO . . . get it?
As to America becoming a normal country among normal countries . . . that would require a
change of hearts and minds. It could be done, but only from within America its own self. And
as the joke goes . . . How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?Only one. But the light bulb has to want to change.
What would be a step toward the light bulb wanting to change? Setting aside the
psycho-cultural need to be Great. No more Greatness. Let's just make America an okay place
for the Americans.
MAOkayFA. Make America Okay For Americans. We will be partway there when a majority of
American people become comfortable saying to themselves . . . ." I am not an American
Greatness Exceptionalist.
I! am an American Okayness Ordinarian. And I'm okay with that."
Trump likes to rip up any old deal just for the sake of raising his profile, methinks.
Whatever happens to INF, it's the NPT that would be the bigger priority. Not a big Al Haig
fan, but he wrote a book about WW3 wherein his theory put the rogue Arab terrorist state in
the lead role as the nuke attacker that destroyed the world. I threw my copy away a long time
ago, but it resonates in my mind that the more likely scenario is the Nuke of Jihad is
employed against Tel Aviv. Would this not have an attenuating effect if the US had to
retaliate against say, Tehran, rather than a clear Russian or Chinese attacker?
I am old enough to remember when there was a lot of anti-nuclear demonstrations in Europe
(especially in Germany). One might argue that the INF treaty was a stroke of genius in terms
of taking the wind out of the sails of the lefty peaceniks.
Since Russia wishes to cultivate allies in the anti-war left, perhaps an end to the INF
treaty will help in those efforts. I do wonder how long the Borg can accuse both Trump and
Tulsi Gabbard of being Russian stooges before people start to think "hey, maybe the Russians
are not as bad as our own news media".
Since Russia wishes to cultivate allies in the anti-war left, perhaps an end to the INF
treaty will help in those efforts.
I am not sure there is anti-war Left left as it was circa 1980s. Russia is really
apprehensive towards all kinds of Euro-left which is a totalitarian LGBTQC4ISR sect which has
nothing in common with Old Left. In fact, all of this left are globalist shills. Russia has
much better chances addressing real European conservative and nationalist circles. But I am
100% positive that this is viewed, correctly, as a routine foreign policy activity and
maintenance of contacts as it was previous years.
In a flash, the US has scrapped the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty,
which safeguarded Europe and the world from a deadly US-Russia arms race. This is particularly
bad news for Europeans.
Russia must be feeling a lot like the Native Indians these days with regards to treaties
signed with the duplicitous Americans. For the second time in as many decades, the US has gone
back on its word, removing another pillar from the global arms reduction architecture.
The Trump administration, in its infinite wisdom, announced on the weekend it
would freeze US participation in the INF " for 180 days ," which, from a military perspective,
must be interpreted to mean forever. In the spirit of reciprocity, Vladimir Putin, expressing
regret that Russia " could not save " the Cold War treaty, said he would be forced to follow
suit.
The Russian leader emphasized, however, that Moscow would not deploy intermediate or smaller
range weapons " until the same type of American weapons " were placed in Europe or elsewhere in
the world.
This latest ratcheting up of tensions between Moscow and Washington was wholly avoidable
– that is, if avoiding confrontation is a goal of the US. Clearly, it is not. The
unpredictable hotheads now dictating foreign policy in the Trump administration, particularly
National Security Advisor John Bolton, a veteran hawk who the Washington Post recently
called a " serial arms control killer, " have somehow concluded that playing a game of
nuclear chicken on the European continent with Russia is the best way to resolve bilateral
issues.
The White House appears to be incensed over Russia's upgrade of a cruise missile, the
'9M729', which it claims exceeds the 500-km flight threshold set down by the treaty. The INF
treaty specifically banned the development, deployment, and testing of ground-based missiles
with a range between 500km and 5,500km (310-3,400 miles).
In fact, the development of this weapon has so irked the Trump administration that last year
the US Ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, warned
Russia that if it did not halt its development NATO would be forced to " take out " the
missile. Although Hutchison later backtracked on the hyperbole, saying she did not mean to
suggest a preemptive strike on Russia, the remark nevertheless underscored the gravity of the
situation.
The obvious question is: does the US have legitimate grounds to be concerned over this
cruise missile, one of the latest in a series of new weapon systems to be
rolled out by the Russian military? Well, if they did have real cause for concern, they
deliberately missed several opportunities to examine the weapon firsthand. In fact, Moscow
invited US Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo to attend a public presentation where Russian military brass were on hand
to field queries about the missile. Yet the Americans snubbed the event, which could have
persuaded them to think twice before dumping a landmark arms control treaty.
On this point, it would have been refreshing to hear some impartial European voices weighing
in on the matter. After all, in the event of another arms race between the US and Russia, the
European continent will once again be forced to wear a large crosshairs on its back. Instead,
EU leaders predictably approached the issue from the American stance, parroting the narrative
that Russia, the perennial bogeyman, is in violation of the INF.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example, without providing a shred of evidence,
said ,
"It is clear to us that Russia has violated this treaty the important thing is to keep the
window for dialogue open."
Immediately assuming Russia's guilt seems to be a non-starter for any sort of productive
negotiations.
What's behind America's madness?
In order to get a clearer picture of what exactly is motivating Washington's reckless
behavior, it is essential to remember that the Trump administration's withdrawal from the INF
is just the latest in a long string of aggressive moves against Russia . Indeed, this is not
the first time Washington has torn up an arms agreement with Moscow.
In 2002, the Bush administration terminated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM
Treaty), which maintained something of a suicide pact between the Cold War nuclear rivals known
as 'mutually assured destruction'. From there it has been all downhill for bilateral
relations.
With the ABM Treaty swept away, the Bush and subsequent Obama administration proceeded to
unilaterally build – despite repeated offers from Moscow to cooperate on the system
– a US missile defense shield in Eastern Europe, just a stone's throw from the Russian
border. In May 2016, NATO announced its missile defense base in Romania was fully operational.
Following the announcement, Mikhail Ulyanov, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's department
for arms control issues, warned that not only did the
US missile defense system threaten the strategic balance between nuclear powers, the launchers
in Romania could easily be re-fitted with offensive cruise missiles, thereby turning a shield
into a sword at a moment's notice.
In other words, Washington is now accusing Moscow of violating an arms control treaty that
it itself had most likely violated almost three years ago.
Pierre-Emmanuel Thomann, a geopolitics analyst from Paris 8 University, told RT this is the
desired outcome Washington was looking for, which already decided " beforehand to get out of
the treaty " irrespective of possible concessions from Moscow.
" The US already destabilized the nuclear balance when they decided to get out of the ABM
treaty in 2002, and when you look at a map the United States [is] putting missile defense
bases all around Eurasia, creating a feeling of encirclement in Russia and China ," Thomann
said.
This leads us to another possible reason why the Trump administration made the rash decision
to kill the INF treaty, and that is due to the huge strides made by the Chinese military of
late. Last year, as just one example, a Chinese firm reportedly completed the successful
launch of a supersonic missile, which the Chinese government said could compete on
international markets.
China, which is not bound by the conditions set down by the INF, has undergone breakneck
militarization ever since. Yes, the United States became an existential threat to Beijing when
the Obama administration announced the so-called '
pivot to Asia '. This disastrous doctrine saw a large chunk of US naval forces enter the
Pacific theater. Thus, Washington may be trying to bring the Chinese and Russians into some
sort of new three-way arms control treaty, but if that were true, it seems to be going about it
in the worst possible way.
Whatever the ultimate cause may be, the United States and its quest for global supremacy, in
cooperation with the European Union, which behaves like a powerless vassal state inside of the
'American empire', must assume a heavy part of the blame for the increasingly perilous state of
global relations today.
Konstantin Kosachev, head of the foreign affairs committee in the upper house of Russia's
parliament, adequately summed up the fate of the world following the latest US withdrawal from
yet another arms reduction pact.
" I 'congratulate' the whole world ," Kosachev told the Russian Senate.
" The United States has taken another step toward its destruction today. "
"... This included "unprecedented steps going far beyond our obligations," Lavrov said, and noted that part of Washington's "systematic" attempts to undermine the treaty included "testing drones that matched the characteristics" of ground-based cruise missiles banned in the treaty, as well as installing "MK 41 launching systems for the defense shield in Europe that can be used to fire mid-range Tomahawk cruise missiles without any modification." ..."
"... Putin noted further in the midst of Lavrov's remarks, "This is a direct a violation of the INF." And Lavrov also added, "Such launchers have already been completed in Romania, more are scheduled to be put into service in Poland and Japan." ..."
"... Alarmingly, Putin concluded his remarks by saying Washington could be imperiling in the long term the landmark New START treaty, set to expire in 2021. ..."
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) has effectively collapsed following the
US announcing Friday that it's suspending all obligations under the treaty. Predictably
Moscow's response has been swift, with President Vladimir Putin saying in a meeting with his
foreign and defense ministers that Russia will now pursue missile development previously banned
under its terms .
Putin said "ours will be a mirror response" in a tit-for-tat move that the Russian president
ultimately blames on Washington's years-long "systematic" undermining of the agreement. "Our US
partners say that they are ceasing their participation in the treaty, and we are doing the
same," the Russian president said . "They say that they are doing
research and testing [on new weapons] and we will do the same thing."
Crucially, however, he noted that there were no plans to deploy short and mid-range missiles
to Europe unless the US does it first -- a worst nightmare scenario that has rattled European
leaders ever since talk began from Trump that the 1987 treaty could be scrapped.
Putin still seemed to allow some degree space for last minute concessions as "still on the
table" possibly in line with the Trump administration's desire to modernize and update a new
treaty taking into account new technological and geopolitical realities, such as China's
ballistic missile capabilities.
"Let's wait until our partners mature sufficiently to hold a level, meaningful conversation
on this topic, which is extremely important for us, them, and the entire world," Putin said.
But also lashing out during the press conference that followed the meeting with top officials
Putin
described :
Over many years, we have repeatedly suggested staging new disarmament talks, on all types
of weapons. Over the last few years, we have seen our initiatives not supported. On the
contrary, pretexts are constantly sought to demolish the existing system of international
security .
Specifically he and FM Sergei Lavrov referenced not only Trump's threats to quit the
agreement, which heightened in December, but accusations leveled from Washington that the
Kremlin was in violation. The White House has now affirmed the bilateral historic agreement
signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan will be suspended for 180 days. Lavrov insisted
that Moscow "attempted to do everything we could to rescue the treaty."
This included "unprecedented steps going far beyond our obligations," Lavrov said, and noted
that part of Washington's "systematic" attempts to undermine the treaty included "testing
drones that matched the characteristics" of ground-based cruise missiles banned in the treaty,
as well as installing "MK 41 launching systems for the defense shield in Europe that can be
used to fire mid-range Tomahawk cruise missiles without any modification."
Putin noted further in the midst of Lavrov's remarks, "This is a direct a violation of the
INF." And Lavrov also added, "Such launchers have already been completed in Romania, more are
scheduled to be put into service in Poland and Japan."
Alarmingly, Putin concluded his remarks by saying Washington could be imperiling in the long
term the landmark New START treaty, set to expire in 2021.
" as well as installing "MK 41 launching systems for the defense shield in Europe that can
be used to fire mid-range Tomahawk cruise missiles without any modification."
US trying to get from Russia top position first-response list and get Europe on that
position.
Neocons should be remembered as oldcons because their bag of tricks is so well known that
they don't fool anyone. Think about this Reagan era fossil who tries to arrange his little
coup in Venezuela and will fall flat on his face. Think also about these Pompeo and Bolton
who are so desperate that they didn't even spend the necessary time to learn the checkers
rules before trying to take on Putin in his favorite chess play. No really, the level of
mediocrity and the lack of strategy or even sheer preparedness of these dudes is so low that
they may even be hung by their own subordinates who can't even stand that stench of fool
play. Trump should be ashamed he hired these clowns to ride their one trick ponies while the
titanic goes down. History will not be kind with him.
Additionally, just last week the Russian Ministry of Defense invited foreign military
attachés and journalists to inspect the new Iskander 9M729 cruise missile. This is the
one that the US claims is in violation of the INF treaty. Representatives of the US and NATO
were invited and expected to be there, but they never showed up.
Interestingly, the 9M729 has a heavier warhead, and thus shorter range, than the older
9M728, which the US has not claimed violates the INF treaty. See it for yourself:
This is the one that the US claims is in violation of the INF treaty. Representatives of
the US and NATO were invited and expected to be there, but they never showed up .
About standard to ignore what doesn't fit the agenda.
Additionally, just last week the Russian Ministry of Defense invited foreign military
attachés and journalists to inspect the new Iskander 9M729 cruise missile. This is the
one that the US claims is in violation of the INF treaty. Representatives of the US and NATO
were invited and expected to be there, but they never showed up.
Interestingly, the 9M729 has a heavier warhead, and thus shorter range, than the older
9M728, which the US has not claimed violates the INF treaty. See it for yourself:
This is the one that the US claims is in violation of the INF treaty. Representatives of
the US and NATO were invited and expected to be there, but they never showed up .
About standard to ignore what doesn't fit the agenda.
It's not hard to see the parallels of how the US is treating China today compared with
Japan in 1939. The US sanctioned Japan and stopped them from importing Iron and Oil and today
China is being technologically sanctioned throughout the West with Huawei.
The US is bludgeoning every Govt throughout the world to get its own way both allied and
contested. This attitude can only lead to War eventually. Venezuela today, Iran tomorrow
which will continue to box in China and Russia.
The US is needing a war to rally its people around the flag and to attempt to keep its
hand on the Rudder of the world.
China will be forced to sink an American ship or shoot down an American Jet to save face
re Taiwan and their Islands in the China Sea.
The West is begging for war and the parallels now and before WW11 is scary.
"... now, playing catch-up, the US is employing the crudest of methods: tariffs & military bullying (& God help us all, kidnapping). ..."
"... Copley implies that cohesive societies that seek victory over all other societies can't have it, because a cohesive society must have enemies, invented or carefully preserved if necessary. Perhaps that's what the Russia affair is about. If so, its not working. ..."
"... Poor General Kelly, one of the generals who let 911 happen, is probably going to be promoted to Bechtel. I say poor because he's only worth about $5 Million, which is a low figure for the super rich who own the military industrial complex. ..."
"... my take is that we are in the end game of imperialism. the western empire is in terminal decline and there will be more empires. from the evidence Russia and China, having learned the lessons of a few thousand years of experience are not seeking for empires. ..."
"... War is Good for Business and Organized Crime. Afghanistan's Multibillion Dollar Opium Trade. Rising Heroin Addiction in the US Afghanistan's opium economy is a multibillion dollar operation which has a direct impact on the surge of heroin addiction in the US. ..."
"... Place this against the U.S. – NSA – on record for what seems to be global surveillance having tapped the phones of U.S. European allies heads of states like Angela Merkel -among other things- with it's budget of $80 billion per year. Similar amount to the total Russian defense budget. Then there is the CIA and other "three letter organizations" in the U.S. and similar operations in the U.K. I think this is David against Goliath struggle and the latter is doing most of the beating. ..."
"... This madness is driving Russia into coalition with China and creating all sorts of totally unnecessary tensions. Forcing them to avoid the US dollar and so forth. How any of this supports western interests, or the interests of U.S. or U.K. citizens is a great misery. One thing is certain – this is self-destruction policy for the U.S. in the long run. This is what happens when the lunatics take over the asylum. ..."
"... Thankfully Vladimir Putin seems to be extremely capable and stable person – not likely to fall into temptation of hitting back with horrible consequences for world peace. ..."
"... Navarro appears to have the full support of Silicon Valley, Boeing and our other high tech exporters. On the other side is Wall Street and possibly British interests. For all of the hullabaloo about Trump violating the law against private citizens conducting foreign diplomacy when he was President-elect, the Wall Street crowd appears to have transgressed much further: ..."
Most recently, a dissident economist and failed California politician named Peter Navarro has parlayed his hostility toward China
into the role of key architect of Donald Trump's "trade war" against Beijing. Like his Russian counterpart Alexander Dugin, Navarro
is another in a long line of intellectuals whose embrace of geopolitics changed the trajectory of his career.
Raised by a single mom who worked secretarial jobs to rent one-bedroomapartments where he slept on the couch, Navarro went to
college at Tufts on a scholarship and earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard. Despite that Ivy League degree, he remained an
angry outsider, denouncing the special interests "stealing America"
in his first book and later, as a business professor at the University of California-Irvine, branding San Diego developers "punks
in pinstripes." A passionate environmentalist, in 1992 Navarro plunged into politics as a Democratic candidate for the mayor of San
Diego, denouncing his opponent's husband as a convicted drug-money launderer and losing when he smirked as she wept during their
televised debate.
For the next 10 years, Navarro fought losing campaigns for everything from city council to Congress. He detailed his crushing
defeat for a seat in the House of Representatives in a tell-all
book , San Diego Confidential,
that dished out disdain for that duplicitous "sell out" Bill Clinton, dumb "blue-collar detritus" voters, and just about everybody
else as well.
Following his last losing campaign for city council, Navarro spent a decade churning out books attacking a new enemy: China. His
first "shock and awe" jeremiad
in 2006 told horror stories about that country's foreign trade; five years later, Death By China was filled with
torrid tales of "bone-crushing, cancer-causing, flammable, poisonous, and otherwise lethal products" from that land. In 2015,
a third book turned to geopolitics, complete with carefully drawn maps and respectful references to Captain Mahan, to offer an
analysis of how China's
military was pursuing a relentless strategy of "anti-access, area denial" to challenge the U.S. Navy's control over the Western Pacific.
To check China, the Pentagon then had two competing strategies -- "Air-Sea Battle," in which China's satellites were to be blinded,
knocking out its missiles, and "Offshore Control," in which China's entire coastline was to be blockaded by mining six maritime choke
points from Japan to Singapore. Both, Navarro claimed, were fatally flawed. Given that, Navarro's third book and a companion
film (
endorsed by one Donald Trump) asked: What should the United
States do to check Beijing's aggression and its rise as a global power? Since all U.S. imports from China, Navarro suggested, were
"helping to finance a Chinese military buildup," the only realistic solution was "the imposition of countervailing tariffs to offset
China's unfair trade practices."
Just a year after reaching that controversial conclusion, Navarro joined the Trump election campaign as a policy adviser and then,
after the November victory, became a junior member of the White House economic team. As a protectionist in an administration initially
dominated by globalists, he would be excluded from high-level meetings and,
according toTime Magazine , "required to copy chief
economic adviser Gary Cohn on all his emails." By February 2018, however, Cohn was on his way out and Navarro had become assistant
to the president, with his new trade office now the co-equal of the National Economic Council.
As the chief defender of Trump's
belief that "trade wars
are good and easy to win," Navarro has finally realized his own geopolitical dream of attempting to check China with tariffs. In
March, the president slapped
heavy ones on Chinese steel imports and, just a few weeks later,
promised to impose more of them on $50 billion of imports. When those started in July, China's leaders
retaliated against what
they called "typical trade bullying," imposing similar duties on American goods. Despite a
warning from the Federal
Reserve chairman that "trade tensions could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global economy," with Navarro at his elbow,
Trump escalated in September,
adding tariffs on an additional $200 billion in Chinese goods and threatening another $267 billion worth if China dared retaliate.
Nonetheless, Beijing hit
back, this time on just $60 billion in goods since 95% of all U.S. imports had already been covered.
Then something truly surprising happened. In September, the U.S. trade deficit with
China
ballooned to $305 billion for the year, driven by an 8% surge in Chinese imports -- a clear sign that Navarro's bold geopolitical
vision of beating Beijing into submission with tariffs had collided big time with the complexities of world trade. Whether this tariff
dispute will fizzle out inconsequentially or escalate into a full-blown trade war, wreaking havoc on global supply chains and the
world economy, none of us can yet know, particularly that would-be geopolitical grandmaster Peter Navarro.
The Desire to be Grandmaster of the Universe
Though such experts usually dazzle the public and the powerful alike with erudition and boldness of vision, their geopolitical
moves often have troubling long-term consequences. Mahan's plans for Pacific dominion through offshore bases created a strategic
conundrum that plagued American defense policy for a half-century. Brzezinski's geopolitical lunge at the Soviet Union's soft Central
Asian underbelly helped unleash radical Islam. Today, Alexander Dugin's use of geopolitics to revive Russia's dominion over Eurasia
has placed Moscow on a volatile collision course with Europe and the United States. Simultaneously, Peter Navarro's bold gambit to
contain China's military and economic push into the Pacific with a trade war could, if it persists, produce untold complications
for our globalized economy.
No matter how deeply flawed such geopolitical visions may ultimately prove to be, their brief moments as official policy have
regularly shaped the destiny of nations and of empires in unpredictable, unplanned, and often dangerous ways. And no matter how this
current round of geopolitical gambits plays out, we can be reasonably certain that, in the not-too-distant future, another would-be
grandmaster will embrace this seductive concept to guide his bold bid for global power.
Alfred W. McCoy, a
TomDispatch
regular , is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of
Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade , the now-classic book which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert
operations over 50 years, and the recently published
In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power ( Dispatch Books).
Dugin, regardless of what minor success he had ten years ago, is not influential in the Kremlin. He did not orchestrate Russia's
absorption of Crimea. Simple strategic needs demanded that Crimea be absorbed, and a flawless Russian execution of an ambitious
plan won the day.
Peter Navarro is correct w/r/t China. Our trading relationship with China has been a disaster for our economy (to which I mean
our ability to have an economy absent financial shenanigans) and USG has effectively funded China's rise. There is no strategic
benefit to offshoring productive capacity. I don't really care if Navarro has failed at other tasks in his life. He is correct
on this one.
we can be reasonably certain that, in the not-too-distant future, another would-be grandmaster will embrace this seductive
concept to guide his bold bid for global power.
Damn! Sounds just like me. Anyway, the US has made a lot of mistakes. It transferred much of its manufacturing base to China
and much of its technology. The Chinese see a chance to break away from the US economically and in technology.
The US invested in China's future. China invested in its future. Which is why China has a future.
Seeing geography as a decisive factor in the course of human history can be construed as a bleak view of the world, which
is why it is disliked in some intellectual circles. It suggests that nature is more powerful than man, and that we can only
go so far in determining our own fate.
Splitting the globe into ten distinct regions, former Sky News Diplomatic Editor Tim Marshall redresses our techno-centric
view of the world and suggests that our key political driver continues to be our physical geography. Beginning with Russia
(and its bewildering eleven time-zones), we are treated to an illuminating, border-by-border disassembly of what makes the
world what it is; why, for instance, China and India will never fall into conflict (the Himalayas), or why the Ukraine is such
a tactical jewel in the crown. With its panoptic view over our circumstance, Prisoners of Geography makes a compelling case
around how the physical framework of the world itself has defined our history. It's one of those books that prompts real reflection
and one that on publication absolutely grasped the imagination of our customers, ensuring it as a guaranteed entrant to our
2016 Paperbacks of the Year.
'One of the best books about geopolitics you could imagine: reading it is like having a light shone on your understanding.'
– Nicholas Lezard,
"There is no strategic benefit to offshoring productive capacity. "
Quite right. However – that horse has long bolted. And now, playing catch-up, the US is employing the crudest of methods:
tariffs & military bullying (& God help us all, kidnapping).
Unfortunately, circumstances demand a radical & imaginative response & even harder, a realisation that the horse has
bolted.
Now that you're here, you should read the Saker more. I'll pose this question though, If Russia and China are hell bent on
imperial expansion, why don't they show any interest in Mongolia? Fertile land, rich mineral resources, a tiny population incapable
of resistance it would be a no brainier. The reason they don't is because they are not imperial powers. Also, is empire a good
thing? In every historical example it has followed the same pattern and failed. Civilisations however endure through the ages.
" Vladimir Putin seeks to shatter the Western alliance with cyberwar " was where I noted this essayist is a fool and stopped
reading. Russians! Russians! Russians everywhere!
But since then has gone on to muse how it might be extended. My argument is that the Empire does not serve the American people
and is leading to the destruction of the republic and the American people. The sooner it ends the better, and if Trump can speed
up its demise, then he is our guy.
A very interesting article, for me, but, I suppose, for quite other reasons than most here expect. The essence of interest
is in the last two paragraphs.
In the first of these two those men are mentioned who by geopolitical ideas caused world wide disasters. If they did, I do not
know. The question 'did Napoleon make history or did history make Napoleon' still is a difficult one among historians, and will
remain difficult, is my idea. The man not mentioned in this paragraph is Hitler.
Then we get the ominous last paragraph, someone grabbing world wide power for geopolitical reasons, a great menace.
The essence of good propaganda is not telling lies, but telling just half truths. Not mentioned is that the area that now is
Germany for maybe hundreds of years could not feed the population, had to import food. In order to be able to import one must
export, a country with not enough agricultural production naturally must export industrial products, to fabricate these one needs
raw materials.
Not for nothing both WWI and WWII had geopolitical causes, German economic expansion to the SW and E, economic expansion that
threatened, in the British view, the autarcic British empire.
The implication of the last paragraph for me is clear, beware of the next Hitler. If the author has someone in mind who will
unleash the last world war is not clear to me.
Copley implies that cohesive societies that seek victory over all other societies can't have it, because a cohesive society
must have enemies, invented or carefully preserved if necessary. Perhaps that's what the Russia affair is about. If so, its not
working.
It's like the Federal German republic trying 90 year old people who were drafted as teenagers to be concentration camp guards
in late WW II, when the Reich was scraping through the bottom of the manpower barrel, or like the British digging up Cromwell's
bones (see Wikipedia, "Oliver Cromwell", section: "Death and posthumous execution"). Not convincing.
Alfred McCoy isn't the exact polar opposite of Bill Kristol who is wrong about everything , but McCoy does have a pretty
good track record of being mostly correct about the issues he covers, nevertheless, he still reads like an opinion column. He
also seems bonded by how he sees the American empire being some sort of force of benevolence when it acts and reacts in the same
manner as any other empire that's come and gone – and of course he loathes the idea of the next empire simply by default(they'll
brag about freedom too Alfred). And of course, in the realm of geopolitics, he never really mentions the bastard child; which
leaves a gaping hole in his analysis.
My guess is McCoy's basically on the right track. Not exactly, but he'll get you out of the woods.
For the past decade, he has been a forceful advocate for Russian expansionism
It gets a bit boring reading about how aggressive Putin is and how he wants to reconquer all the territories that were voluntarily
given up by his predecessors. How exactly would Russia benefit by reaquiring the Baltic States or Poland? These countries are
on life-support. Poland get $20bn annually in direct and indirect subsidies from the EU. As for Ukraine, what possible benefit
to Russia would it be to have an extra 35 million people who are broke. Ukrainians today spend half their income on food and that
other half on heat – and that in a country with a very cold winter.
Let's not forget that there would not have been a "Berlin Crisis" if Stalin had not given parts of Berlin to the USA, the UK
and France. Can you imagine the USA doing something similar? This whole article is a real let down. I am disappointed. I guess
every barrel has to have a rotten apple or two.
I would add that in my life, Henry Kissinger was the other supreme geopolitical theorist who attempted to establish a multipolar
geopolitics over a bipolar one. Keep in mind that it was he who essentially argued that China must be recognized in order to blunt
the USSR. Nixon thus became the one who opened China to the US, so that in theory the world was to be divided into the Russia
pole; the China pole; the American/NATO pole, and the "Third World" pole. With a dash of Mahan added to the mix, all would be
balanced and stable, or so Kissinger argued. Hmmmm, maybe not!
Are you for real? Have you looked at where these two respective areas are geographically? Hell, their borders aren't even adjacent.
As for China's interest in Tibet: what was once's part of the Empire will always be part of the Empire. Tibets been part of
the empire twice now, first under Genghis' Yuan Dynasty and again during under the Qing. That simple fact means from now until
the sun goes supernova, for China to be considered unified, Tibet must be a part of it. No ifs or buts.
That's not to mention the strategic considerations of occupying the high ground vis a vis the sub-continentals as well as the
area being the source of several great rivers. You'd have to be a madman to give that kind of advantage up.
@Anon Ghandi was of the opinion that the people of India, forgot the number, 100 million or more ?, served 400.000 rich Britons.
The Roman empire, I'd say 1% rich, 99% poor.
The tsarist empire, not much better.
The German empire again the exception, nowhere else at the end of the 19th century were common people in comparable living conditions.
The EU empire, EP members tax free incomes of some € 200.000 a year, plus an extravagant pension system.
Verhofstadt, additional income, not tax free, of at least € 450.000 a year.
Declarations, Schulz has been accused of spending € 700.000 in a year, among other things he liked a glass of wine.
When it suits their purpose, writers on economics–I won't call them Economists–praise the tiger-like speed and agility with
which Capitalism responds to the vagaries of pressures and demands that arise in world markets. But when they're engaging in public
relations we get this:
"Despite a warning from the Federal Reserve chairman that " trade tensions could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global
economy ," .. Whether this tariff dispute will fizzle out inconsequentially or escalate into a full-blown trade war, wreaking
havoc on global supply chains and the world economy
which throw a protective cloak over a poor, picked-upon capitalism which is, apparently, incapable of getting out of its own
way.
Disappointing read. No, there is nothing to suggest that Dugin has any influence on Putin. No, there is no Russian cyberwar.
Putin's aims are Russia's recovery from the disasters of communism (a road to a blind alley as he has called it) and defending
Russia against NATO's expansion, colour revolutions and numerous false accusations.
Beijing is the place to look today for big strategic thinking.
@Puzzled reasons would be the last. Because the Europeans would find of other sources and shut out Russia as being an unreliable
business partner. Moreover, Russia is now the largest exporter of wheat and is developing export levels of production in soybeans
and pork. You can't sell to countries that you have wrecked militarily.
It's the U.S., not Russia that is playing the 800 pound Global Cop Gorilla with its war-mongering, economic warfare and global
subversion.
Like Puzzled, when I read that stupid, irrational line by Alfred McCoy, I simply stopped reading. Because nobody that dense
about obvious geo-political reality deserves to be read.
Disappointing read. No, there is nothing to suggest that Dugin has any influence on Putin.
No kidding. This is what happens when you get your Russian news from the Times and the Beeb. I mean, if Dugin were such a Kremlin
favorite, how could he have lost his job at Moscow State University? You'd think he could just pick up the phone, call 'Uncle
Vova', and get his job back!
Of course Putin is a Eurasianist, but that's not because Dugin told him to be one. It's because every Russian ruler has been
a Eurasianist for centuries now. Why? Just look at a map: Russia is located in Eurasia. Would we therefore expect the Russians
to be Pan-Africanists or something else? Naturally they're going to be Eurasianists. They learned long ago that if they don't
dominate Eurasia, somebody else will -- and that will cause security problems for Russia. I can't say I hold that against them.
It's not as though the US would take kindly to some foreign empire coming on over to the Western Hemisphere and setting up shop,
say, in Latin America. In fact, just consider how Washington reacted when the Soviets concluded an alliance with Cuba. There was
no talk about the 'sovereignty of small nations' coming from the wallscreen then!
What financial shenanigans? And how has the US effectively funded China's rise? And how do tariffs destroy China ? (tariffs
are like shooting yourself in the foot)
The cause for poverty is located at the Pentagon because they own the national debt! When if ever will the Joint Chiefs be
put on trial for these treasonous Wars and lost trillions?
December 24, 2013 The Worldwide Network of US Military Bases
The US Military has bases in 63 countries. Adding to the bases inside U.S. territory, the total land area occupied by US military
bases domestically within the US and internationally is of the order of 2,202,735 hectares, which makes the *Pentagon* one of
the *largest* landowners worldwide.
Dec 21, 2013 Black Budget: US govt clueless about missing Pentagon $trillions
The Pentagon has secured a 630 billion dollar budget for next year, even though it's failed to even account for the money it's
received since 1996. A whopping 8.5 trillion dollars of taxpayer cash have gone to defence programmes – none of which has been
audited.
@Ilyana_Rozumova between other countries and with its own colonies. As the Dutch comparative advantage was frozen out, their
military aggression declined with it. America sitting on its hands while China becomes a giant Hong Kong and countries all over
Eurasia fall under its sway would by likely to lead to a very nasty war that America would loose and loose badly. It is better
to try now to stop China growing that big and dangerous by declining to trade with them under conditions that will inevitably
make them grow too large to fight. Will trade barriers to China work well enough? Probably not because they are past the lift
off stage now (Carter did too good a job), but it is worth a try.
There is opportunity for an American renaissance and really the only practical solution for its people – that is to swiftly
and decidedly push its pathetic government aside – and begin rapidly re-educating, re-training, re-tooling, and re-building a
next-generation manufacturing base.
Everything about this CIA agent's history lesson sounds fake. The blood sucking military runs the White House. ISIS or ISIL
or whatever the CIA calls itself today poses no threat. Poor General Kelly, one of the generals who let 911 happen, is probably
going to be promoted to Bechtel. I say poor because he's only worth about $5 Million, which is a low figure for the super rich
who own the military industrial complex.
@Sean ised an efficient military staff, efficient in planning. The Prussian army was the first to make extensive use of railways,
first time after the French 1870 attack. Very capable people, Germans. Red Army use of railways even in 1941 was a mess.
The GB preparations for the occupation of neutral Norway in April 1940, also a mess.
Pity quoted book is in German and with gothic letters, Ludendorff shows with extensive map material how the Germans in WWI fought
a two front, sometimes even three front war. Just possible through detailed transport planning.
Erich Ludendorff, 'Meine Kriegserinnerungen 1914 = 1918′, Berlin, 1918
As I said before, rhetorics such as 'USG has effectively funded China's rise' are just over-exaggeration if not BS. Facts:
–Foreign investments only constitute a small % of Chinese domestic investment,
–The majority of foreign Investment in china are NOT from US.
–Total investment in China in recent years amount to $trillions per year
If one cares to examine the major industrial sectors in China , like hi-speed rail, steel, photovoltaic panels, electricity,
energy,.. automobiles Only in the auto sector the americans have a sizable role because the yanks want market access.
we can be reasonably certain that, in the not-too-distant future, another would-be grandmaster will embrace this seductive
concept to guide his bold bid for global power.
my take is that we are in the end game of imperialism. the western empire is in terminal decline and there will be more
empires. from the evidence Russia and China, having learned the lessons of a few thousand years of experience are not seeking
for empires.
empires, traditional ones, are now altogether too costly, especially approaching their end. the world wont tolerate that anymore.
the credit empire is working so far but the people have cottoned on to that. to end global banking power simply take over the
banks, and recuse all debt for they were fraudulently accrued.
all banking will then by need be worker co-ops able to deal with all the financial services required by society..no conglomerates
required
the capitalists will probably try a desperate military gambit to try maintain their empire but that wont work. they are already
outgunned unless they decide to take the world down with them.
but I don't think we will have to worry about such trade 'grandmasters' farting around with the world for too much longer.
the end of imperialism will make such work redundant
and if the democracy does not replace capitalism and the elite wins, it's a Brave New World we looking at. Brilliant geneticist
bent on engineering humans. brilliant mind controllers, psychiatrists and such would be useful job qualifications to have, not
trade specialist.
Brave New World also makes the trade 'genius' redundant
December 31, 2018 War is Good for Business and Organized Crime. Afghanistan's Multibillion Dollar Opium Trade. Rising Heroin
Addiction in the US Afghanistan's opium economy is a multibillion dollar operation which has a direct impact on the surge of heroin
addiction in the US.
It's always fun to read articles and history. This article was fun and perhaps thought provoking. But at least some parts of
it make no sense to me.
Take for example the "heartland" theory. Yes it probably made sense over a century ago when strategist -always looking in the
rear view mirror- judged the situation based on the Roman empire or Napoleons conquest. And their thoughts grounded in traditional
territorial wars.
Today with nuclear weapons, fast long range missiles and in very different economic reality, I don't think the "Heartland"
is the key to control the world, Eurasia, Europe or indeed anything else than possibly the "Heartland" it self. Control from the
Heartland over nuclear France or the U.K?
Annexing small part of land on your own borders whose inhabitants overwhelmingly welcome you with open arms, like Russians
did in Crimea, is totally different from conquering unwilling, hostile neighbors. The latter is extremely costly and difficult
exercise with just about zero upside but gaping black hole on the downside. Remember Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam? So the former
isn't indication of the latter!
I dont't see anything that supports the theory the Russians are playing by the book of the Heartland theory. In current political
situation it's outlandish idea. Perhaps the idea is to paint Russia's leaders as lunatics?
Yes the Russians are probably engaged in cyber-war. They seem to have the Russian troll farm in St. Petersburg – as reported
by European media it's amateur operation costing perhaps few million dollars per year with 80 people from the unemployment list's
hammering on laptops working shifts creating and nurturing social media accounts. No experts in politics or advanced computing
in sight, no supercomputers, artificial intelligence. Like I said, amateur operation hardly indicating state-sponsored efforts.
Place this against the U.S. – NSA – on record for what seems to be global surveillance having tapped the phones of U.S.
European allies heads of states like Angela Merkel -among other things- with it's budget of $80 billion per year. Similar amount
to the total Russian defense budget. Then there is the CIA and other "three letter organizations" in the U.S. and similar operations
in the U.K. I think this is David against Goliath struggle and the latter is doing most of the beating.
The press? R.T and few other outlets versus the western MSM who has in recent years acted like a pack of rabid dogs against
Russia. Investigative journalism into international affairs is replaced by publishing official statements and "analysis" from
"experts". This is war propaganda – nothing less. And the Russians are playing desperate defense most days.
This madness is driving Russia into coalition with China and creating all sorts of totally unnecessary tensions. Forcing
them to avoid the US dollar and so forth. How any of this supports western interests, or the interests of U.S. or U.K. citizens
is a great misery. One thing is certain – this is self-destruction policy for the U.S. in the long run. This is what happens when
the lunatics take over the asylum.
Thankfully Vladimir Putin seems to be extremely capable and stable person – not likely to fall into temptation of hitting
back with horrible consequences for world peace.
It was a nice history essay, but there isn't much of a logical relationship between Mahan, Haushofer, et al. and the present
trade confrontation.
Navarro appears to have the full support of Silicon Valley, Boeing and our other high tech exporters. On the other side
is Wall Street and possibly British interests. For all of the hullabaloo about Trump violating the law against private citizens
conducting foreign diplomacy when he was President-elect, the Wall Street crowd appears to have transgressed much further:
It seems the New York banks would gladly trade the SV engineering jobs for a bigger share of the China banking business,
a la the Cleveland and Detroit auto industry jobs of the past.
A possible break with Britain is something even bigger to watch, as their involvement in China is even more finance-related.
@Anon ng, which far exceeded direct investments into China by any other country.
If we take a look at the Santander report on Hong Kong FDI, most of it seems to come from the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman
Islands (both offshore banking locations, with the funds coming from who knows where) and the UK.
"... this is a clear sign that Canada no longer exists as an independent nation, but is a colony of the USA/Israeli empire. ..."
"... This story is not about an ultra-wealthy Chinese heiress enduring an odd adventure in Canada. This story is about a complete loss of Canadian sovereignty, because detaining this lady is outright insane. Canada was conquered without firing a shot! Welcome back to the royal empire run as a dictatorship. ..."
"... If only America focused its attention inward, on growth and stability, instead of transcendent American Imperialism then the world may stand a chance. ..."
"... Western positions on climate, neoliberalism, migration, in my opinion point into the same direction: critical thinking, almost gone. ..."
"... Defrauding the nation into "war of aggression" is the supreme crime one can commit against the American People. The "SUPREME CRIME"! ..."
"... Every "penny" belonging to each and every Neocon Oligarch who CONSPIRED TO DEFRAUD US INTO ILLEGAL WAR should be forfeit until the debt from those wars is paid down .. IN FULL ! ..."
"... Canada may be the obvious criminal. But on consideration, isn't it rather like the low-level thug who carries out a criminal assignment on the orders of a gang boss? And isn't it the gang boss who is the real problem for society? ..."
"... and Ms. Meng was seized on the same day that he was personally meeting on trade issues with Chinese President Xi. Some have even suggested that the incident was a deliberate slap in Trump's face. ..."
As most readers know, I'm not a casual political blogger and I prefer producing lengthy research articles rather than chasing
the headlines of current events. But there are exceptions to every rule, and the looming danger of a direct worldwide clash with
China is one of them.
Consider the arrest last week of Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei, the world's largest telecom equipment manufacturer. While flying
from Hong Kong to Mexico, Ms. Meng was changing planes in the Vancouver International Airport airport when she was suddenly detained
by the Canadian government on an August US warrant. Although now released on $10 million bail, she still faces extradition to a New
York City courtroom, where she could receive up to thirty years in federal prison for allegedly having conspired in 2010 to violate
America's unilateral economic trade sanctions against Iran.
Although our mainstream media outlets have certainly covered this important story, including front page articles in the New
York Times and the Wall Street Journal , I doubt most American readers fully recognize the extraordinary gravity of
this international incident and its potential for altering the course of world history. As one scholar noted, no event since America's
deliberate 1999 bombing of China's
embassy in Belgrade , which killed several Chinese diplomats, has so outraged both the Chinese government and its population.
Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs correctly
described it as "almost a US declaration of war on China's business community."
Such a reaction is hardly surprising. With annual revenue of $100 billion, Huawei ranks as the world's largest and most advanced
telecommunications equipment manufacturer as well as China's most internationally successful and prestigious company. Ms. Meng is
not only a longtime top executive there, but also the daughter of the company's founder, Ren Zhengfei, whose enormous entrepreneurial
success has established him as a Chinese national hero.
Her seizure on obscure American sanction violation charges while changing planes in a Canadian airport almost amounts to a kidnapping.
One journalist asked how Americans would react if China had seized Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook for violating Chinese law especially
if Sandberg were also the daughter of Steve Jobs.
Indeed, the closest analogy that comes to my mind is when Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia kidnapped the Prime Minister
of Lebanon earlier this year and held him hostage. Later he more successfully did the same with hundreds of his wealthiest Saudi
subjects, extorting something like $100 billion in ransom from their families before finally releasing them. Then he may have finally
over-reached himself when Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, was killed and dismembered by a
bone-saw at the Saudi embassy in Turkey.
We should actually be a bit grateful to Prince Mohammed since without him America would clearly have the most insane government
anywhere in the world. As it stands, we're merely tied for first.
Since the end of the Cold War, the American government has become increasingly delusional, regarding itself as the Supreme World
Hegemon. As a result, local American courts have begun enforcing gigantic financial penalties against foreign countries and their
leading corporations, and I suspect that the rest of the world is tiring of this misbehavior. Perhaps such actions can still be taken
against the subservient vassal states of Europe, but by most objective measures, the size of China's real economy surpassed that
of the US several years ago and is now substantially
larger , while also still having a far higher rate of growth. Our totally dishonest mainstream media regularly obscures this
reality, but it remains true nonetheless.
Provoking a disastrous worldwide confrontation with mighty China by seizing and imprisoning one of its leading technology executives
reminds me of
a comment
I made several years ago about America's behavior under the rule of its current political elites:
Or to apply a far harsher biological metaphor, consider a poor canine infected with the rabies virus. The virus may have no
brain and its body-weight is probably less than one-millionth that of the host, but once it has seized control of the central
nervous system, the animal, big brain and all, becomes a helpless puppet.
Once friendly Fido runs around foaming at the mouth, barking at the sky, and trying to bite all the other animals it can reach.
Its friends and relatives are saddened by its plight but stay well clear, hoping to avoid infection before the inevitable happens,
and poor Fido finally collapses dead in a heap.
Normal countries like China naturally assume that other countries like the US will also behave in normal ways, and their dumbfounded
shock at Ms. Meng's seizure has surely delayed their effective response. In 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon visited Moscow and
famously engaged in a heated
"kitchen debate"
with Premier Nikita Khrushchev over the relative merits of Communism and Capitalism. What would have been the American reaction
if Nixon had been immediately arrested and given a ten year Gulag sentence for "anti-Soviet agitation"?
Since a natural reaction to international hostage-taking is retaliatory international hostage-taking, the newspapers have reported
that top American executives have decided to forego visits to China until the crisis is resolved. These days, General Motors sells
more cars in China than in the US, and China is also the manufacturing source of nearly all our iPhones, but Tim Cook, Mary Barra,
and their higher-ranking subordinates are unlikely to visit that country in the immediate future, nor would the top executives of
Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, and the leading Hollywood studios be willing to risk indefinite imprisonment.
Canada had arrested Ms. Meng on American orders, and this morning's newspapers reported that
a former Canadian diplomat
had suddenly been detained in China , presumably as a small bargaining-chip to encourage Ms. Meng's release. But I very much
doubt such measures will have much effect. Once we forgo traditional international practices and adopt the Law of the Jungle, it
becomes very important to recognize the true lines of power and control, and Canada is merely acting as an American political puppet
in this matter. Would threatening the puppet rather than the puppet-master be likely to have much effect?
Similarly, nearly all of America's leading technology executives are already quite hostile to the Trump Administration, and even
if it were possible, seizing one of them would hardly be likely to sway our political leadership. To a lesser extent, the same thing
is true about the overwhelming majority of America's top corporate leaders. They are not the individuals who call the shots in the
current White House.
Indeed, is President Trump himself anything more than a higher-level puppet in this very dangerous affair? World peace and American
national security interests are being sacrificed in order to harshly enforce the Israel Lobby's international sanctions campaign
against Iran, and we should hardly be surprised that the National Security Adviser John Bolton, one of America's most extreme pro-Israel
zealots,
had personally given the green light to the arrest. Meanwhile, there are credible reports that Trump himself remained entirely
unaware of these plans, and Ms. Meng was seized on the same day that he was personally meeting on trade issues with Chinese President
Xi. Some have even suggested that the incident was a deliberate slap in Trump's face.
But Bolton's apparent involvement underscores the central role of his longtime patron, multi-billionaire casino-magnate Sheldon
Adelson, whose enormous financial influence within Republican political circles has been overwhelmingly focused on pro-Israel policy
and hostility towards Iran, Israel's regional rival.
Although it is far from clear whether the very elderly Adelson played any direct personal role in Ms. Meng's arrest, he surely
must be viewed as the central figure in fostering the political climate that produced the current situation. Perhaps he should not
be described as the ultimate puppet-master behind our current clash with China, but any such political puppet-masters who do exist
are certainly operating at his immediate beck and call. In very literal terms, I suspect that if Adelson placed a single phone call
to the White House, the Trump Administration would order Canada to release Ms. Meng that same day.
Adelson's fortune of $33 billion ranks him as the
15th wealthiest man in America, and the bulk of his fortune is based on his ownership of extremely lucrative gambling casinos in
Macau, China . In effect, the Chinese government currently has its hands around the financial windpipe of the man ultimately responsible
for Ms. Meng's arrest and whose pro-Israel minions largely control American foreign policy. I very much doubt that they are fully
aware of this enormous, untapped source of political leverage.
Over the years, Adelson's Chinese Macau casinos have been involved
in all sorts of political bribery scandals
, and I suspect it would be very easy for the Chinese government to find reasonable grounds for immediately shutting them down, at
least on a temporary basis, with such an action having almost no negative repercussions to Chinese society or the bulk of the Chinese
population. How could the international community possibly complain about the Chinese government shutting down some of their own
local gambling casinos with a long public record of official bribery and other criminal activity? At worst, other gambling casino
magnates would become reluctant to invest future sums in establishing additional Chinese casinos, hardly a desperate threat to President
Xi's anti-corruption government.
I don't have a background in finance and I haven't bothered trying to guess the precise impact of a temporary shutdown of Adelson's
Chinese casinos, but it wouldn't surprise me if the resulting drop in the stock price of
Las Vegas Sands Corp would reduce Adelson's personal
net worth were by $5-10 billion within 24 hours, surely enough to get his immediate personal attention. Meanwhile, threats of a permanent
shutdown, perhaps extending to Chinese-influenced Singapore, might lead to the near-total destruction of Adelson's personal fortune,
and similar measures could also be applied as well to the casinos of all the other fanatically pro-Israel American billionaires,
who dominate the remainder of gambling in Chinese Macau.
The chain of political puppets responsible for Ms. Meng's sudden detention is certainly a complex and murky one. But the Chinese
government already possesses the absolute power of financial life-or-death over Sheldon Adelson, the man located at the very top
of that chain. If the Chinese leadership recognizes that power and takes effective steps, Ms. Meng will immediately be put on a plane
back home, carrying the deepest sort of international political apology. And future attacks against Huawei, ZTE, and other Chinese
technology companies would not be repeated.
China actually holds a Royal Flush in this international political poker game. The only question is whether they will recognize
the value of their hand. I hope they do for the sake of America and the entire world.
This is no surprise. Anyone who follows political events knows that John Bolton is insane, so no surprise that he devised this
insane idea. The problem will be corrected within a week, and hopefully Bolton sent to an asylum.
However, this is a clear sign that Canada no longer exists as an independent nation, but is a colony of the USA/Israeli empire.
Canada provides soldiers for this empire in Afghanistan even today, and in Latvia. Most Canadians can't find that nation on a
map, but it's a tiny unimportant nation in the Baltic that NATO adsorbed as part of its plan for a new Cold War.
This story is not about an ultra-wealthy Chinese heiress enduring an odd adventure in Canada. This story is about a complete
loss of Canadian sovereignty, because detaining this lady is outright insane. Canada was conquered without firing a shot! Welcome
back to the royal empire run as a dictatorship.
I hope someone in China is reading this article. I would love to see Adelson and his cohorts go down in flames. This would fit
right in with China's current anti-corruption foray. Xi has a reputation for hanging corrupt officials. Shutting down Adelson's
casinos would be consistent with what Xi has been doing and increase his popularity, not least of all, right here in the US.
If only America focused its attention inward, on growth and stability, instead of transcendent American Imperialism then the world
may stand a chance. The future will suffer once China's debt traps collapse and like America it begins placing military globally.
America would be the one country who could work towards a Western future but this will never be the case. Better start learning
Mandarin lest we end up like the Uyghurs.
@Anonymous Use your
brain. The Chinese elite want to use the political clout that Adelson and the other big casino Jews have with the US government.
To gain lobby power from a proven expert, Shelly Adelson, they are willing to allow him to make the big bucks in Macao. They expect
quid pro quo.
The Chinese are pussies and will always back down. The U.S. laughed in their face after they bombed and killed them in Belgrade
and got crickets from the Chinamen. China can't project much power beyond its borders. They can't punch back. The Chinese (and
East Asians) are only part of the global business racket because they are efficient worker bees facilitating the global financial
system. They have no real control over the global market. And if they start to think they do they'll get a quick lesson. Like
they're getting with Meng, who is being treated like coolie prostitute. LMAO.
I always enjoy fresh writing from Mr. Unz. Clarity of thought is a fine thing to witness in language. It should be stated, America
is not in any danger.the empire is and is in terminal decline. As Asia's economic might grows in leaps ad bound, so does the empire
scramble to thwart losing its global grip.
As Fred Reed once pointed out, declining empires rarely go quietly. Will America's leadership gamble on a new war to prevent asia's
ascendancy?
I think it's possible.
But what do I know. As my father once said, "I'm just a pawn in a game."
To his credit he had the wherewithal to see that. Alas, most Americans are asleep.
The call for Ms. Meng's arrest had to come from the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. They enforce every thing related
to sanctions, which they claim is what Meng was arrested for– sale of phones and software to Iran.
But they also say they had been on her company's case since 2013 so their timing is rather suspect.
What else I don't understand is her company has research and offices in Germany, Sweden, the U.S., France, Italy, Russia, India,
China and Canada ..So if what they sold or attempted to sell to Iran wasn't outright 'stolen' intellectual property from the US
or even if it was why not transfer it to and or have it made in China or some country not signed onto the Iran sanctions and then
sell it to Iran. I haven't boned up on exactly what kinds of phone software they were selling but I think it has something to
do with being able to bypass NSA and others intercepts.
You are assuming Meng is not a sacrificial pawn in some larger game.
It would be priceless for Xi to shut down Adelson's operations in Macau for a few days or weeks, but I'm afraid Xi is very
much akin to Capitain Louis Renault in Casablanca , and after walking into a Macau casino and uttering the phrase, "I am
shocked- shocked- to find that gambling is going on in here!" might admit in the next breath, "I blow with the wind, and the prevailing
wind happens to be from Jerusalem."
Half a century or so propaganda like 'the USA policing the world' of course had effect.
Not realised is that in normal circumstances police is not an autonomous force, but has to act within a legal framework.
The illusion of this framework of course exists, human rights, democracy, whatever
She's out on bail. Agree that Bolton blindsided Trump. Trump is going to try to turn this into some sort of PR gesture when he
pardons her. No way he will let this mess up his trade deal. Which is beached until she exonerated.
What is true
of these stories of course cannot be known with certainty, but it is asserted that USA military technology is way behind China
and Russia.
Several examples exist, but of course, if these examples tell the truth, not sure.
PISA comparisons of levels of education world wide show how the west is intellectually behind the east.
Western positions on climate, neoliberalism, migration, in my opinion point into the same direction: critical thinking, almost
gone.
"I very much doubt that they are fully aware of this enormous, untapped source of political leverage".
I very much doubt whether that is the case. As far as I know, most Chinese people are distinguished by their intelligence,
thoroughness and diligence. What do the thousands of people employed by China's foreign ministry and its intelligence services
do all day, if they are unaware of such important facts?
However I also doubt if China's leaders are inclined to see matters in nearly such a black and white way as many Westerners.
Jewish people seem to get along very well in China and with the Chinese, which could be because both have high levels of intelligence,
culture, and subtlety. As well as being interested in money and enterprise.
It's certainly an interesting situation, and I too am waiting expectantly for the other shoe to drop.
Yes, whatever your bias is, China is a "normal" country. In the sense of being closer to the ideal than most countries – not of
being average.
You may bewail some of the "human rights" issues in China, although I believe they may be somewhat magnified for PR purposes.
But when did China last attack another country without provocation and murder hundreds of thousands of its citizens, level its
cities, or destroy the rule of law? (Like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya )
The Chinese seem to be law-abiding, sensible, and strongly disposed to peace. Which is something the world needs a lot more
of right now.
@Dan Hayes "why hasn't
anyone before thought of it.. "
" WHY HASN'T ANYONE BEFORE THOUGHT OF IT !!"
You must be kidding me.
For over three years I have been issuing comment after comment after comment .Like a crazed wolf howling in a barren forest
.That the "number one" priority of the American people should be demanding the seizure of ALL the assets of Neocon oligarchic
class.
Why ?
Not because they are "oligarchs." ..or some might own "casinos" but because they "deliberately" Conspired to Defraud the American
People into illegal Wars of Aggression and have nearly bankrupted the nation in the process.
That's why.
And it is the worlds BEST REASON to seize the assets a thousand times better than "bribery charges." I have issued statement after statement to that affect ,on Unz Review, in the hope that at some point it might, at least subliminally,
catch on.
What I have witnessed over the past six years, is a lot of intelligent, thoughtful people "correctly diagnosing" the issues
which plague the nation But no one had any idea of what to do about it. I have been pointing out, that if people really want to do something about it then do whats RIGHT: Seize the assets of the defrauders.!
Of course we can. Of course we can Its the LAW! Defrauding the nation into "war of aggression" is the supreme crime one can commit against the American People. The "SUPREME CRIME"!
(If you don't think so, go ask your local Police Officer. He will tell you FLAT OUT ..it is the Worst crime "Conspiracy to Defraud
into Mass Murder! .Not good ! You can even ask him if there is a statute of limitations. He will probably say something like "
Yeah .When the Sun collapses!")
And they are GUILTY as charged There is no doubt , .. not anymore. We all know it and can "prove" it ! Every "penny" belonging to each and every Neocon Oligarch who CONSPIRED TO DEFRAUD US INTO ILLEGAL WAR should be forfeit until
the debt from those wars is paid down .. IN FULL !
The keys to the kingdom are right there, right in front of your noses. If you want to change things ."take action" the law is on YOUR side. We don't need China to do a damn thing ..We just need the American People to rise up,"apply the law" and take back their country
and its solvency.
Canada may be
the obvious criminal. But on consideration, isn't it rather like the low-level thug who carries out a criminal assignment on the
orders of a gang boss? And isn't it the gang boss who is the real problem for society?
An article with the identical take as Ron Unz, including the idea that China has its key lever via Sheldon Adelson's casinos,
was published on the Canadian
website of Henry Makow also noting that USA political king-maker Adelson, is a major force behind the anti-Iran obsessions
that partly grounded the arrest of Ms Meng, and so well-deserves consequences here...
In the Jeffrey Sachs article linked above, Sachs lists no less than 25 other companies which have been 'violating US sanctions'
and admitted guilt via paying of fines, but never suffered any executive arrests, including banks including JP Morgan Chase, Bank
of America, PayPal, Toronto-Dominion Bank, and Wells Fargo.
The principle against 'selective, arbitrary, and political prosecutions'
The principle that one state cannot take measures on the territory of another state by means of enforcement of national laws
- 'proportionality of law', which demands that penalty for any said 'crime' needs to be proportionate to the offence, and not
draconian, 'cruel and unusual' Ms Meng is threatened with decades in prison
This is also a significant humiliation of President Trump personally, his own advisors apparently colluding to render him powerless
and uninformed
The Meng case brings to mind the story of another sanctions-violating 'target' arrested at USA request, the great USA chess
master and non-Zionist Jew, Bobby Fischer (1943-2008).
Born in Chicago, Illinois, USA, Fischer impressed the world with his genius, but, like Ms Meng became criminally indicted by
the USA regime, for the 'crime' of playing chess in Yugoslavia when the Serb government was under USA 'sanctions'. Harassed across
the globe, Fischer was jailed in Japan in 2004-05 by embarrassed Japanese leaders, for this fake 'crime' which few people in the
world thought was wrong. Fischer had been using his celebrity voice to strongly criticise the USA & Israeli governments, making
him also a political target, much as Ms Meng is a political target due to her being a prominent citizen and quasi-princess of
China.
The Japanese, loath to be the instrument of Fischer's USA imprisonment, finally allowed Bobby to transit to Iceland where he
was given asylum and residency. Living not far from Iceland's NATO military base, Fischer became quickly and mysteriously struck
with disease, and Fischer died in Reykjavik, perhaps a victim of a CIA-Mossad-Nato assassination squad.
The Chinese government, I am told, directly understands the power and role of Sheldon Adelson here, and Chinese inspectors
are perhaps inside Adelson's Macau properties as you read this. Perhaps Chinese officials may show up soon in Adelson's casinos,
and repeat the line of actor Claude Rains' character in the 1942 film 'Casablanca' -
"I'm shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here!"
What we have to realize is that just as there is no real difference between Democrats and Republicans because they are both
owned by the same people, so must we realize that in reality there is little difference between the leaders of the worlds countries
because they are all owned by the same central banks. This is why Nate Rothschild famously stated "give me control of a countries
money supply, and I care not who makes its laws" . All the world's central banks are tied together by BIS, WB and IMF and
the US marines. This is the reason Syria, Libya, NK and Venezuela have been taken down: Rothchild central bank control.
So this Huaiwei arrest almost certainly has nothing to do with the "trade war", and is with certainly a hit by one side of
the Kabal against the other. Zionist Nationalists versus Chabad Lubbovitz perhaps?
Jared Kushner has been lying pretty low lately and recently was stripped of his security clearance. He was linked to Kissilev
the Russian ambassador, plus he was pushing Trump to help protect MBS in SA. I would bet that he is at the center of this storm.
I'm honestly shocked no one has stated the obvious: very, very few Americans would be likely to care if Sheryl Sandberg were arrested
on dubious charges in China. I cant say I would be one of those few people.
I also should note that the crown prince of KSA is Mohammad bin Salman. Salman is his father, the king. The crown prince is
Mohammad, son of (aka "bin") Salman.
@TheMediumIsTheMassage
In many ways China does deviate from international norms, but of course so does the United States. As Tom Welsh pointed out, Chinese
foreign policy is downright angelic compared to the US, even if you consider Tibet and Xinjiang to be illegitimately occupied
territories (an argument I'm sympathetic to). Perhaps China would act as belligerently as the US does if China were the sole global
superpower, but it's not, so it's fair to judge China favorably compared to the US.
@Craig Nelsen Trump
deserves it for hiring Bolton at all. Perhaps one might argue Trump was blackmailed into doing so but he doesn't seem to be acting
like a blackmailed man.
Mr. Unz, at no time since Ms. Wanzhou's arrest have I felt myself in a position to judge that this was a strategically unwise
or incautious act. It might be, but apparently I'm to be contrasted from so many of your readers, and you, simply for understanding
myself to have an inadequate handle on the facts to make the call. That would be true, that my handle on the facts would be inadequate,
even if I didn't have personal knowledge of Huawei's suspicious practices or their scale.
I worry that you don't seem to evidence the presence of someone trusted who will go toe to toe with you as Devil's Advocate.
Too often, on affairs of too great a consequence, you come across too strongly, when the data doesn't justify the confidence.
A confident error is still an error and Maimonides' advice on indecision notwithstanding, a confident error is a candidate for
hubris, the worst kind of error. All of this, of course, assumes you make these arguments in good faith because if not the calculus
changes mightily.
Too many of your readers evidence that they interpret this event and form an opinion of it based on nothing but this higher order
syllogism:
Because I distrust the US government
[or because I distrust those I believe to control the US government]
It follows that this was an unjustified act or else a dangerous strategic error
After this higher order syllogism is accepted without due critique, evidence is sought to justify it and no further consideration
of the possibilities is tallied.
At minimum you need to have run a permutation where you seriously consider that : it is well know to US operatives, if not
to US citizens, you, and your readers, that Huawei is actively, constantly and maliciously waging covert war on the USA. You should
at least consider this possibility. If true, this act may merely be a shot across the bow that notifies China of a readiness to
expose things China may not wished exposed, and might stop endangering US citizens, if it were made aware such things stand to
be exposed.
If that's true, not only are you a fishing trawler captain causing distraction with a loudspeaker yelling at the captain of
the destroyer that just fired the warning shot across the bow of a Chinese vessel that is likely covert PLA/N, but now you may
be positioning your trawler to block the destroyer.
Do you really have enough information to know this is wise? Do you really know as much as the destroyer captain?
I will be away today, in the off chance you reply and I don't immediately answer it is because I can't.
Superb, as always, Ron Unz!
For someone who says he has no background in economics you you put your finger dead center on the money nexus of this "puppet
run by another puppet controlled by another puppet dangling from the strings of a still bigger puppet" chain from hell.
I wish someone would read out the entire article, may be with photos of the culprits, on Youtube with subtitles in Chinese.
@Craig Nelsen Nobody
is suggesting that "the order" came from Bolton or that he could indeed give any such order. True his not telling Trump about
what was about to happen bears a sinister interpretation.
@TheMediumIsTheMassage
I think what he means by normal are countries whose leaders are interested in the well being of their nation and the people they
rule. No divided or corrupted loyalties to another nation.
By this standard the United States is clearly not a normal country.
One angle you did not mention, Cisco (U.S. company) of course until not too many years ago had a near-monopoly on the kind
of network systems Huawei is selling as number one now (actually, I did not know of Huawei's success there, thought of it as a
handset maker), that may be a factor here.
There are a few Chinese or U.S. people of that descent on this site, mainly PRC-sympathetic, it would be very amusing if they
were able to ignite a big discussion of your hypothetical reprisals
During the bombing of Belgrade a missile fell on the Chinese Embassy. A local tv reporter approached a Chinese Embassy official
and asked him. What are you going to do now? The answer was.
The Meng case brings to mind the story of another sanctions-violating 'target' arrested at USA request, the great USA chess
master and non-Zionist Jew, Bobby Fischer (1943-2008).
Fischer was another victim of Zionist controlled American imperialism. Yugoslavia, the child of Woodrow Wilson, became the
victim of the Imperialist war Against Russia. Russia's brother, and ally, Yugoslavia, was destroyed by the kind democrat gang
administration of Wm (that was not sex), Clinton.
Excellent article, and an ingenious suggestion regarding the Adelson casinos. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a casino
shutdown. Having worked in the marketing end of the casino industry myself, I can tell you the most coveted demographic lists
were always the Chinese players, words like fanatical and obsessive don't even come close to describing their penchant for gambling.
I could literally see casino shutdowns in China causing a national Gilet Jaune moment followed by the overthrow of the Communist
Party LOL.
I would definitely welcome seeing more Ron Unz articles on current topics.
@Carlton Meyer Any chance
this is Democrat, Deep State types at State and Justice manufacturing this cluster-f in order to make Trump look unaware? This
is a President that respects casinos. And business. If Bolton and Company pulled this from behind the scenes without Executive
knowledge or authorization, is that even legal? More treason? But given the circumstances, how does all this even GET to Iran,
hurt Iran at all? What was supposedly illegal was done in 2010. Are we certain bags of cash from the Chinese and Russians and
Iran weren't traveling about Democrat-ruled DC back then? Grabbing this chick helps the case against Iran? I'm at a loss as to
how.
And so the thought of a more local political benefit/purpose, stirring a diplomatic shit-storm on Trump's watch, something
he'd have to take responsibility for. To start a near war, sort of like the Bay of Pigs. Operatives, pulling tricks, writing checks
the President then has to cover, looking like an unelectable mook throughout.
I'm happy to give the AIPAC kiddies full credit, I just don't see the damage to Iran in all this. For crying out loud, we carted
$500 billion cash over to Iran under Obama's watch, what, 2013 or 2014ish? I don't know how we skip over THAT, to get to trade
shenanigans in 2010, also taking place under Obama's watch. What was Holder doing when he was AG after all, why no action then?
If it's Israeli-driven today, why wasn't Israel pushing Holder to take action against Huawei back in 2010?
@TheMediumIsTheMassage
How is the USA a "normal" country in any sense of the word? It once was truly great among the nations of the world but that ship
sailed looooong back.
We invade for fake "freedom", inject the poison of homo mania into nations that do not do the bidding of the homos and/or bend
to the will of the chosen ones, pretend it's all for some good cause then invite the survivors to displace the founding stock
of this country. You call that "normal"??
We are nothing more than a vehicle for every kind of degenerate (((loser))) with cash to use our men and women as their private
mercenaries. We spread filth around the place, destroy nations and proclaim ourselves as the peace-makers with the shrill voice
of a worn out street prostitute on kensingtion ave (philly).
We are like that hoe, living out the last days of her aids infested body, with a grudge on the world for something that was
completely of our (((own))) making. Philly might have been the birthplace of this country but camden is where we are all headed.
And looking at China, we are dysfunctional beyond repair. Of course we still have quite a few things the Chinese might want to
emulate (no the SJW versions but the read deal) but looking at our other maladies, they probably won't who'll blame them?
@Anon Yes it was s Portuguese
colony. Interesting that Persian traders including Jews were in Macau going back st least to 500 AD probably more.
Ron, have you sent this article to the Chinese ambassador in DC yet?
Strange that the Chinese let Adelson in. The Macau casinos have thrived for a long time. The Portuguese left valuable casinos
and the Chinese let the Jews in soon after the Portuguese left.
It makes sense that foreign casino operators would want to move into Macau, but why would China let foreigners in?
Could it be that one of the largest investors in China since the mid 1970s Richard Blum husband of Dianne Feinstein has something
to do with it??
She's as much the Senator representing China as a Senator representing California.
Another interesting aspect of all this is the "suicide" of Physics Professor Zhang Shoucheng at Stanford just a few hours after
Meng was arrested on Dec 1. According to reliable Chinese sources and widespread reporting on social media Zhang was the conduit
to China from Silicone Valley. He was richly rewarded by Chinese investment in his US companies. IMHO the Chinese understand the
role of Israel and Adelson in US politics but are cautious in going this far. The Chinese are taking the light touch approach
with Trump and his Adelson selected neocons. A Chinese businessman Guo WenGui with the highest connections to the Chinese elites
and security services has sought political asylum in the USA. On the internet he daily speaks to the Chinese diaspora (in Mandarin)
on the complex developments in Chinese official corruption. The NY Times has now started to take him seriously (good idea ) and
reports that he and Steve Bannon have formed an alliance to expose Chinese government activities. You can read all this in the
NY Times. Unz should translate Guo Wengui into English and publish his commentaries. In my analysis he is usually right about
China and has shown remarkable predictive powers. He knows how and what the Chinese think, where the bones are buried and what
comes next. He and Bannon plan to reveal the facts about the recent suicide in France of another prominent Chinese businessman
Wang Jian who was Chairman of Hainan Airlines parent company.
This article by Mr. Unz is a good example of why people should read and support the Unz Review. No one is better equipped to shed
light on otherwise unmentioned interests behind mainstream news events like this one.
Kudos for making a smart suggestion that no doubt will be heard by people who could carry it out.
Good article, but it is only scratching the surface.
Many things would be explained if somebody would find out what is the volume of US investment in China, and what percentage of
it is Jewish.
That would shed light why the rabid Jewish press in US so bestially attacking Trump, after Trump started to impose tariffs on
Chinese goods.
I do not know, but I could guess that Trump reached deep into Jewish profits.
We have no choice than wait what will happen to tariffs after Trump will be replaced.
@Carlton Meyer Canada
declared an end to participating in combat operations in Afghanistan in July 2011 and withdrew its combat forces, leaving a dwindling
number of advisors to Afghan forces. The last Canadian soldier departed Afghanistan in March 2014. You are spot on regarding Bolton's
certifiability.
Trump has been totally phagocyted by the Neo-Cons in the foreign policy. The two pillars of the neocons foreign policy are now
Saudi Arabia and Israel. Trump is benefitting from the neo-cons intelligence and their powerful financial network that he is convinced
would help in his reelection.
Once he is re-elected then he may decrease his reliance on them but for the next few years the jewish lobby will prevail in Trump's
foreign policy. Unless they are not able to protect Trump from falling under the democrats assaults or been eliminated from power,
they are on for more wars, more troubles and more deaths. History will place Trump near Bush junior as neo-cons puppets responsible
for the largest destruction of countries since WWII.
@Brabantian Interesting
that she was arrested in the Chinese colony of Vancouver BC. Maybe the Canadian government is asserting sovereignty over Vancouver
at long last.
That must have been frightening. There she was sitting in the VIP lounge surrounded by deferential airline clerks as usual
and suddenly she's under arrest.
Since the end of the Cold War, the American government has become increasingly delusional, regarding itself as the Supreme
World Hegemon.
More delusional than when in 1957 the US government gave Iran a nuclear reactor and weapons grade uranium? In his latter years
Khashoggi 's relative, the weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi, much later mused on what the US was trying to achieve by giving Iran
vast amounts of armaments, when all it did was set off an arms race in the region. America then switched to Iraq as its cop on
the beat and gave them anything they asked for, and were placatory of Saddam when he started talking crazy. This was under the
US government least attentive to Israel. Yes things should be more balanced as Steven Walt suggests
Averting World Conflict with China, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review If it wants to create the conditions for a final settlement
of the Palestinian problem, then America should be more even handed but it must also be very cautious about Iran. We don't know
who will be in power there in the future and history shows that once those ME counties are given an inch they take a mile.
Saudi Arabia seems quite sensible, its liking for US gov bonds that even Americans think offer too low a rate of interest is
easily explained as payment for US protection. Killing Khashoggi that way was a dreadful moral and foreign policy mistake from
someone who is too young for the amount of authority he has been given, but the victim did not beg for death like more than a
few Uygurs are doing right now. The CIA agent China rounded up with the help of it's network of double agents in the US were doubtless
glad to have their interrogation terminated.
Some sweeteners from Adelson are likely in the Tsunami of dirty Chinese money, which are amusingly being laundered in Canadian
casinos. As Walt points out the Chinese elite want bolt holes and bank accounts in north America. By the way most of the ill gotten
gains are from sale of opiates such as fentanyl.
Targeting Sheldon Adelson's Chinese Casinos
Yes that will work, especially when added to what China is already doing in targeting farmers who supported Trump, so he is
definitely not going to be reelected now you have explained all this to them, and you are also opening up Harvard to their children,
which can only redound to the detriment of white gentiles. Deliberate pouring of the vials of wrath or just accidentally spilling
them? I am begining to wonder.
Thank you, Ron, for a clear-headed and insightful article.
There are however, two tiny infelicities, which I would not want for them to distract from the article's merit.
First, I think the Saudi Arabian Prince you are referring to is Prince Mohammed bin Salman, not "Prince Salman". "Prince
Mohammed" would be the abbreviated form of his name. "Bin" is of course the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew "ben" indicating paternity,
rather than a middle name, so "Salman" is not his surname. "Prince Salman" would refer to the current Saudi King before he was
King, rather than to the current Prince.
Second, maybe the hypothetical of China seizing Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook is not the best analogy since I, and I suspect
others who are aware of her key role in empowering and enriching a deceptive and parasitical industry, would not be terribly troubled
if China seized her. Indeed, we might consider it a public service. Admittedly, it is hard to find a good analogy for a prominent
female executive of a US national champion company since so many of our prominent companies are predatory rather than productive
and scorn their native country rather than serve it.
and Ms. Meng was seized on the same day that he was personally meeting on trade issues with Chinese President Xi. Some
have even suggested that the incident was a deliberate slap in Trump's face.
@Baxter"America
is not in any danger." America is in very great danger, but only from within.
Almost half of all millenials believe that Capitalism is evil and that the Socialism should be the guiding economic principle
of this nation. When you point out that it has failed for every nation in history that has tried it, notably the Soviet Union
and more recently Venezuela, they retort that it is because those countries "did it wrong" and that "we will do it right."
When you ask for specifics as what they "did wrong" that we will "do right" they stare at you wordlessly as if you
are the one who is an idiot.
It should also be pointed out that a vast majority of Democrats think that Ocasio-Cortez is brilliant and that we need more
legislators like her.
What if Ms. Meng, was giving Iranian dissidents phones and other equipment to undermine the Government of Iran, starting another
color revolution, that sucks in America and Israel? What if the Trump administration asked that this not be done in order to end
the endless "revolutions" that have been happening and bankrupting our country and threatening Israel? What if the sanctions are
benefiting Iran's government too? China was allowed to become so large at our expense when we opened up trade and moved businesses
over there, but this was to keep them from being too cozy with Soviet Russia, just ask Nixon.
Part of the Zionist plan for a Zionist NWO was laid by David Rockefeller when he sent Kissinger to China to open up Chinas slave
labor to the NWO types like Rockefeller and the Zionist controlled companies in the U.S. and part of the plan was the deindustrialization
of America thus bringing down the American standard of living while raising the standard of living in China.
I will never believe the fake disagreement between the Zionist controlled U.S. and the Chinese government as long as G.M and
Google and the other companies that have shut down their operations in the U.S. and opened operations in China, it is all a NWO
plan to bring down we Americans to third world status and then meld all of us into a Zionist satanic NWO.
The enemy is not at the gates, the enemy is in the government and its name is Zionism and the Zionist NWO!
"We must confront Russian cheating on their nuclear obligations," Pompeo said at the
conclusion of the NATO meeting, claiming the U.S. has warned Russia to re-enter compliance
about 30 times over the past five years. He urged the West to increase pressure, arguing it can
no longer "bury its head in the sand" over repeat violations.
But for the first time Pompeo signaled it's not too late to salvage the treaty, despite
Trump already saying the US it taking steps to pull out: he said Washington "would welcome a
Russian change of heart."
On Oct. 20 President Trump first announced the United States' planned withdrawal from the
historic treaty brokered by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan
in 1987. At the time Russia's Foreign Ministry
slammed the move as "a very dangerous step" which is ultimately part of "continuing
attempts to achieve Russia's concessions through blackmail". Russian officials have issued the
counter-charge that it is the US that's out of compliance with the treaty.
The US is waging unconstitutional war in Syria without authorization of the UNSC but
Pompeo has the effrontery to lecture the Russians on their "lawlessness."
Is there ONE freaking day out of the year when some senior official of the USG is not
acting like an utter horse's ***?
Putin should just have the SVR make some fake "proof" Trump is a Russian agent and feed it
to the democratic-isis-******-lover party and let them tear Trump a new *******.
Considering it was the democrats who first pushed this muh russian meddlings, can't even
see how will the US be able to pull itself out of this (****)hole they dug for
themselves...
So the US with a big lead in ballistic missiles and anti-ballistic missiles, wants to blow
that up to promote the development of long range stealth cruise missiles, well, I guess there
must be a massive profit in it.
The normal rule in a arms race though, the big losers are the countries with the biggest
lead in current war technologies, when new technologies enter the fray, negating existing
investments and bankrupting that country as the right off their existing lead and having to
race to play catch up and take the lead again.
It's like the crazy, the US leads in space, great lets that it into a battlefield and
eliminate that lead, why, just ******* why would you be stupid enough, banning war in space
protects you lead, promoting war in space ends it. Blocking long range cruise missiles
protects the US lead in ballistic missiles and anti-ballistics missile systems, allowing it
ends that lead.
Now in the most idiotic fashion, the US has declared it will arbitrarily leave that treaty
without any evidence of anything, now setting the precedent, that any country can withdraw
from any treaty with the US for any arbitrary reason because that is the behaviour the US
government has set precedent for, why hold any treaty with the US, when they will pull out at
any time for any reason. The probable message from the rest of the world to the US, yeah ****
off America, we are not Native Americans who exist for you to abuse us
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/01/18/368559990/broken-promises-on-display-at-native-american-treaties-exhibit
(we know it is in the American government nature but **** off anyhow).
What a pompous *** Pompeo is. After his lies about MbS how can I trust him on this issue.
Is the US clean? They are certainly not in compliance with the chemical weapons treaty having
destroyed no stockpiles as they agreed to do....almost 2 decades after the treaty was
signed.
Treaties are ******** unless the parties to them actually implement them and follow the
rules. The US seems to believe they have an inherent right to ignore the treaties they sign
up to. Why anyone deals with them I have no idea.
Where did Trump get these Bush 2,Zionist pig holdovers?
After Bush 2 dumped ABM treaty NATO/US have been creeping up to Russias border.
Then in 2014, Obama & Nuland decided it would be a good idea to effect regime change
in Ukraine and put neonazi thugs on Russia's border.
EU Israhelli clients all know this is ******** about Russia. But Russia pissed off the
Zionist entity in interfering with Yinon/7countries in five years plan.
How LONG are we going to put up with this Zionist attack on our country?
They are asking why Russia not keeping treaty while we violate it?
Secretary of war Mike Pompeo
Washington Seeks 'Pretext' to Abandon INF Treaty - Russian Envoy to US
"...We are accused of violating the Treaty by allegedly possessing a certain 9M729
missile that violates the accord's provisions. However, we do not see any clear facts or
arguments that could lead to conclusions of violations,"
Sputnik Here
Russia, China, Iran challenging global US leadership: Pompeo
"..US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has targeted Russia, China and Iran for opposing
Washington's "leadership role". PressTv
Just accuse without any specific evidence.
another
China has simply made no effort to halt its ongoing pattern of aggressive
, predatory trade .
US always blaming others while violating every law and treaty known to man.
" I regret that we now most likely will see the end of the INF Treaty," North Atlantic
Treaty Organization Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared ...
Fixed: " I'm ecstatic that our fabricated accusations allows us to finally see the end of
the INF Treaty, which really benefits Russia far more than NATO," North Atlantic Treaty
Organization Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared ...
The whole point of the US strategy is to use short-range cruise missiles to take out
Russian retaliatory capability in a first strike, thereby destroying all of those hypersonic
weapons, and using their ABM systems to "clean up" any missiles that survived the initial
onslaught. The "advantage" of the short-range cruise missiles is that they greatly reduce
Russia's available response times - it basically must decide to annihilate the US within 5
minutes of notice of an attack, or face being wiped out with no retaliatory capabilities. (It
is worth noting that, in the past, false alarms have lasted for longer than 5 minutes.)
This is by far the most destabilizing, dangerous move, ever - any false blip on a Russian
radar can lead to an all-out nuclear exchange. It is infinitely more threatening to humanity
than "global warming". Brought to you by the Evil Drumfpster.
The Dead Man Hand only allows you to respond with capabilities that have survived and that
are not eliminated by the ABM. The 5 minutes notice is until the vast majority of your
nuclear arsenal is decimated - dead hand (i.e., ability to retaliate if the leadership is
entirely decapitated) or not.
Is Mike Pompeo Starting to Look Like Kim Jong Un? He is talking like communist leader at
Communist party congress.
Mike Pompeo argued that Trump's reassertion of national sovereignty through his "America
First" policy would make those institutions function better. "In the finest traditions of our
great democracy, we are rallying the noble nations of the world to build a new liberal order
that prevents war and achieves greater prosperity for all," Pompeo said at a speech at the
German Marshall Fund thinktank. "We're
supporting institutions that we believe can be improved; institutions that work in American
interests – and yours – in service of our shared values."
He listed a series of current international institutions, including the EU, UN, World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund, that he said were no longer serving their mission they
were created.
The remarks were frequently punctuated with praise for Trump, who is referred to 13 times
in the text. Pompeo portrayed his president as restoring an era of triumphal US leadership in
the world, for the first time since the end of the cold war.
"This American leadership allowed us to enjoy the greatest human flourishing in modern
history," the secretary of state said. "We won the cold war. We won the peace. With no small
measure of George HW Bush's effort, we reunited Germany. This is the type of leadership that
President Trump is boldly reasserting."
President [George H. W.] Bush used to talk about a new world order, based on shared rules
and on cooperation among free nations. I was at high school at the time, and I remember
perfectly well the sense of hope and of opening that one could breathe in Europe over these
years.
He imagined - and I quote - "a world where the rule of law supplants the role of the
jungle; a world in which nations recognise their shared responsibility for freedom and
justice; a world where the strong respect the rights of the weak."
My generation believed in this vision, believed in the possibility for this vision to turn
into reality, to become true, especially in Europe - a continent divided by the Cold War. We
hoped that after the Cold War a more cooperative world order would indeed be possible and
indeed be built.
Today, I am afraid we have to admit that such a new world order has never truly
materialised and worse, there is a real risk today that the rule of the jungle replaces the
rule of law. The same international treaties - so many in which we are together - that ended
the Cold War are today put into question.
Instead of building a new order, we have to today invest a huge part of our energy in
preventing the current rules from being dismantled piece by piece.
Like many people, I do not find what is known as the concept of Mutual Assured
Destruction, or MAD to be reassuring. Spurring the creation of more ways to use nuclear
weapons is what ending the INF Treaty will do. Joschka Fischer, German Foreign Minister, and
Vice-Chancellor from 1998-2005 writes;
In this new environment, the "rationality of deterrence" maintained by the United
States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War has eroded. Now, if nuclear proliferation
increases, the threshold for using nuclear weapons will likely fall.
The nuclear deterrent we hold is a hundred times larger than needed to stop anyone sane or
rational from attacking America, and for anyone else, an arsenal of any size will be
insufficient. What we are talking about is the Intermediate-range Nuclear-Forces treaty also
known as the INF Treaty which limits short-range missiles. The article below explores the
insanity of a new arms race.
China and Russia don't want a military arms race but they will get one. The funny part is
they will confide in Trump about their woes and he will mimic their desires but not agree
with them.
"We are either going to have a REAL DEAL with China, or no deal at all - at which point we
will be charging major Tariffs against Chinese product being shipped into the United States.
Ultimately, I believe, we will be making a deal - either now or into the future....
Chinese version of neoliberalism and the USA version do differ.
Notable quotes:
"... I especially encourage the Russians on here to return to their home country. There is little point writing material critical of America in English on fringe media sites while in America contributing to the US economy and paying US taxes. My observation has been that the Russian personality not to mention background doesn't fare terribly well in corporate America. Why waste your energy in a country and system beyond reform that despises you for who you are that only accepts you for your labor. You'll find a better fit in your home country where you'll actually have genuine social belonging, which, unlike China, actually really needs more people. ..."
"... Xi might have stepped up too early, but maybe this wouldn't matter. When the Americans decide to confront China depends on the Americans. In case you believe that US presidents drive US policy, Trump was saying things about China 25 years ago. ..."
"... Chinese progress has been most impressive but the country is sitting on an enormous pile of private and SOE debt.. There has not been a country in recorded history that has accumulated debt at the rate China did post the 2008 crash. ..."
"... @Achmed E. Newman Dictatorships are personality dependent, as opposed to democracies that are ? dependent. Communism came up with a catchy slogan – dictatorship of the proletariat. Why couldn't US – which are, after all, a birthplace of propaganda – come up with a similarly catchy slogan, such as: Democracy – dictatorship of the elitariat? Or maybe, Democracy – dictatorship of the deep state. ..."
"... I worked for Chinese-Filipinos and this is really 100% true. The ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are the most heartless capitalists on earth. ..."
"... [You have been repeatedly warned that you leave far too many rambling, vacuous comments, especially since so many of them demonstrate your total ignorance. Fewer and fewer of your comments will be published until you improve your commenting-behavior or better yet permanently depart for another website] ..."
Great, but kinda pedestrian. Lemme use this platform to point out China's flaws from a
Chinese perspective.
Chinese society and Chinese people are too arrogant, materialistic, and hypersensitive to
criticism.
This is a huge problem. One, it alienates pretty much anyone who becomes familiar with
China. Two, it leads to mistake after mistake when no criticism is offered to correct them in
time. Three, it causes society to view things overly in terms of money, falling behind in all
other aspects. Nobody cares how much rich or strong you are if you're a crass, materialistic
asshole. They'll hate you.
All societies have these issues, few are as bad as China. There are Chinese reading this
right now and getting angry and ready to call me a traitor, demonstrating my point
exactly.
A wise dictator is great for the country, but Xi is not wise. He is a stubborn old man
stuck in the past who is clearly not listening to advisers. He has overplayed his hand,
confronted the US 10~20 years too early, damaged China's image out of some paranoid fear of
Uyghurs, and absolutely failed at making friends with our East Asian neighbors, instead
driving them further into the arms of the Americans.
China does not need more repression right now, it needs to slowly liberalize to keep the
economy growing and competitive. I'm not talking about western style "open society" bullshit,
traitors like multiculturalists and feminists should always be persecuted. But the
heavy-handed censorship, monitoring of everyday citizens is completely unnecessary. If China
does not develop a culture of trust, and genuine, non-money based curiosity, it will not have
the social structure to overcome the west.
Outside of trade and money-related issues, the Chinese citizenry is woefully ignorant of
the outside world. There is no widespread understanding of foreign cultures and ideologies,
how they might threaten us, how to defend against them, or how to work around them. An
overwrought sense of nationalism emphasizes Chinese victimhood to the point of absurdity,
squandering any sympathy onlookers might have, and actually causes some to turn 180 and hate
China instead.
Angry, condescending attitudes towards our neighbors, especially Japan, severely cripple
China's ability to be a world player. Without a network of like-minded friends (actual
friends, not trade partners), China will never be able to match the western alliance. It is
not just America we have to overcome, but an entire bloc of nations. I don't care how much
people hate our neighbors, China must extend the olive branch, present a sincere face of
benevolence, and not act like the big guy with a fragile ego. Racially and culturally similar
East Asians are the best candidates for long-term friendship, it is wrong to forsake them
under the assumption that all we need is Russia or Pakistan.
Despite the trade war, I'm not worried about China's economy, infrastructure, political
system, or innate ability. These are our strengths. I have no love for liberal democracy or
western values. But China must change its attitude and the way it interacts with the outside
world soon, or face geopolitical disaster.
Don't overreact to every insult or criticism. Compete in areas that isn't just money or
materials. Really understand soft power, and what it takes to be liked around the world.
Develop our own appealing ideas and worldview. Listen to well-meaning, nationalistic critics,
and change before the world discovers China's ugly side.
I would say that yes, dictatorships tend to be more efficient than "democracy". The only
major downside to dictatorships are that usually dictators – thanks perhaps to personal
ambitions, lack of accountability, volatile personalities – tend to cause major wars.
That's a reason why someone becomes a dictator – to make it into the history books.
And the easiest way to make it into the history books is to cause a major war(s) and capture
all the glory that comes with causing the deaths of as many people as possible.
But then again, looking at the US, they don't seem to have been disadvantaged by a lack of
dictators at all, as far as starting wars goes. One has to wonder, are dictatorships even
competitive with US in the category of causing wars?
By Tiensen do you mean Tencent, famous now for its WeChat which I use for messaging and
payments. I now also use their cloud storage Weiyun (3 TB on only 10 RMB / month) as well as
their email.
By the way, Nvidia, YouTube, and Yahoo were all founded by ethnic Chinese from Taiwan. I
actually think Nvidia is more impressive than both Microsoft or Google. Its GPU technology is
much higher barrier to entry and as far as I can tell still exclusive to America.
I may well never come back to America ever again, and thus, most of what goes on in
America will no longer be directly relevant to me. I could give pretty much zero of a fuck
about the nonsense on China in the English language press, which I will only look at very
occasionally, and those who create it. It would be rather futile to try to change the views
of the majority of white Americans. Of course, there are a minority of white Americans who
are more informed, reasonable, and open-minded, the ones I tended to interact with back in
America, many of whom are unhappy with the state of American society. They are welcome to
contact me (my email is on my website), and if they use not an American email, I'll be more
willing to share certain information with them and possibly connect them to China-related
business/opportunities.
I especially encourage the Russians on here to return to their home country. There is
little point writing material critical of America in English on fringe media sites while in
America contributing to the US economy and paying US taxes. My observation has been that the
Russian personality not to mention background doesn't fare terribly well in corporate
America. Why waste your energy in a country and system beyond reform that despises you for
who you are that only accepts you for your labor. You'll find a better fit in your home
country where you'll actually have genuine social belonging, which, unlike China, actually
really needs more people.
Main difference is China is about Chinese ruling over Chinese with Chinese pride, whereas
America is about JAG(Jews-Afros-Gays) ruling over whites with 'white guilt', jungle fever,
and homomania.
Problem with China is too much corruption and petty greed.
Many tried to warn the weenies what would happen while our industries were "donated" to China
and got hosed for their trouble. Pat Buchanan's troubles actually started when he wrote
The Great Betrayal , even if they took a little extra time to pull his syndicated
column down.
Did you know about a World War II-era Kaiser steel mill once in California, that was cut
up in blocks like a model kit and shipped in its entirety to China?
It happened right out in the open, under Daddy Bush, and everyone who complained became an
unperson, Orwell-style. Nobody dared object to the glories of free trade. And the Chinese in
California said it was doing so because they had a multi-million ton Plan to fill, and it was
almost the 21st century.
China is now taking the wealth their nation is creating with stuff developed in Europe,
Britain, and the United States. The hole in the donut is they could have done all that under
license and we could have kept on with, and even improved our industrial base.
But in fact our leaders had Gender Reassignment in mind for the 21st century, not actual
productive work that truly builds nations. The Impoverishment of Nations is well known: Send
the real work out, keep the barbarians inside well-fed, sharp-clawed, and morally
depraved.
" its stunning advance in forty years from impoverished Third World to a huge economy"
Bullshit. The stunning advance occurred between 1950-1975. Starting with an industrial
base smaller than that of Belgium's in the 50s, the China that for so long was ridiculed as
"the sick man of Asia" emerged at the end of the Mao period as one of the six largest
industrial producers in the world.
National income grew five-fold over the 25-year period 1952-78, increasing from 60 billion
to over 300 billion yuan, with industry accounting for most of the growth. On a per capita
basis, the index of national income (at constant prices) increased from 100 in 1949 (and 160
in 1952) to 217 in 1957 and 440 in 1978.
Over the last two decades of the Maoist era, from 1957 to 1975, China's national income
increased by 63 percent on a per capita basis during this period of rapid population growth,
more than doubling overall and the basic foundations for modern industrialism were laid and
outpacing every other development takeoff in history.
In Germany the rate of economic growth 1880-1914 was 33 percent per decade.
In Japan from 1874-1929 the rate was 43 percent.
The Soviet Union over the period 1928-58 the rate was 54 percent.
In China over the years 1952-72 the decadal rate was 64 percent.
Bear in mind that, save for limited Soviet aid in the 1950s, repaid in full and with
interest by 1966, Mao's industrialization proceeded without benefit of foreign loans or
investments–under punitive embargoes the entire 25 years–yet Mao was unique among
developing country leaders in being able to claim an economy burdened by neither foreign debt
nor internal inflation.
Socially China has a great advantage over America in that, except for the Muslims of
Xinjiang, it is pretty much a Han monoculture. Lacking America's racial diversity, its
cities do not burn, no pressure exists to infantilize the schools for the benefit of
incompetent minorities, racial mobs do not loot stores, and there is very little street
crime.
Wait, weren't you a supporter of American racial diversity? Weren't the millions of dusty
beaners entering the US a God's gift to the country's rich, colorful, cultural tapestry?
A dictatorship can simply do things. It can plan twenty, or fifty, years down the
road.
So can the Western, globalist (((deep state))). The Chinese dictatorship is simply doing
it for themselves and their nation. Their people's lives are getting better for
decades while we have every reason to envy our grandfathers.
"China has an adult government that gets things done. America has a kaleidoscopically
shifting cast of pathologically aggressive curiosities in the White House."
Well put: I have long argued that the last adult president was Bush the Elder – what
followed was a sorry sequence of adolescents.
There was only one chance to elect a non-preposterous grown-up – Romney. It was
spurned.
But be of good cheer: the White House might currently be occupied by an absurd oaf, but it
might have been Hellary, a grown-up with vices not to my taste. Better the absurd than the
appalling?
As for China – I've never been there. At second-hand I am impressed. But it too
could take a tumble – life's like that.
@Cyrano Having a
dictator is not just a bad idea because of wars, Cyrano. The English spent many centuries
slowly chipping away at the ultimate power of Kings and Queens. I'm pretty sure that if they
hadn't done that, you and I would not be here writing to each other today.
There can be a powerful Monarchy or Dictator, say, like under Queen Victoria or Josef
Stalin. There will be much different outcomes. It would be a shame if the good King or
dictator happens to die and leave the whole nation to a bad one, and your children's lives
are much the worse for it, don't you think?
China is a perfect example, as anyone growing up under Mao had it very rough, even if he
didn't get swept up in the 1,000 lawnmowers campaign or the Cultural Revolution. If you had
been born in 1950, say, that was tough luck for much of your life. If you were born in 1985,
though, well, as one can read in the column above, it's a different story.
Since I brought up Queen Victoria, and now have this song in my head (not a bad thing), I
will move it into Reed's Reeders' heads now. Great stuff!:
@dearieme I agree
with your sentiment, Dearieme, and I completely agree with you about George H.W. Bush* being
the last President to act like one should.. However, that shouldn't matter anyway. Our system
of government is NOT supposed to be about who is president making a big difference in how
things run. It used to work like that too, before the people betrayed the US Constitution and
let the Feral Gov't get out of hand.
The fact is, that Mitt Romney or not, per Mr. Franz above,
the country has been in the process of being given away for > 2 decades now. Yes, no
manufacturing might, no country left. That brings up what is wrong with Mr. Reed's article,
which I'll get to in a minute.
* Politically, I hate the guy, but that's not what your point is.
I am not knocking the observations of how things run economically in America vs. in China. I
think the article does a good job on that. However, the whole analysis part seems kind of
STATIC. I know Fred knows better, as he grew up in what was a different country and BY FAR
the most powerful economically, precisely because it was when the US Feral Gov't still left
private (at least small) business alone for the most part.
You do realize, Mr. Reed, that the US was NOT created to be a democracy, but a
Constitutional Republic? China WAS a totalitarian society, but things only got (WAY) better
after Chairman Deng decided that the central government would start leaving people alone to
do business. The Chinese are very good at business and are very hard workers.
Yes, the Chinese government runs much better, at this point, than the US Feral Gov't after
years and years (say 5 decades) of infiltration by the ctrl-left. All of our institutions
have been infiltrated, governments , big-business , media , universities ,
lower
education all of it. China had it's physical Long March, and 3 decades of hard-core
Communism, but they got over it. America has had it's Long March on the down low, and is
reaping the whirlwind at the present. Will we get over it? Maybe, but it'll take guns. We got
'em.
The winds of change have blown through. They can change direction again. For a place like
America, it's not going to take one powerful man (look how ineffective President Trump has
been), but the people and a movement. Just as some have been unobservant of China over the
last 2 decades, many will miss the changes here too.
Germany in 1880 was much nearer the technological frontier than China was in 1950. The Japan comparison is better, but Japan at the end of the Tokugawa era was about as
developed as Britain in 1700 (and had already for instance substantially displaced China in
the exported silk market).
The Soviet Union suffered certain events in the period from 1941-1945 you may wish to look
up.
More relevant comparisons might be South Korea and Taiwan. Or even postwar Italy, Spain,
Portugal, and Greece.
I think most informed people now are aware that Soviet-style central planning is effective
for the initial industrialization phase. What we dispute is that it is uniquely
effective, as Mazuo and Sovoks insisted. Other systems have matched its performance at lower
human and geopolitical cost.
@dearieme GHW
certainly acted Presidential, but did that help America?
He was the architect of NAFTA (even if signed by Bill Clinton) and signed the Immigration
Act of 1990, which significantly increased the yearly number of immigrant visas that could be
issued and created the disastrous Temporary Protected Status visa.
A wise dictator is great for the country, but Xi is not wise. He is a stubborn old man
stuck in the past who is clearly not listening to advisers. He has overplayed his hand,
confronted the US 10~20 years too early, damaged China's image out of some paranoid fear of
Uyghurs, and absolutely failed at making friends with our East Asian neighbors, instead
driving them further into the arms of the Americans.
Xi might have stepped up too early, but maybe this wouldn't matter. When the Americans
decide to confront China depends on the Americans. In case you believe that US presidents
drive US policy, Trump was saying things about China 25 years ago.
The Uyghur thing nobody cares about. The western media would find something else to lie
about.
I agree with the things you say afterwards. although I find it difficult to see China
becoming likable to it's neighbors. I believe the big thing will be to see what the CCP does
in the next economic crisis; will they change or will they turtle into bad policy and
stagnate. The challenge after that would be the demographics.
@dearieme Mormons
are idealists, not realists, which puts them outside the grown-up pale in my book. Mormonism
might as well be called American Suburbanism at this point. That lifestyle takes a lot of
things for granted that will not be around much longer. They top out intellectually at the
level of mid-tier management.
To be fair, this applies to most Americans, convinced that inside everybody is a
conformist, suburban American just waiting to get out.
There's a case that can be made that Mormonism is actually the official American
religion.
Chinese progress has been most impressive but the country is sitting on an enormous pile of
private and SOE debt.. There has not been a country in recorded history that has accumulated
debt at the rate China did post the 2008 crash.
It would be a shame if the good King or dictator happens to die and leave the whole
nation to a bad one, and your children's lives are much the worse for it, don't you
think?
Sure, but the bad one would run the risk of being overthrown and his bloodline
slaughtered. Everyone would know that the buck ends with him and his family.
Modern "democracies" dilute this responsibility and leave room for a set of hidden kings
and dictators to run the show from the shadows. The plebs are supposed to vent their
frustration by voting out the bad guys but that's useless (a pressure relief valve, really)
if the shadow dictators control the information and the choices.
@Thorfinnsson
"GHW certainly acted Presidential, but did that help America?:
I've no idea but it's not the point anyway. The point is that he presumably arrived at his
decisions by thinking like an adult, instead of being blown around on gusts of adolescent
emotions, like Slick Willie, W, O, and Trump.
@Anonymous He may
run that risk, but with absolute authority, who will stand up to him? You've got to know the
history of Western Civilization (Europe, I mean) is filled with years and centuries of
terrible, evil Kings and Queens in countries far and wide, right?
As far as democracies go, no, it doesn't work in the long, or even medium, run, unless you
withhold the vote for landowners and only those with responsibility. I don't thing that's
been the case here except for the first 50 years or so. You give the vote to the young, the
stupid, the irresponsible, the women, etc., and it goes downhill. In America's case, it took
a long time to go downhill because we had a lot of human and real capital built up.
Now, this is all why this country, as I wrote already above, was not set up to BE a
democracy, Mr #126. It was to be a Constitutional Republic, with powers of the Feral Gov't
limited by the document. However, once the population treats it as nothing but a piece of
paper, that's all it becomes.
Chinese progress is impressive in absolute terms, but it is much more impressive in relative
terms. While the US and all its sidekicks are ruining their countries by losing
manufacturing, running up mountains of debt, and dumbing down the populace by horrible
educational system and uncontrolled immigration of wild hordes with medieval mentality, some
countries, including China, keep moving up. But the achievements of China or Russia wouldn't
look so great without the simultaneous suicide of the West.
Let me give you the example I know best. As a scientist and an Editor of several
scientific journals I see the decline of scientific production in the US: just 20 years ago
it clearly dominated, but now it went way down. There emerged lots of papers from big China.
Quality-wise, most of them are still sub-par, but they are getting into fairly decent
journals because of the void left by the decline of science in the US.
Yes, if current tendencies continue for 20 more years, Chinese science would improve and
China would become an uncontested leader in that field. However, if the US reins in its
thieving elites and shifts to a more sensible course, it still has the potential to remain
the world leader in science. It just needs to cut military spending to 20-30% of its current
crazy unsustainable levels and invest some of the saved resources into science, industry
(real one, not banking that only produces bubbles galore), and infrastructure. Is this
realistic? Maybe not, but hope springs eternal.
@Jason Liu As a
long time China watcher myself I didn't see anything you described with regards to China's
foreign policy, including its dealing with its East Asian neighbors. From what I saw China's
statecraft with respect to its neighbors is mature, friendly, measured, restraint and long
term thinking. May be I am missing something or see something and interpret it in an opposite
way than you did. For example you said
"and absolutely failed at making friends with our East Asian neighbors, instead driving
them further into the arms of the Americans"
"Angry, condescending attitudes towards our neighbors, especially Japan, severely cripple
China's ability to be a world player. "
I didn't see any of that. Any specific example to illustrate your point?
@DB Cooper Again,
Chinese and Russian foreign policy looks best when you compare it to the US. Both countries
made their fair share of blunders, but next to the rabid dog US they look decidedly sensible
and restrained.
@Jason Liu You
may very well be accurately describing the attitudes of individual Chinamen; but I see
no evidence that the Chinese government is all that guilty of alienating other countries. On
the contrary, they seem to be doing quite well. Even the hated Japs can't seem to invest
enough money into China.
There may be something to this. If you look at centuries of Chinese painting, you will
see that each generation largely made copies of earlier masters. As nearly as I, a
nonexpert, can tell, there is more variety and imagination in the Corcoran Gallery's annual
exhibition of high-school artists than in all of Chinese paining.
There was a point in time when I would have agreed with Fred on this; but seeing what's
become of Western art over the last century, I can't anymore. A few centuries ago, Western
art was surely making progress by leaps and bounds. These days though, it's in swift decline.
All it's got left to offer is pointless pretentiousness. At least traditional Chinese
painting still requires some real craftsmanship and skill.
Chinese progress has been most impressive but the country is sitting on an enormous pile
of private and SOE debt.. There has not been a country in recorded history that has
accumulated debt at the rate China did post the 2008 crash.
This is what happens to your brain on Forbes and the Wall Street Journal .
In reality, China is the world's largest creditor. In fact, it's the US which is the largest
debtor in the world.
All that Chinese debt that the Western presstitutes go on an on about is really just an
accounting gimmick: some state-owned bank in China makes a loan to some state-owned
conglomerate there, and this gets written down as a debt. But the Chinese government (which
owns both of them) is never going to allow either of the two parties to actually go bankrupt,
so the debt isn't actually real. It's no different than ordering your right-pocket to lend
your left-pocket ten dollars: your right-pocket may now record that loan as an 'asset' on a
balance sheet somewhere, while your left-pocket will now record it as a 'liability', but
you as a person aren't any richer or poorer than you were before. You still have ten
dollars–no more, no less. And so it is with China. They merely 'owe' that money to
themselves.
@Achmed E. Newman
Dictatorships are personality dependent, as opposed to democracies that are ? dependent.
Communism came up with a catchy slogan – dictatorship of the proletariat.
Why couldn't US – which are, after all, a birthplace of propaganda – come up
with a similarly catchy slogan, such as: Democracy – dictatorship of the elitariat? Or
maybe, Democracy – dictatorship of the deep state.
I personally prefer elections where there is only one candidate and one voter – the
dictator, it kind of simplifies things. I think it takes a lot of bravery to be a dictator,
you don't delegate glory, but you don't delegate blame either, you take full responsibility
and full credit for whatever is happening in the country.
@Digital Samizdat
The sheer amount of shadow debt outstanding is huge. 250 to 300% of GDP by some estimates.
You reckon the Chinese government have this covered and can rescue failing institutions. They
probably don't even know how many bad loans need to be written off and how badly it will
cause a squeeze on normal lending.
From what I saw China's statecraft with respect to its neighbors is mature, friendly,
measured, restraint and long term thinking.
Do you think that correctly describes China's handling of claims in the South China Sea,
or its attitude toward the independent country of Taiwan, or its promotion of anti-Japanese
propaganda on Chinese television?
but I see no evidence that the Chinese government is all that guilty of alienating other
countries.
Its complete disregard of other nations' entirely legitimate claims in the South China Sea
is evidence to the contrary. It's not as if other nations must completely sever all relations
with China for any alienation to be occurring.
@Jason Liu
Excellent comment, Jason. Certainly if China wishes to again become Elder Brother to East
Asia, it needs to start relating to its neighbors as Little Brothers instead of obstacles to
be rudely shoved aside.
@gmachine1729
gmachine, Glad to hear you are in a place that you like and suits you. That is what nations
are all about. I am also in favor of native peoples contributing their effort (through
commercial, intellectual and spiritual endeavors) to the benefit of their fellow
nation-citizens, as long as those contributions are not wrung out by force of the state.
And Russia will have a lot more people by and by. They will be Chinese or Uyghar (sp?)
perhaps, but that empty space will surely be put to use by someone or someones. Whether the
Russians like that much could be another matter.
@Random
Smartaleck China's handling of the claims in South China Sea has been characterized by
restraint and a lot of patience. Basically a combination of dangling a big carrot with a
small stick. This is the reason the ASEAN has signed up to the SCS code of conduct and the
relation between the Philippines and China is at a all time high since Aquino's engineered
the PCA farce several years ago.
Taiwan considered itself the legitimate government of all of China encompassing the
mainland. It's official name is the Republic of China. Mainland China considered itself the
legitimate the government of all of China encompassing the island of Taiwan. Its official
name is the People's Republic of China. The so called 92 consensus agreed by both sides is
that each side agreed there is only one China and each side is free to interpret its own
version of China. For the mainland that means PRC (Peoples Republic of China). For Taiwan
that means ROC (Republic of China). There is no such thing as the independent country of
Taiwan.
China's tv has world war II drama doesn't constitute propaganda in as much as history
channel in the US has world war II topics all the time.
If the reporting I have read (widely sourced) about infrastructure quality, durability, and
actual utility is even 1/2 correct, quite a lot of government (especially provincial
government) directed development cannot and will not prove to be wise investment. Combined
with the opaque economic reporting, also subject to differing reporting as is infrastructure
rating, there is some good reason t believe that the nation has some huge huge challenges
diretly ahead.
The male overhang in China (and in India, others as well, but much smaller) is another
potential problem that is difficult to assess. Maybe it is a nothingburger, and 50 million
men without any chance to have a single wife will just find something else worthwhile and
rewarding to do with their time. Maybe not. Combine wasted urban investment, financial
chicanery on a gross scale, a narrow authoritarian structure and tens of millions of
unsatisfied, un-familied men, the downside looks pretty ugly.
Maybe that reporting is all bullshit. I don't think so. I think that Chinese leadership is
likely very concerned, hence so many of them securing property and anchor babies in the West.
I do hope for the sake of the Chinese people, and the rest of the globe, that whatever comes
along will not be too bad.
This is why I'm not afraid of China: Chinese are greedy soulless capitalists, or pagans as
another poster calls them. Spot on. A country of 1.3 billion pagans will always stay a low
trust society. Every Chinese dreams of getting rich, so they can get the hell out of China.
As for all the worship of education, no fear there either, the end goal of every single
one of their top students is to go an American university, then once they get here, do
everything they can to stay and never go back.
This is why I fear China: they are invading us, and bringing their dog-eat-dog, pagan ways
with them, slowly but surely turning us into another low-trust, pagan society like the one
they left behind. Also once they get here they instantly start chanting "China #1!", and look
out for interest of China rather than that of the US. If we were wise we would stop this
invasion now, but Javanka can't get enough of their EB5 dollars.
@Digital Samizdat
The problem is neither debt nor bankruptcies, although they are part of what is going on. It
is the artificially elevated level of economic activity and the expectations of the people
depending on that level continuing to sustain their lifestyles. The activity can only be
sustained by expanding credit. If you believe that credit can continue to expand infinitely,
well, we will see.
I notice that the Chinese are reducing their personal consumption in response to the
cracks appearing in the economies of the world. They are wise to do so.
We have the same problem in the US, probably worse, and it exists throughout most of the
"first" world. China has a decided advantage because of the degree of social control of its
people, but China will not be immune when the bubble breaks.
@Anon Fred
probably shouldn't say anything about art, but when has ignorance got in the way of USian
cultural putdowns? Anyway, the very idea that the Chinese merely make copies is nonsense,
pure and simple.
@Digital Samizdat
Well put. The propaganda on US websites is always about the debt as there is a need to
believe that China is going to collapse as it simply can't have achieved what it has without
freedom, democracy and the American way, or more accurately by not employing the disastrous
policy mix known as the Washington Consensus. It is the countries who followed that (likely
deliberately) flawed model of open exchange rates, low value added manufacturing (to enrich
US multinationals and consumers) with western FDI that have given the support for the
otherwise flawed Reinhardt and Roghoff study that everyone (who hasn't actually read it) uses
to justify why debt to GDP is 'a bad thing' over a certain level. As those benighted emerging
economies prospered from their trade relationship they were then offered lots of nice $ loans
for consumption, buying cars and houses and lots of western consumer goods. So current
account deficit, more $ funding, inflation, higher interest rates to control inflation
triggering a flow of hot money that drivers the exchange rate temporarily higher undermining
the export model. Then crash – exchange rate has killed export model, interest rates
cripple domestic demand, financial markets plummet, hot money rushes out, exchange rate
collapses so stagflation. Wall Street comes in and privatises the best assets and the US
taxpayer bails out the banks. Rinse and repeat.
China was supposed to 'act like a normal country' and play this game, but it didn't. It
followed the mercantilist model and built a balanced economy without importing western
consumer goods and financial services. However, unlike Germany, Japan or S.Korea, China does
not have a standing US Army on its soil to ensure that everything gets done for good old
Uncle Sam. Hence the bellicosity and the propaganda. China's debts are owned by China, as are
a lot of America's debts. Raising debt to build infrastructure and assets like toll roads,
airports, electricity grids, high speed railways means that there is an income bearing asset
to offset the liability. Raising debt to maintain hundreds of imperial bases around the world
less so.
@Mark T You are
very perceptive. The reason why China's debts are 'bad' while Uncle Scam's debts are 'good'
is because (((the usual suspects))) are profiting off the latter, but not the former. They
were betting that, if they gave the Chinese our industry, China would repay the favor by
giving them their finance sector in return. But that's not what happened! And now, (((the
usual suspects))) are waking up to the rather embarrassing realization they got played by
some slick operators from the East from wayyyy back East.
The so called 92 consensus agreed by both sides is that each side agreed there is only
one China and each side is free to interpret its own version of China. For the mainland
that means PRC (Peoples Republic of China). For Taiwan that means ROC (Republic of China).
There is no such thing as the independent country of Taiwan.
The "One China Policy" is a diplomatic sham designed to avoid bruising the fragile egos of
the two Chinas, and is insisted on by the PRC to aid in their Finlandization & eventual
absorption of Taiwan. Taiwan has been an independent country in all but diplomatic
nomenclature for 70 years. The PRC's claim that Taiwan is a "renegade province" is laughable.
The island is simply territory that the CCP never conquered. It is only the CCP's mad
insistence on the "China is the CCP, the CCP is China" formulation that convinces it
otherwise.
Likewise, Taiwan's claim of jurisdiction over the mainland -- while justifiable given
history -- is simply delusional. The ROC can do absolutely nothing to enforce this claim,
and, barring something truly extraordinary, will never be the government of the mainland
again. Regardless, this claim does not negate Taiwan's de facto independence because it has
absolutely nothing to do with placing Taiwan under others' control.
China's tv has world war II drama doesn't constitute propaganda in as much as history
channel in the US has world war II topics all the time.
You know better than that. We aren't talking about sober, fair-minded documentaries here.
The Chinese productions are lurid, over-the-top demonizations of the Japanese. These combined
with the National Humiliation curriculum and various museums show that the CCP quite likes
stoking hatred against Japan among the Chinese masses perhaps they hope to exploit it in some
near-future manufactured conflict.
@Random
Smartaleck "The "One China Policy" is a diplomatic sham designed to avoid bruising the
fragile egos of the two Chinas, and is insisted on by the PRC to aid in their Finlandization
& eventual absorption of Taiwan. "
It is insisted on by both sides. The quarrel between the ROC and the PRC is which one is
the legitimate government of China. The 92′ consensus only formalized this
understanding in a documented form.
This "One China Policy" has its root deep into the historic narrative of China when
successive dynasties replaced one after another and which dynasty should be recognized as the
legitimate successor dynasty to the former dynasty. If you read any Chinese history book at
the end of the book there is usually a cronological order of successive Chinese dynasties one
followed another in a linear fashion. But of course in reality very often it is not that
clean cut. Sometimes between transition several petty dynasties coexist each vying for the
legitimacy to get the mandate of heaven to rule the whole of China. This "One China Policy"
is just a modern manifestation of this kind of cultural understanding of the Chinese people
and has nothing to do with Communism, Nationalism or whateverism.
@Random
Smartaleck "These combined with the National Humiliation curriculum and various museums
show that the CCP quite likes stoking hatred against Japan among the Chinese masses perhaps
they hope to exploit it in some near-future manufactured conflict."
These kind of museums are fairly newly built, three decades old at most, many are even
newer and is a direct response to Japan historic revisism. If the CCP want to milk this kind
of anti-Japanese sentiment for its political purpose shouldn't they built this kind of museum
earlier? From what I understand the elaborate annual reenactment of the atomic bombing in
Nagasaki and Hiroshima begin the moment the US retreated from the administration of Japan in
1972. Now this is what I called the milking a victimhood sentiment for its political
purpose.
The largest tourist group to Japan from a foreign country is from mainland. If the CCP is
really stoking hatred to the Japanese then they really suck at it. What Japan did to China in
the last century don't need any stoking. History speaks for itself.
I would not debate Fred on any of the points he makes but I have a point of my own.After they
read Fred's article select any number of Chinese men and women at random and tell them they
are welcome to migrate to the US with no strings attached and at the same time select any
number of American men and women at random and tell them they will likewise be welcomed by
the Chinese. The proof should be in the pudding.
It followed the mercantilist model and built a balanced economy without importing
western consumer goods and financial services.
Agree somewhat. China did and does import a lot of western consumer goods. China is Germany's biggest
trading partner, and Germany has trade surplus with China. And China isn't even the world's largest trade surplus country . Germany is, followed by
Japan.
..
Germany poised to set world's largest trade surplus.
Germany is on track to record the world's largest trade surplus for a third consecutive year.
The country's $299 billion surplus is poised to attract criticism, however, both at home and
internationally. Germany is expected to set a €264 billion ($299 billion) trade surplus this year, far
more than its closest export rivals Japan and the Netherlands, according to research
published Monday by Munich-based economic research institute Ifo.
GM does well in China, selling more cars in China than it does in the US. (Personally I
think GM makes crappy cars. ) It is successful in China, because GM has been doing a
fantastic job of marketing its brand and American brands still enjoy prestige in China. And
Apple certainly wouldn't have become the first trillion dollar company without China's
market.
On a personal note, one of my relatives sells American medical devices to China and makes
decent money. It isn't easy though as competition is fierce. America is not the only country
that makes good medical devices. You have to compete with products from other countries.
With regard to the financial section, China has been extremely cautious of opening it up.
Can you blame China? Given how the Wall Street operates. China just didn't have expertise,
experience or regulations to handle a lot of these stuff. China has been preparing it,
though, and it is ready to reform the market.
Beijing pushes ahead with opening up its financial sector despite trade
tensions.
In "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" , the first sentence of the book is "
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分.
It can be roughly translated as "Under the heaven the general trend is : what is long
divided, must unite; what is long united, must divide".
I believe in my lifetime China and Taiwan will unite again, and North Korea and South
Korea will become One Korea.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a 14th-century historical novel attributed to Luo
Guanzhong. It is set in the turbulent years towards the end of the Han dynasty and the
Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history
What is wrong with less 'inventiveness'? Do we really need a software update every 1 or 2
years? Just think, for example, how annoying the 'microsoft office ribbon' is for most of its
adult and serious users who would prefer good-old drop-down menus! Or do we really need to
change our clothes and phones every year and renew our furniture every decade because the
preferred style is changing? The vast majority of the world, especially those areas where
communitarian family models were the norm at some point in time, would embrace a little
stability over coping with each unnecessary 'invention'. For the Anglo-Saxon world, marked by
the 'absolute nuclear family', on the other hand, stability and predictability is a nightmare
and an assault on their precious individuality. Hence, the tension between the US-led bloc of
English-speaking nations and China-Russia-led Eurasia is no surprise, but rather the natural
outcome of the cultural fabric of each bloc. A world succumbing to the Chinese vision would
definitely be more dull, but more stable and foreseeable as well.
This has been an excellent article along with some excellent commentary. It's difficult to
get a clear picture of what's actually happening in China and every little bit helps. Two of
my kids went to Ivy League schools and when we were doing the drive to check them all out,
they were filled with Asians. The Chinese I deal with are very materialistic and appear to
base their importance on wealth and position. One poor Chinese kid I know who works as a
mechanic tells me Chinese girls won't even date him because of his status. Of course I live
in NY where most people are materialistic so it's hard to tell if that's a Chinese trait or
not. They do appear to be a very smart, hard driven people and there's a whole lot of them,
so there's a chance we start seeing them replace our present elite in the near future.
One poor Chinese kid I know who works as a mechanic tells me Chinese girls won't even
date him because of his status.
so it's hard to tell if that's a Chinese trait or not.
Yes that is a trait, Rich, and though somewhat prevalent in America too, the Chinese seem
to have no respect for guys that work with their hands. To me, that's shameful. They respect
the rich conniving businessman over the honest laborer.
I'd like to see one of the China-#1 commenters on here, or even Fred Reed*, argue with me
on that one. The British-descended especially, but all of white American culture has a
respect for honesty. That is absolutely NOT the case with the Chinese, whether living in
China or right here. See Peak Stupidity on DIY's in China vs.
America – Here is Part 1 .
* You're not gonna gain this kind of knowledge in a couple of weeks and without hanging
with Chinese people, though.
Socially China has a great advantage over America in that, except for the Muslims of
Xinjiang, it is pretty much a Han monoculture. Lacking America's racial diversity, its
cities do not burn, no pressure exists to infantilize the schools for the benefit of
incompetent minorities, racial mobs do not loot stores, and there is very little street
crime.
America's huge urban pockets of illiteracy do not exist. There is not the virulent
political division that has gangs of uncontrolled Antifa hoodlums stalking public
officials. China takes education seriously, as America does not. Students study, behave as
maturely as their age would suggest, and do not engage in middle-school politics.
Agreed. China is not burdened by the abomination of cultural and racial strife. The United
States has lost trillions of dollars due to racial and cultural differences.
@DB Cooper I'm
not picking on, or arguing at all with, you in particular, Mr. Cooper, but let me chime in
about this whole Mainland China vs. Taiwan thing. The first thing to remember is, excepting
the original Taiwanese people who've been invaded left and right, these people are ALL
CHINESE. They will eventually get back together, as the Germans have, and (I'm in agreement
with another guy on this thread) the Koreans will.
Even the Chinese widow of Claire Chenault, the leader of the great American AVG Flying
Tigers who supported the Nationalist Chiang Kai-Shek, had worked for years enabling business
between Taiwan and the mainland. There is so much business between the 2 that any kind of war
would seriously impede, and right now, the business of China is business (where have I heard
that before?)
Another thing I can say about it is that it's sure none of America's business, at this
point. The Cold War ended almost 3 decades ago. We are beyond broke, and it does us nothing
but harm in thinking we must "defend" an island of Chinamen against a continent of Chinamen.
Let the Republic Of China and the People's Republic Of China save faces in whatever asinine
ways they see fit to. It's not a damn bit of America's business.
After they read Fred's article select any number of Chinese men and women at random and
tell them they are welcome to migrate to the US with no strings attached and at the same
time select any number of American men and women at random and tell them they will likewise
be welcomed by the Chinese. The proof should be in the pudding.
American propaganda plays a big part here. Plus more Chinese speak English than Americans
speak Mandarin.
What I mean is, you may not have looked at it in a while, but the last bunch of times I've
seen the "History Channel", it was all about one set of guys trying to sell their old crap to
another bunch of guys, and the drama that apparently goes with that the Pawn Stars .
Where history comes in, I have no earthly idea. I'd much rather be watching the Nazi Channel
over this latest iteration of that network. Better yet, though, I don't watch TV.
* I think from the Chongching vs. Chongqing thing (you were right, of course). I hope I am
remembering correctly.
@Simply Simon I
recently did a graduate degree at MIT, where there are a ton of Chinese students. They seem
to be proud of China's progress, but as far as I can tell, almost all of them want to remain
in the U.S.
@Realist
abomination of racial and cultural strife! Incredible! why is such diversity an abomination
and not an advantage?
Because America ripped off all the people who are in strife' currently..and never
addressed what such exploitation did to them socially ..making what could be an advantage a
so-called 'abomination'
if some of the trillions had been spent on the needs of the American people by building
essential physical and social infrastructure to meet popular need, then there would be no
strife, people would have opportunity and structures to do their business..there would be no
social loss and diversity would not be the problem that it is
the American system uses up people and discards them to the wayside when immediate
exploitation needs are met. but we all know this making that comment inaccurate, nonsense
really.
and again the 'strife has been going on so long that the elites should know it inside out
and be able to address it positively. that they have not means that they do not care about
the people period. they are prepared to let the strife go on and exploit that for profit and
social control too
@MIT Handle It's
the proof of the pudding. No matter how progressive China is the students value America's
freedom of speech, movement, and religious liberty to name a few of the things we cherish.
It just needs to cut military spending to 20-30% of its current crazy unsustainable
levels and invest some of the saved resources into science,
An idealist, and way off the mark. Empire's number one goal isn't a scientific one, but
rather a financial one. The entire purpose of the U.S. military is to secure, and shore up
Wall Street(White/Jewish) capitol on a global scale. Smedley Butler wrote about this very
fact in the 1930's, and it still remains just as true. The Cold War/Vietnam war wasn't fought
to battle a weak, retarded economic system such as communism, but rather to shore up
financial dominance – for the same reason the U.S. military is fixated on oil fields,
pipelines and other resources – Money!
Financial weapons(sanctions) can kill way more people than bombs, and(loan sharking-IMF World
Bank) can conquer more territory than armies(Central, South America, Africa, Greece, etc
)
And the goal is not to just remain the the financial dominant system, but more importantly,
to destroy any potential competition – this is what is putting Russia, China,
and the Eurasian economic system in Washington's cross hairs.
The U.S. military strategists have mentioned on many occasions that they are not afraid of
a larger military, but rather they are deathly afraid of a larger economy. If scientists are
needed for stated goals then so be it, but they are not the crucial factor.
@MBlanc46 Why
would China need US investment? They get massive investment from Singapore other wealthy
Asian countries.
There is massive remissions from Chinese in Canada, UK and Australia. China has the money to invest extensively in Africa. Recently the Philippines went to China for investment instead of the United States. The rest of the world has pretty much written the US as declining irrelevant former
Superpower in economic terms. It still has military power as Fred noted but you cannot take
over foreign economies with a military.
You say all that but Fuji Chinese took over the economies of Philippines (A US ally no
less), Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam (Less so because the Vietnamese hate the
Chinese).
If the Koreans or Japanese did not hate the Chinese so much, they would probably take over
their economies as well.
The real Chinese power is not IN China. It is with Fuji Chinese merchants in Southeast
Asia.
Petty greed? And this is not rampant in Israel, US, Russia, Latin America .
@Jason Liu The
most anti-China people I've ever spent time with were the incredibly successful Chinese
diaspora in SE Asia. I found their contempt shocking. Chinese people were made the butt of
their jokes even on seemingly random topics. Your post offers an explanation.
I'm much more positive about your (?) country. I really liked it. But it does give me
pause for thought whenever familiarity breeds contempt.
My own little annoyance came recently. I had reason to download WeChat. It was the easiest
way to coordinate some business. When I later tried to delete my account, I found I could
not. After searching for an answer, I read that I had to email the company and was certainly
not guaranteed a response nor any action. That put the first line of their marketing about
"300 million" users into perspective.
Another anecdotal thing I've noticed. There used to be lots of Chinese restaurants in
London and very few Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese. There are now more of all of the
latter near me, and the Chinese restaurants are generally very low quality holdouts, probably
surviving by holding long cheap leases. People really like the other cultures, especially
Korea and Japan, not so much the Chinese – a strange fact given the history of East
Asia.
More relevant comparisons might be South Korea and Taiwan
Neither comparisons are exactly relevant. These two countries are tiny compared to
China. But more importantly, America took both of them entirely under its wings, due to
specific geopolitical conditions. Without the Korean and Vietnam wars, China-US thaw might have happened earlier, who
knows. Godfree isn't wrong when he points out that China was under complete embargo. It's not
like they had much of a choice other than central planning.
@Jason Liu
Brilliant, Jason! Now, what does he have to fear from giving the Uigurs and Tibetans the
right of self-determination instead of following the Israeli model and sending swarms of Han
in?
And why the threat of war over every square inch along the Indian border, where the people
are definitely not Han?
Why this greedy insanity, when if the idiot could learn the meaning of reconciliation
China would zoom ahead at record speed! Is he a Jew in disguise?
@Tyrion 2I
worked for Chinese-Filipinos and this is really 100% true.
The ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are the most heartless capitalists on earth.
China has a government that can do things: In 2008 an 8.0 quake devastated the region
near the Tibetan border, killing, according to the Chinese government, some 100,000 people.
Buildings put up long before simply collapsed
Well what the Chinese government could not do is prevent the corruption that
allowed many of these collapsed buildings to be constructed from poor materials and without
regard for earthquake-related building codes.
That an overall mediocre country like China can be held up as a paragon of efficiency and
achievement to an American audience only speaks to the desperate rot afflicting America
itself. China has not managed to produce any internationally competitive products of any
complexity such as cars or airplanes; and to the extent it is beginning to succeed, this is
due to foreign investment and theft of IP. Meanwhile, South Korea has shown the world how
it's done properly.
In terms of economic systems, the Chinese are clearly superior. China runs a large
economic surplus
Up to now on the backs of poorly paid/overworked peasants. Shot a big hole in your article
right away. Damn and I don't get paid for this?!? (Grin)
PS. Intelectual theft of mostly Western knowledge. Snap! Second hole shot.
I need to get an agent, I'm soooo good I should be in charge of Face the Nation. (Smile) But
I would keep the lovley Margaret Brennan as the host. (Grin)
1. China's one-child policy did not come about as a sort of attempt at eugenics. It came
about because the previous six-child policy ("strength through numbers") was a colossal
failure, and the resulting poverty nearly tore the communist state apart at the seems. So
often governments insist on rapidly growing the population, and then when they get their
wish, they realize that a massive number of hungry and angry people leads not to strength but
to weakness. Just look at what happened when the Syrian government tried that
2. China peaceful? Not hardly. China is peaceful now because most people are doing OK.
Back when population was pushing at the limits – during Mao's early phase, and before
– when people were chronically malnourished and living in mud – no, the Chinese
people were not peaceful.
3. Again, numbers do not always translate into strength. India looks to surpass China in
total population, and they will be lucky just to avoid collapse.
4. Another thought: China is essentially ethnically pure Han Chinese. This might make
revolts possible, as the people find it easy to band together. Not so in India, which is a
massive pastiche of 100′s of different racial and ethnic groups – which are too
busy competing with each other to band together. There is an old saying that the worst
poverty that a people will accept before revolting, is exactly what they will end up with.
Could part of China's strength be the fear of the elites that, if the people are crushed too
much, that things could fall apart?
Regarding economic and scientific advancements with which no one at the time could
effectively compete, China sounds a bit like Germany prior to England, Russia and the United
States combining economic and military resources to destroy it.
@Realist That
isn't true. There are thousands of us now in Asia.
White males are everywhere in Asia doing every kind of business. I've been here for years.
Can some ethnic Han Chinese in the know give us the scoop on this:
Are Han Chinese merchants, bankers getting back on top in places like Vietnam,
Indonesia? There were huge anti Chinese riots in Indonesia in the 1960s and Han Chinese Merchants
were singled out for ethnic cleansing by victorious Vietnamese Communists in ~ 1975 –
the first Vietnamese boat people were Han Chinese merchants.
My take is that the Han Chinese in China and elsewhere in Asia are a lot like Japanese
nationalist in the 1930s and Jewish merchants/bankers forever.
In all of this Chinese sphere of influence ares of Asia I think 2018 USA has pretty much
nothing to offer except maybe playing balance of power to contain China and yes, have
military alliances with all the countries in Asia that are not mainland China – I'm
sure the Vietnamese want us back to militarize the Vietnam/China border – and we're
good at that sort of thing, but we absolutely can not and will not control, protect our own
Southern border.
Nov 28, 2018 Belt & Road Billionaire in Massive Bribery Scandal
The bribery trial of Dr. Patrick Ho, a pitchman for a Chinese energy company, lifts the
lid on how the Chinese regime relies on graft to cut Belt and Road deals in its global push
for economic and geopolitical dominance.
@nickels When was
the last time Western Christianity demonstrated any moral conduct toward other nations? Was
it England and the US fire-bombing German cities filled with civilians, followed by dropping
two nuclear bombs on a defeated nation?
as the US tries to garrison the world. Always favoring coercion, Washington now tries to
batter the planet into submission via tarifffs, sanctions, embargos, and so on.
"and so on" ? Why not just be honest Fredo? Without tariffs, the lot of the American working class would eventually fall to the level
of the rest of the Third World's teeming billions of near-starving wretches. As the one
percent continued to move all its manufacturing to the slave labor wage rates of China and
Mexico, et al.
By imposing tariffs on the products that the internationalist scumfucks build in China and
elsewhere, it tends to encourage the production of these things domestically, thereby
protecting the ever falling wages of the reviled American working class. Also China engages
in policies that are specifically intended to bolster China, like protectionist economics.
Whereas the ZUS does the opposite, its elite favoring policies that specifically fuck over
the despised American citizen in favor of anyone else.
So Trump's tariffs are one of the few things he's actually doing right. At least if you're
not one of those internationalist scumfucks who despise all things working class
American.
As for
"US tries to garrison the world. Always favoring coercion, Washington now tries to batter
the planet into submission sanctions, embargos,"
That is all being done on behalf of the Zionist fiend who owns our central bank. Duh.
What would be good, is for the ZUS to tell the Zionists to fuck off –
- returned to being the USA (by ending the Fed), and imposed massive tariffs on any
industry that off-shored its manufacturing. Hell, any industry that threatens the well-being
of our domestic industries. That pay domestic taxes and employ Americans.
This is the kind of thing China does, and if though some miracle our treasonous government
scoundrels were all to get hanged by lampposts on the glorious Day of the Rope, perhaps then
we'd do the same.
A wise dictator is great for the country, but Xi is not wise. He is a stubborn old man
stuck in the past who is clearly not listening to advisers. He has overplayed his hand,
confronted the US 10~20 years too early, *
When was the last time China sent gunboats or spy planes to murikka's doorstep ?
[hint] fukus have been doing that since the day of Opium war.]
Who started the trade war anyway ?
*damaged China's image out of some paranoid fear of Uyghurs,*
Tell that to the victims of CIA sponsored Uighurs head choppers
[1]
*and absolutely failed at making friends with our East Asian neighbors, instead driving
them further into the arms of the Americans.*
[sic]
I've posted many times here and MOA, a tally of all panda huggers PM/prez in EA,
SA, SEA .,who were ousted/liquidated by fukus shenanigans. [2]
True to form, fukus turned around to accuse China .of ' driving all its friends into
the arm of the murikkans'
fukus have many sins.
but their vilest depravity must surely be . Robbery crying out robbery.
There's this sanctimonious journo from BBC , who 'boldly' confront a Chinese diplomat,
' Do you realise your assertive/aggressive policies are driving all your friends away/
/ .'
what a prick !
[1]
Ron frowns on image posting,
but very often a picture is worth a thousand words.!
P.S.
YOUR critique might be very PC and earns you hundreds of up votes, but its all a load of
bull.
Trouble is, the mushroom club members have been kept in the dark and fed bullshit so long,
bull is exactly what they enjoy most. hehehheh
@Achmed E. Newman
So Mao's Cultural Revolution to elevate the status of workers and peasants didn't have any
lasting effect?
I seem to remember from Historian David Hackett Fisher how in the British American
colonies craftsmen who work with their hands such as tinsmith/silversmith Paul Revere were
highly regarded and enjoyed status due to recognition of the value of their work to society,
with honest skilled workers enjoying status as a calling equal to religious and government
leaders.
I also remember from somewhere the idea that countries with thriving middle classes were
countries that acknowledged and valued the work of blue collar and even unskilled labor,
while those that don't value the work of the "lower classes" are the ones stuck with a rich
elite, and poverty for the masses.
@Durruti Nah,
humor doesn't come across too well, or you missed my "dictator" signature – your
language, if you will recall. That's where the "or else" came from. You do need to calm down,
as we are pretty much on the same side here.
Don't mind the Commies on here – it was much worse under the previous 2 Fred Reed
posts on China.
OK, pre-emptive apologies here for any more wrong interpretations
Great comments. I can only add (1) Here in Calif the Chinese-Americans I know all seem to
love vegetables, and are lean. I wish I could be more like that. New Year's Resolution. (2)
Harvard downgrades Asian-American applicants because of the "personality" factor of being
decent. I think our culture is in trouble if we are penalizing students for being polite,
genial, decent.
Answer: To replace WW 2, which was the best thing that ever happened to the US economy,
allowing it to recover from an economic depression that would have otherwise been permanent.
The US started the Cold War like they started all other wars in which they've been engaged,
including the current war on terror.
@Random
Smartaleck As I understand it the ROC and the PRC share the view that the South China Sea
islands are Chinese even though they don't entirely agree how to define China.
So Mao's Cultural Revolution to elevate the status of workers and peasants didn't
have any lasting effect?
Noooooo it didn't. [/George Castanza mode]
Actually, wait, it didn't have ANY effect to elevate ANYONE, besides those elevated onto
the stage to get pig blood poured on them sort of a poor man's Carrie scene.
Anyway, Mark, whatever you remember from your David Hackett Fischer (sorry that I'm not
familiar) along with your last paragraph sound like pretty good explanations. Though China
has a pretty large middle class now, it's NOT your father's middle class. I don't know if it
could ever be a very trusting society, no matter how much money the median Chinafamily
has.
If you read Mein Kampf, you'll find that Adolph Hitler held similar views regarding German
citizenship, with the first requirement being that you must be of German blood, followed by
meeting various physical, civic and educational requirements prior to anyone becoming a
citizen of Germany, including those born in Germany. The idea that there could be any such
thing as a Black German struck him as preposterous.
(2) Harvard downgrades Asian-American applicants because of the "personality" factor
of being decent. I think our culture is in trouble if we are penalizing students for being
polite, genial, decent.
If you don't already, SafeNow, you should read the archives (or current writings) of Mr.
Steve Sailer, right here on this very site. He has been all over this stuff for years –
I think that the college admissions/high-school quality/graduation rates/etc by race, IQ etc.
is close to an obsession for him, but the posts are usually pretty interesting.
As to this specific point of yours, my answer is that this is the way Harvard keeps the
black/hispanic/other special people's numbers up where they want them along with Oriental
numbers down where they want them. That personality thing is just a way of putting "vibrant"
young people ahead. I don't like vibrancy a whole lot myself, unless there are kegs of beer
involved and only on the weekends. That is a problem for some of the Oriental young people,
as they can't drink as much as they would like – I'm not sure if it's allergies or
not.
BTW, I'd be remiss in not letting you know that the blog owner himself, Mr. Unz, is
involved in a lawsuit about Harvard admissions and has also written a whole lot about
this.
Oh, on your (1), agreed about the tons of vegetables, but they do not consider anything
without rice a meal. Rice can be OK, but when you eat lots of the white rice, with its very
high Glycemic Loading, you can balloon up fast. Not as many of the Oriental girls I see in
America and China are as slim as the way it used to be.
The sheer amount of shadow debt outstanding is huge. 250 to 300% of GDP by some
estimates.
The amount of shadow debt is probably exaggerated: all that extra cash would either
increase China's inflation rate or else greatly boost the import of goods. The Chinese
inflation rate is reasonable, as is the quantity of imports (nowhere near GDP).
As Digital Samizdat said, China's debt is mostly internal; the country's development was
largely due to her own efforts.
@Godfree Roberts
You continue to use bad statistics. World Bank specialists know more than you do. Ordinary
Chinese know that their living standards lagged terribly under Chairman Mao. The most
important changes came after he died.
Deng Xiaoping traveled to Southeast Asia in November 1978. Rather than telling the
Southeast Asians about China's "incredible advances," he sought to learn from Singapore's
progress and listened intently to Lee Kuan Yew, who told Deng that China must re-open
international trade, move toward privatization, and respect market forces. Farmers were given
greater choice in planting crops and, after meeting production quotas, were allowed to sell
surplus produce on the free market. Starvation deaths declined. Widespread privatization
began in the 1990s. China eventually acceded to the World Trade Organization. Economic growth
took off as economic freedom increased from less than 4 to more than 6 on a 10-point scale.
(Hong Kong and Singapore are close to 9 on this scale, and the US is about 8.) Human capital,
which China has in abundance (more so than the US) is more than important than economic
freedom, once a minimum of economic freedom (at least 6 on a 10-point scale) is attained, but
economic freedom below 4 (as in pre-1979 China or today's Venezuela or North Korea) does not
lead to much improvement in living standards.
@Simply Simon
China is still a developing country: the average per capita income is lower than Mexico's
level. (China is growing faster than Mexico, of course.) However, because China has so many people, the country as a whole can do great things.
tar all whiteys as white trash supremacists, even tho there's an army out there.
what is that? another gratuitous smear? Here's a clue: Not wanting to see your nation- whether it be Chinese or Palestinian or
German – flooded and overcome by foreigners- does not make you a Chinese or Palestinian
or German "supremacist". K? It simply means that you are sane and of sound mind and
psychological health. Only the insane would agitate to fund an army of foreign invaders to
overcome your nation and people. That, or having an ((elite)) that resents, envies and
despises your people, and desires to see them replaced and bred out and overcome.
Being an American, we're acutely aware of the loss suffered by the Amerindian tribes when
whitey overcame them.
But somehow I can't imagine anyone telling an Apache that his desire to preserve the lands
they had conquered – as distinctly Apache lands, suggested that he was a vile and
reprobate "Apache supremacist". I can only imagine the look on Geronimo's face if some SJW
type of the day, were to scold him as an 'Apache supremacist!' for not laying down and
accepting his tribe's marginalization and replacement.
But in the insane world we live in, Germans and N. Americans and others, are all expected
to want to be overcome, or it can only mean that they must be terrible "white trash
supremacists".
It's so laughably deranged that it's literally, clinically insane, but you still hear such
raving nevertheless.
@neutral It's all
relative. Our freedom of speech , movement and religious liberty has been degraded but
obviously not to the degree the MIT students would prefer to return to China.
So you have a better plan than President Xi ? That's pretty fucking funny especially as your plan sounds like the talking points coming
out of some neocon stinktank
The world is moving on your dinosaur thinking where the irrelevant west is still the
reference point doesn't exist anymore except in the fervid imaginations of American
exceptionalists
Basically everything you said is bullshit China's diplomacy is light years ahead of the
west the country is in fact presenting all kinds of benevolence to neighbors, with mutually
beneficial development pulled along by the Chinese locomotive
Even Japan, a country in denial about its massive crimes of the past, is coming around to
the inevitable conclusion that it must live in CHINA'S neighborhood India joined the SCO last
year look up the SCO btw and think about which will be more relevant 10 or 20 years from now
this org or dying bullshit like Nato and the G7
As for supposedly 'challenging' the US that's pretty funny what's to challenge US doesn't
have a pot to piss in
US doesn't even have an industrial base anymore with which to produce weapons in case of a
real war with an actual enemy that doesn't wear sandals look up the Pentagon's 'Annual
Industrial Capabilities' report even the MIC's stuff comes from China, somewhere down the
supply chain that's fucking hilarious
US is is well on its way to finding out the hard way a financialized Ponzi economy that
has figured out how to de-industrialize a previously industrial country for untold riches for
a handful of parasites and actually being a strong and healthy country with actual
capabilities to PRODUCE REAL STUFF are two mutually exclusive goals
Look at the so-called 'trade war' most Americans don't even realize that tariffs on
Chinese goods only means that they will be paying an extra tax Chinese are laughing at this
'trade war' what happens to Walmart and Amazon if China just stops exporting stuff to the US
they can do that you know it will hit some Chinese billionaires but so what 70 percent of the
economy is in government hands and there is enough of a consumer base in China that even
eliminating all US exports is not going to do much damage
In the meantime GM is shutting down factories and cutting 15,000 high paying jobs but
setting up shop in China along with Harley and others LOL
You're obviously some brainwashed Chang Kai-shek acolyte keep on living in your make
believe disneyworld while a socialist and dynamic China grows tall all around you LOL
No amount of tariff will force China to go along with Trump's "fair trade" plan until Trump
does what his brilliant senior advisor Stephen Miller wants him to do -- stop issuing student
visas, plus EB5, H1b, OPT and green cards to Chinese nationals, step up raids of Chinese
birth hotels in CA, NY, WA, and rescind all passports issued to Chinese birth tourist babies.
That will send tens of thousands of Chinese citizens out on the streets protesting as they
are all eager to get the hell out with their ill gotten gains while they still can, and Xi
will bend over backwards in no time.
@FB I think your
diatribe just proved Jason Liu's point about mainland Chinese being thin skin, arrogant and,
I will also add, extremely dishonest and ill-mannered. It's why most people in Southeast Asia, Oz and NZ, including the Chinese diaspora, despise
the mainland Chinese.
@Anon Machine
tools make up a fair percentage of what China imports from Germany. Tools to make tools and
patterns for manufacturing should be considered an investment.
@FB FB gets it.
All the bluster of the disingenuous American billionaire sellouts and their xenophobic,
gullible domestic fanbase will amount to nothing.
Apart from nuking China or bribing their leaders (a la Yeltsin) to follow the Washington
Consensus, China will continue its economic development. And unlike dissolution era Soviet
Union, China isn't broken and desperate to seek the "knowledge" of neoclassical economists.
Unlike Plaza Accord Tokyo, China isn't under American occupation, and unlike Pinochet era
Chile and countless other minnows, the US establishment cannot hope to overthrow the Chinese
government.
Then we get the Anon dude who replied to FB. Way to ignore history and empirical evidence
and bolster yet another dimbulb argument with racism.
Jason Liu is a retard. You resorting to typical racism is acceptable to a number of this
site's resident know-nothings, but resorting to racism to bolster your non-argument is pretty
much the definition of stupidity.
Democracy fails simply because it is basically mob rule, and 51% of the mob isn't anymore
intelligent than the minor 49%. When the Supreme Court passed Citizens United (a misnomer)
which misinterpreted money as speech, the coup, that began with the assassination of JFK, was
complete. The effect has been devastating for the average Joe; completing the transfer of
power from the people to the corporations and the billionaire class, i.e. the bGanksters.
There's much to be said of a dictatorship, but where do we fit in with the selection, and
would the elite ever allow a new JFK? No, they wouldn't even tolerate a new Muammar Gaddafi.
So were stuck with the revolving door wannabes.
No western country allowed itself to be destroyed by its leadership as China did. This
includes Nazi Germany (and I do not consider USSR a western country).
Watch this video and reflect on the fatal flaw in Chinese culture and character.
@anonymous The
ethnic Chinese of Southeast Asia who control the economies of those places are Fuji Chinese,
not Han.
Fuji Chinese actually immigrated to Philippines and Malaysia and Indonesia to escape Han
persecution and the Han themselves were escaping the Manchu Chinese by migrating South into
the Fuji Province.
Virtually all the ethnic Chinese of Southeast Asia are from the Fujian Province. This is especially true of the Philippines. Virtually all Chinese-Filipinos are from Amoy
very near to Taiwan on the coast of the Fujian Province.
@someone But he
didn't resort to racism. And if anyone deserves the insulting "retard" it is you and FB for
not seeming to see the lack of relevance to what he said in your purported responses to Jason
Liu.
@Carroll Price
Hitler wrote that in jail before he was taking orders from psychics and astrologers. The
syphilis had not really set in yet at that point.
Black US GI's wreaked a fair amount of havoc in Germany on and off the bases. There were
always rapes, stolen cars, assaults around US army bases.
Of course so did some white American GI's. Dahmer is suspected-though he did not admit
it-of having killed people around the base where he was stationed. Ironically the country most adhering to this policy these days is Israel.
What is it with people whose grasp of Chinese history is limited to the Cultural Revolution?
Why do they comment here, and why are they somehow ignorant of the previous.. say 130 years
of Chinese history? Maybe, just maybe, Chinese society would not have collapsed if it weren't
for Opium traders destroying both China and India under the guise of free trade, de facto
colonization, then outright genocidal invasion and occupation from the Japanese military
regime?
And way to bag on any sort of collective action against the ossified rentier class. Cause
Marx/Engels/Lenin/Mao is a scourge of present-day societies for some reason?
The Cultural Revolution sure has an analogue in the US and its vassal states. The whole
neoliberal/militarist Reagan revolution and similar class war developments have wracked the
US and its minion states for FORTY YEARS. Yet few people seem to be aware of it. And others
correctly note the decline in living standards, then proceed to ignore the oligarchy
beneficiaries of neoliberalism/militarism, and instead are led to demagogues to blame
irrelevant scapegoats.
@FB If you
believe this arrogant rant counts as a responsive reply to Jason Liu then, assuredly you are
the candidate retard. And that is true notwithstanding the presence of intemperately stated
truths in your rant.
@denk And you are
a typical non-American who is obsessed with a country you have never been to because you have
been watching US films your entire life and your perception of reality is formed by
screenwriters in Los Angeles.
You secretly would like to go to the United States but have a distorted perception based
upon second-rate Hollywood films.
Typical of the Chinese Singaporean you are not Chinese and possibly have never been to
China. Your family has been in Singapore for three or four generations.
As a result you see white Americans and are secretly enthralled by them. Their towering
height and self-confidence and loud voices in Orchard Road STARBUCKS.
@Jeff Stryker
Jeff, your history sucks, your political economy sucks.
Filipino Chinese are Fujian, not Fuji–Not written nor pronounced like the Japanese
mountain or film.
Fujianese are Han. Their dialect is distinct, but they are as Han as the other southern
subgroups like the Hakka (who also compose a part of Sino-Filipinos) and Cantonese. Places
like Thailand and Malaysia have large numbers of Teochow and Cantonese, not Fujis or Fujians
or any other of your malapropisms.
What is it with your dipsh!t obsession with (incorrect) demographics and your piss poor
knowledge of EVERYTHING ELSE?
@Carroll Price
Yes, the comparison of late 19th century Germany and China today has been made quite often
with at least some plausibility for non specialist readers. Happily Miranda Carter's
marvellous New Yorker article doesn't seem to have relevance to China's leadership today. See
"What happens when a bad tempered distractible doofus runs an empire".
@Realist I've
already said that no person not born in China can be a citizen.
The only Caucasians who are Chinese citizens are the descendants of Portuguese settlers in
Macau of which there is still a small community.
Philippines in particular would take a huge economic hit if every Western man living there
left. Other Asian countries would feel a similar affect to their economies.
Locals PREFER to work for Western men rather than the Chinese ethnics because Chinese
ethnics treat Malay employees like farm animals and pay a pittance.
I did not mention Thailand because the Chinese-Thai (I'm married to one and we have two
children) are no longer a distinct group and don't have the economy in a stranglehold like
they do in Philippines or Malaysia.
Cantonese have never been the businessmen that Fujian Chinese are in Southeast Asia and
live in piss-poor Chinatowns in Manila or Jakarta.
When we talk about ethnic Chinese economic dominance in Southeast Asia we are talking
about Fujian Chinese shopkeepers.
[You have been repeatedly warned that you leave far too many rambling, vacuous comments,
especially since so many of them demonstrate your total ignorance. Fewer and fewer of your
comments will be published until you improve your commenting-behavior or better yet
permanently depart for another website]
ATTENTION ALL CHINESE POSTERS (OR ETHNIC CHINESE WHO FANCY THEMSELVES AS SUCH)
You may be offended by my views but I have earned them. I've worked with ethnic Chinese in
Asia a long time.
I'm married to one. I have two children with one. They go to Chinese schools.
So I have a right to my cynical opinions.
Most of you see a bunch of loud American tourists in some local Starbucks and you think
you know everything about the West.
You know very little.
I at least have lived in squalor with ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia in the trenches
doing business with them.
Well what the Chinese government could not do is prevent the corruption that allowed
many of these collapsed buildings to be constructed from poor materials and without regard
for earthquake-related building codes.
That an overall mediocre country like China can be held up as a paragon of efficiency
and achievement to an American audience only speaks to the desperate rot afflicting America
itself. China has not managed to produce any internationally competitive products of any
complexity such as cars or airplanes; and to the extent it is beginning to succeed, this is
due to foreign investment and theft of IP. Meanwhile, South Korea has shown the world how
it's done properly.
Those buildings were built in a different era, when China was much poorer. When China gets
richer, the regulations will be strengthened and more effectively enforced. It's the same for
every country.
East Asian countries develop in stages. Today's China is like South Korea 20 years ago. 20
years ago, South Korea was like Japan 40 years ago. The difference is that while Japan and
South Korea can obtain Western technologies without problem, China has been under Western
military embargo since 1989.
You probably did not realize it, but China has burst onto the scene of some cutting edge
technologies such as super computer, the application of quantum physics, and space
technologies including China's own GPS system; not to mention dominating in ship-building,
the manufacturing of solar panel, LCD panel and LED light, cell phone including 5G
technology, electric vehicles and highspeed rail etc etc.
@someone Dude
you're never going to convince the koolaid gulping Unz whackadoodles with actual historical
knowledge and facts
They're Pavlovian reactions is to defend the rentier class that is driving them into the
ground talk about irrational and self-destructive they must love and worship the 0.01 percent
since they are voting for their good which in fact entails the death of the middle class and
ordinary folks by definition
What clowns they only spout what they have been spoonfed to spout marching blindly like
the proverbial lemmings off the cliff believe me, better men have tried to talk sense into
these morons, without effect see PCR
PS notice the flurry of anon retards here and they actually think I'm Chinese LOL
@Simply Simon
Most MIT graduates want to stay in the U.S. because it's a much richer country than China and
much easier to get ahead materialistically. After working 10-15 years in the U.S., you can
easily get a 4-bed room house with 2 nice cars in its garages in a decent neighborhood. What
can you get in China? You probably can only afford an apartment with a semi-decent car with
nowhere to park. It has little to do with free speech or politics.
@Anon You worship
at the altar of that incompetent demagogue Steven Miller. Not only are you a dimbulb racist,
you can't see through the thinnest veneer of an oligarch who harnesses the latent xenophobia
of the masses to ram through yet more regressive policies. His dipsh!t eugenicist immigration
policies are just a reflection of the same color/ethnicity bar which led to the deaths of his
relatives several generations ago.
You think banning individuals of a certain ethnicity are enough to make America Great
Again? That's gullible, even for this site.
Should have followed eugenics and banned your idiot fetus from ever hatching.
@someone Actually
I have to wonder if even the standard narrative about the 'terrible' cultural revolution has
anything to do with reality
I would love to see a Godfree Roberts essay on this subject, since I am far from anything
approaching a China scholar his essays on Mao were absolutely tremendous there can be no
doubt that there could have been no modern Chinese economic miracle had it not been for Mao's
Great Leap Forward
I did not mention Thailand because the Chinese-Thai are no longer a distinct group and
don't have the economy in a stranglehold like they do in Philippines or Malaysia.
According to Amy Chua in her book World on Fire , the Chinese make up 12% of
Thailand's population and they do still by and large control Thailand's economy, it's just
that it's very hard to tell them apart from native Thais because they've changed their names
to local Thai names, but those in the know can still tell because Chinese Thai last names
tend to be very long.
@FB I like
Godfree. He is a contrarian and certainly not afraid of voicing his opinions. He offers some
unique perspective on looking at China and this is very refreshing because I can say most of
the things the MSM on China is just nonsense and Godfree got some but not all of them right,
in my opinion.
As to Mao's Great Leap Forward, or Cultural Revolution for that matter, let's look at it
this way. If you pay attention to China's pundits talking about China in Chinese TV today you
get the impression that the Chinese government is very proud of what it has accomplished in
the last forty years. And it should be. Lifting hundreds of millions of people out of abject
poverty and transforming China to today's situation like what Fred described in such a short
span is no easy feat. These Chinese pundits always talk about 'Reform and Opening Up' all the
time. This is the phrase they used most often. But 'Reform and Opening Up' refers to the
policy Deng implemented when he took over. I have yet to see anybody praising the Great Leap
Forward and Cultural Revolution in Chinese TV. To the extent that it was brought up on very
rare occasion, it was brought up in passing but never elaborated. It is as if the history of
Communist China started in 1979 instead of 1949. May be it has some dirty laundry it doesn't
want to air? The CCP has officially declared Mao's legacy as 70% good and 30% bad. What's
that 30% bad about?
I am convinced that the standard narrative about the 'terrible' cultural revolution is
close to reality. utu posted a video on China's Great Leap Forward on this thread. Do you
think the video is CGI graphics?
@Anonymous Amy
Chau got a good many things about her own Chinese-Filipino people wrong, I place little stock
in what she says about Thailand. Or even about the Philippines.
She is only relevant for touting herself as Chinese when her family has been in the
Philippines for generations-that reflects how at odds Chinese-Filipinos are with the
predominant population and also why the Indonesians and Malaysians have carried out savage
pogroms from time to time.
Worse in the Philippines is Chinese-Filipino involvement in meth. They make it and
distribute it and import it from China. The drug war in Philippines is entirely the result of
Chinese. And Tiger Mom is unlikely to bring that up in her wildly self-congratulatory books
which also focus on German Jews because she is married to one.
Chinese do not control the Thai economy to anywhere near the extent that they control the
economy of the Philippines or other countries. Thailand has actively forced the Chinese to
assimilate to a degree and at any rate they are probably the most clever of the Southeast
Asians.
Chinese immigrants also fair best in countries broken up by colonialism like Philippines
by Spain or Malaysia by Brits where they can slide in during post-colonial confusion.
*And why the threat of war over every square inch along the Indian border, where the
people are definitely not Han?*
Pleeeeze,
Show me ONE instance of China threatening war on India.
*In the NEFA, China seemed tacitly to have accepted the Indian claim and the fact of
indian occupation, even though this meant the loss of a very large and valuable territory
populated by Mongoloid people and which in the past had clearly belonged to Tibet. It had
come into Indian hands only as a result of British expansionism during China's period of
historical weakness, a fact firmly suggested by the very name of the frontier Beijing had
tacitly accepted as the line of control -- the McMahon Line. *
The only war the US will fight with Iran is a nuclear war. A population of 80 million
bordering Pakistan with 197 million is a big effort and the US has been a complete flop with
even 35 million Afghans and $2 Trillion spent. Israel can play the "Polish Card" the one FDR
used to blackmail Chamberlain into declaring war in 1939 – and boy did he apply
pressure ! – but it won't help Israel survive and more than Poland did.
Israel cannot "solve the Palestinian problem" any more than the "Jewish problem" was
solved when Tsarist Russia let them emigrate to USA and USA stopped them emigrating from Nazi
Germany under Johnson-Reed Act 1924 as in case of SS St Louis in 1939 sent back to
Germany.
Israel will never resolve the problem they perceive. The actions of their ally and friend
Mohammed bin Salman will make it nigh on impossible now the crudity of the gangsters running
alongside Israel are plain to see and Trump had better read up on Uncle Remus and the Tar
Baby
A thermonuclear attack on Iran by the USA would probably trigger a response by Russia. The
Russian defence doctrine clearly states that thermonuclear weapons will be used in the event
of an attack on Russia or its allies.
How close an ally Iran is in that context may be debatable; but Russia could not afford to
stand by while Iran was destroyed.
The U.S. military still thinks that a nuclear war can be won by targeting Russian leadership
in a bizarre Dr. Strangelove logic; it's a recipe for unmitigated catastrophe, says Daniel
Ellsberg on Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay
PAUL JAY: Welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself. I'm Paul Jay. This is The Real News
Network, and we're continuing our discussion with Daniel Ellsberg. Thanks for joining us
again.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Good to be here.
PAUL JAY: I'll just remind everyone that Daniel, in the early 1960s, worked for Rand
Corporation. And as is the title of his book, The Doomsday Machine: The Confessions of a
Nuclear War Planner, that's what he was. He was planning nuclear war; had the highest security
clearance. Of course, he was to discover that there was actual various levels of highest
security clearance. Some, in some sense, almost didn't even include the president, but we'll
get into that story. But one of the most critical things most people thought that was a sort of
safeguard on the unleashing of nuclear war was only the president could do it. Only the
president could actually push the button, and there was all this theater of a case being
carried around wherever the president was with all the secret codes that could that could
launch. And perhaps even the president thought so. But here's a scene from a movie, Dr.
Strangelove, where there's a scene that is a little more real than perhaps people watching the
film thought.
--
GEN. BUCK TURGIDSON: Mr. President, about 35 minutes ago General Jack Ripper, the commanding
general of Burpleson Air Force Base, issued an order to the 34 B-52s of his wing, which were
airborne at the time as part of a special exercise we were holding called Operation Dropkick.
Now, it appears that the order called for the planes to attack their targets inside Russia. The
planes are fully armed with nuclear weapons, with an average load of 40 megatons each. Now, the
central display of Russia will indicate the position of the planes. The triangles are their
primary targets; the squares are their secondary targets. The aircraft will begin penetrating
Russian radar cover within 25 minutes.
PRESIDENT MERKIN MUFFLEY: General Turgidson, I find this very difficult to understand. I was
under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear
weapons.
GEN. BUCK TURGIDSON: That's right, sir. You are the only person authorized to do so. And
although I hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like Gen. Ripper
exceeded his authority.
--
PAUL JAY: When Daniel Ellsberg and his colleague walked out of the theater after watching
Dr. Strangelove, they turned to each other and said, "That's a documentary film. That's not a
piece of fiction."
Thanks for joining us, Daniel. And why was that a documentary film? Everyone understood only
the president could push the button.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, there are a number of things about the film, actually, that were
quite esoteric from the point of view of the public. As you say, as you say, it had been
understood, and to this day it's pretty much understood that only the president could do that.
People are very concerned now that the person who can do that is Donald J. Trump. And there's
widespread dismay about that, as well there should be. And people are asking the question
whether he could be overruled if he made that decision. The answer is no, not constitutionally,
not legally.
But what they don't understand is that it's never been the case that only the president
could do that. And by the way, it's never been the case that there were no other people in this
system who were at least as impulsive or radical or screwy as President Donald J. Trump. I'm
sorry, it happens. As in the film Dr. Strangelove, my friend, my boss Harry Rowland, and a
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, who saw that with me both We agreed that we could almost
recognize some of the people in that film, having met General LeMay and others, for
example.
PAUL JAY: LeMay is Dr. Strangelove?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Curtis LeMay. Well, no, he wasn't. He was Buck Turgidson, I would say, the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or Jack D. Ripper, to a certain extent, as a wing commander who
sends the planes off on his own.
PAUL JAY: This is a guy that goes-
DANIEL ELLSBERG: That almost could have been Thomas Power, the later head of the Strategic
Air Command.
PAUL JAY: In the movie, for people that haven't seen it, this is a base commander who goes
nuts, and on his own decides to launch the war.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Now, Power, by the way, was thought by some of his subordinates when he was
head of the Strategic Air Command to be essentially unbalanced, which is not the way they
thought of Curtis LeMay. He was even described as a sadist by people who worked under him, to
some extent. And they were among perhaps very few people who ever really thought that a nuclear
war with Russia would be good for the world, that we would come out victorious and we would
have settled the Russian, or Soviet, or Communist problem. That was a very, a very small number
of people who ever believed that, and they were mostly, I think, apostles of General Curtis
LeMay.
PAUL JAY: And the war planning had a lot of those kinds of assumptions, that a war kind of
could be winnable, in some weird context.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Actually, I'll tell you- this is quite relevant, actually, in a way. The
first point you were asking me about, the question who else could push the button.
PAUL JAY: And how did you find this out, that it wasn't just the president?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: The answer was that I was told in the Pacific. I was part of a task force,
a research group, looking into command and control of nuclear forces in the Pacific under the
Commander in Chief Pacific, CINCPAC, Admiral Harry D. Felt. And his particular interest was to
assure that an execute order, a launch order, would get out despite, perhaps, atmospheric
problems, and despite perhaps enemy efforts to disrupt that. But I also looked into especially
the problem of could the order go out without the president having determined that? Or perhaps
even without Admiral Felt having determined? And what I found was absolutely.
On the latter point, by the way, I discovered that the supposed "two-man rule," which we
hear about to this day, that nothing can be done with respect to the launch of nuclear weapons
that doesn't have confirmation by at least two people, as in launch control centers or anywhere
else. And what I found was that the rule, that the procedures to enforce that, such as having
two separate safes with two parts of an execute code, one part in each safe so that only one
officer at a time could know half the code, was invariably violated. They all had both halves
of the code in case one of them was sick, or visiting the PX at that moment, or health, or
whatever reason. They ensured that they could get that order out without having to wait for two
people. There were other forms that that took, but the supposed two-man rule was basically a
myth. On the other hand, the one-man rule, the notion that only the president can do it, turned
out also to be a myth. What I learned was that- I was told that Admiral Felt had received a
letter from President Eisenhower authorizing him, if communications were out with Washington,
or if the president were incapacitated- like in the small case, in the command post, if the
boss or somebody else is sick- the theater commander, Commander in Chief Pacific, could launch
the weapons on his own if he felt it necessary in a crisis. He was about to be attacked, or the
war was starting, or whatever.
Now, in those days, before communications satellites existed, I think, or certainly were
common, communications were out part of every day between Washington and Hawaii, where Felt
was. And that meant that for some significant part of every day, the Commander in Chief Pacific
was on his own, in- perhaps in terms of a crisis, such as the Offshore Islands, the
Quemoy-Matsu crisis of 1958, which was just a year before I was investigating this for CINCPAC.
Then I learned that the Commander in Chief Pacific had, in turn, delegated for the same reason
to lower commanders, like 7th Fleet in WESTPAC, Western Pacific. For the same reason, as I say.
Again, communications were lost between Hawaii and Western Pacific or Korea part of every day,
on this. And so you had to assure, as they saw it, that the of the order would get out despite
an atmospheric disturbance, or cutting of a cable, as had happened at various times.
So there were many fingers on the button, essentially, that could do this, and no locks at
that time. That came much later. The image the public has had, I think, up to this point is
that the president's so-called football, the briefcase that contains, allegedly, codes and
options, they think of those codes as like the lock on a combination lock without which the
weapon can't be fired. That's not true. The codes we talk of, the president codes in that
briefcase, are authentication codes assuring that the person receiving it knows this is the
president, or the boss, and whoever, and enables him to give the order; to be one of those who
can give the order. It's in no way necessary for that order to have that code for the order to
go out at a lower level. And that's always been true.
Now there's a reason- that turned out to be true, what I was told. And I in fact, I informed
McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy's National Security Assistant, of that situation in late
January, 1961. He didn't know of it, and he alerted the president to this. I investigated it
for him, to pin that down. Kennedy renewed the order rather than, as I was told, reverse the
order of the great General by Lieutenant Kennedy, which is his rank in World War II.
PAUL JAY: But when Kennedy becomes president he's not briefed that this is the case?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, he was briefed by McGeorge Bundy after I briefed McGeorge Bundy. But
Bundy had not known this, no, and might not have for some period had I not brought it to their
attention. It was very closely held inside the Defense Department. Many people did not know it.
But in the high chain of command, of course, they did know that this was possible. It was true
not only for CINCPAC, but for the other commanders who had control of nuclear weapons, and they
in turn had delegated.
So it was- the button has always been quite widely distributed, and it's almost surely true
in most of the other nuclear weapons states, if not all of them. Otherwise a single warhead on
the capital, or on the main command post, or in a few command posts, a few weapons, could
paralyze retaliation. The idea of deterrence is said to depend on the possibility that you
would respond. But the notion that you could paralyze the opponent's force by hitting his
command or communications at the top would pretty much nullify deterrence. It's called
decapitation. And our own plans depended on doing that to Moscow, and always have. So have the
French, and the British, from the very first. They don't have even the pretense of disarming
Russia. Their main focus has always been Moscow. The decapitation attack, and so forth.
Now, Moscow's response to that, ultimately, was the same as ours. They developed, as I tell
in the book, discovered by Bruce Blair and others during the period of glasnost in the Soviet
Union under Gorbachev, that they had arranged that if Moscow were destroyed, a rocket would go
up, allowing and authenticating a launch order to go either directly from other distributed
command posts in mountains, caves, elsewhere in the Soviet Union, or even directly to the
missiles. There was a plan for that, though it wasn't instituted. But during a crisis,
definitely, if we hit Moscow it would not paralyze them any more than it would have with us.
That seems logical enough if you're depending on assuring an attack in the event of an attack.
But of course, it allows for the possibility of accidental unauthorized war at any time.
PAUL JAY: In his book The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg says the decapitation strategy
still presents a great danger. He writes:
" Ten days after President Trump's inauguration in 2017, Pravda quoted his statements that
'the United States should strengthen and expand the nation's nuclear capacity,' and 'Let it be
an arms race.' Pravda then reported that 'Not so long ago, the Russian Federation conducted
exercises to repel a nuclear attack on Moscow and strike a retaliatory thermonuclear attack on
the enemy. In the course of the operations, Russia tested the Perimeter System, known as the
'doomsday weapon' or the 'dead hand.' The system assesses the situation in the country and
gives a command to strike a retaliatory blow on the enemy automatically. Thus, the enemy will
not be able to attack Russia and stay alive.'"
Ellsberg writes: "What has not changed is American preoccupation with threatening Russian
command and control The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, passed with
bipartisan support and signed by President Obama on December 23, 2016, included a provision
which mandated a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the
Strategic command on 'Russian and Chinese Political and Military Leadership Survivability,
Command and Control, and Continuity of Governmental Programs and Activities.' This provision of
the law called for the U.S. Strategic Command to 'submit to the appropriate congressional
committees the views of the Commander on the report including a detailed description of how the
command, control, and communications systems' for the leadership of Russia and China,
respectively, are factored into the nuclear war plan.
Ellsberg writes: " The Pravda news stories quoted above, both appearing in the second week
of the Trump administration, were explicitly responding to these provisions of this law signed
a few weeks earlier in their explanation of the continuing need for Perimeter. Such plans and
capabilities for decapitation encourage -- almost compel -- not only the Perimeter system, but
Russian launch on (possibly false) warning: either by high command (in expectation of being hit
themselves imminently, and in hopes of decapitating the enemy commanders before they have
launched all their weapons) or by subordinates who are out of communication with high command
and have been delegated launch authority.
" As General Holloway expressed it in 1980, he had confidence that with such a decapitating
strategy, a U.S. first strike would come out much better for the United States than a second
strike, to the point of surviving and even prevailing. He was right about the hopelessness of
the alternative forms of preemption. But in reality, the hope of successfully avoiding mutual
annihilation by a decapitating attack has always been as ill-founded as any other. The
realistic conclusion would be that a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviets
was -- and is -- virtually certain to be an unmitigated catastrophe, not only for the two
parties but for the world. But being unwilling to change the whole framework of our foreign and
defense policy by abandoning reliance on the threat of nuclear first use or escalation, policy
makers (probably on both sides) have chosen to act as if they believed (and perhaps actually do
believe) that such a threat is not what it is: a readiness to trigger global omnicide."
And for those of us who don't know the definition of 'omnicide,' it's the total extinction
of the human species as a result of human action.
Dr Strangelove is what American foreign policy has become since the film was first
aired in the 1964, coincidentally the same year the Beatles hit North America in a big
way. Increasingly in that era "life" imitated art. These days all the important aspects
of "life" are viewed on your I-Phone or other video device where reality now resides.
Instead of Foxnews and tweeting, Trump could spend useful time actually watching these
interviews and listening. Bolton, Pompeo and the rest could join him. To see such abysmal
ignorance in those who "rule us" and ditch the few restrictions present now (Putin warned
GWBush in 2002 ABM withdrawal, now we have INF also tossed out) is more than frightening.
Only about a week ago Pres. Putin (and there is NO NEED for the enmity which so many wish
to continue, over 25 years after the USSR broke up and the "communist menace" was gone)
said IF the US launched an attack there would be an immediate response, and all would
perish. "We would go to heaven as martyrs and they would croak(!) without having time to
repent". In the west this was called a threat, but Putin is rational and unlike those
with their grandiose first-strike ignorance, he actually knows about war and his country
has tremendous experience of being invaded and attacked, and fighting for their country,
inside it.
Who really believes that there is an absolute control over nuclear weapons? Even in
the cartoons we are shown how someone can actually launch a nuclear missile. In any case,
since those weapons exist and are available, it's insane to put controls over them that
it would make it impossible for a lone person to answer a nuclear attack that wipes out
the nation.
Now, if the nations of the world wanted to deter any nuclear activity then they should
design their nuclear weapons to detonate even if their missile is knocked down by the
enemies defenses. That way, even if they lose the war they will insure no one wins. The
resulting radioactive clouds would spread throughout the world and everyone would die.
It's the perfect deterrent. I die, you die, everyone dies.
We are a suicidal species. Lemmings waiting for the moment to end ourselves.
"The most ominous US move is the recent decision to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with the former Soviet Union, which frees the Pentagon to build
up a new arsenal of short and medium-range nuclear missiles that will be targeted primarily
at China. The Pentagon's previous AirSea Battle strategy for war with China, involving a
massive conventional air and missile attack on the Chinese mainland from nearby bases, is now
being supplemented or replaced by plans for a devastating nuclear attack.
The Trump administration is setting course for a catastrophic war with China that will
inevitably involve the deaths of many millions, if not billions, of people. In founding the
Fourth International in 1938, on the eve of World War II, Leon Trotsky warned that humanity
faced only two alternatives: either socialism or barbarism. A new revolutionary
International, opposed to the treacherous Social Democratic and Stalinist leaderships, was
needed to mobilise and unite workers around the world to abolish capitalism and its outmoded
division of the world into rival nation states."
"Putin said on November 19 that Russia responded to the U.S. move by developing new
weapons that he said were capable of piercing any prospective missile shield. The Russian
leader had previously warned that the U.S. plan to withdraw from the INF Treaty could lead to
a new "arms race."
A USA nuclear first strike on China would have to guarantee eliminating almost 100% of
China's offensive nuclear delivery capabilities Including Chinese SSBNs. However as the
following article indicates, China's land based ballistic missile force including mobile
launch systems is already deployed throughout the vast Chinese interior in (possibly
shifting) locations that are far from trivial to detect and neutralize. Furthermore, 'You
close to me then me close to you'.
The missile flight time FROM China to Japan or Australia is how the encirclement door
swings both ways.
Not to mention that Russia need only announce it is selling its new technology to China.
America is maneuvering itself into a place where it cannot be confident any of its weapons
will reach their targets, while there is a strong possibility a retaliatory counter-strike
would kill millions of Americans.
The seabed section of Turkish Stream is complete; the last pipe was laid in place with mutual
direction from Putin and Erdogan. All that remains now is completion of the land section in
Turkey, pressure-testing and cleanup, and then Turkish Stream is ready to deliver gas.
I had a couple of close encounters with mind-blowing pieces of equipment some years back when
doing technical translation work – all the more interesting since I can barely change a
fuse. The gigantic pipe laying ?barge seems inadequate – is awesome. Thanks for that
video.
It was only an announcement, but think of it as the beginning of a journey into hell. Last
week, President Donald Trump
made public his decision to abrogate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a
1987 agreement with the Soviet Union. National Security Advisor
John Bolton , a Cold Warrior in a post-Cold War world,
promptly flaunted that announcement on a trip to Vladimir Putin's Moscow. To grasp the
import of that decision, however, quite another kind of voyage is necessary, a trip down memory
lane.
That 1987 pact between Moscow and Washington was no small thing in a world that, during the
Cuban Missile Crisis only 25 years earlier, had reached the edge of nuclear Armageddon. The
INF Treaty led to the elimination of thousands
of nuclear weapons, but its significance went far beyond that. As a start, it closed the books
on the nightmare of a Europe caught between the world-ending strategies of the two superpowers,
since most of those "intermediate-range" missiles were targeting that very continent. No
wonder, last week, a European Union spokesperson, responding to Trump,
fervently defended the treaty as a permanent "pillar" of international order.
To take that trip back three decades in time and remember how the INF came about should be
an instant reminder of just how President Trump is playing havoc with something essential to
human survival.
In October 1986 in Reykjavik, Iceland, the leaders of the United States and the Soviet
Union, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail
Gorbachev , briefly came close to fully freeing the planet from the horrifying prospect of
nuclear annihilation. In his second inaugural address, a year and a half earlier, President
Reagan had wishfully called for "the total elimination" of nuclear weapons. At that Reykjavik
summit, Gorbachev, a pathbreaking Soviet leader, promptly took the president up on that dream,
proposing -- to the dismay of the aides of both leaders -- a total nuclear disarmament pact
that would take effect in the year 2000.
Reagan promptly agreed in principle. "Suits me fine," he said. "That's always been my goal."
But it didn't happen. Reagan had another dream, too -- of a space-based missile defense system
against just such weaponry, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also dubbed "Star Wars." He
refused to yield on the subject when Gorbachev rejected SDI as the superpower arms race
transferred into space. "This meeting is over," Reagan then said.
Of the failure of Reykjavik, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze would then
comment :
"When future generations read the transcripts of this meeting, they will not forgive us." At
that point, the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and the USSR had hit a combined 60,000
weapons and were still growing. (Five new American nuclear weapons were being added each
day.) A month after Reykjavik, in fact, the U.S. deployed a new B-52-based cruise missile
system in violation of the 1979 SALT II Treaty. Hawks in Moscow were pressing for similar
escalations. Elites on both sides -- weapons manufacturers, intelligence and political
establishments, think tanks, military bureaucracies, and pundits -- were appalled at what the
two leaders had almost agreed to. The national security priesthood, East and West, wanted to
maintain what was termed "the stability of the strategic stalemate," even if such stability,
based on ever-expanding arsenals, could not have been less stable.
But a widespread popular longing for relief from four decades of nuclear dread had been
growing on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In a surge of anti-nuclear
activism , millions of ordinary citizens took to the streets of cities in the U.S. and
Europe to protest the superpower nuclear establishments. Even behind the Iron Curtain, voices
for peace could be heard. "Listen," Gorbachev pleaded after Reykjavik, "to the demands of the
American people, the Soviet people, the peoples of all countries."
A Watershed Treaty
As it happened, the Soviet leader refused to settle for Reagan's no. Four months after the
Iceland summit, he proposed an agreement "without delay" to remove from Europe all intermediate
missiles -- those with a range well under that of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
When Pentagon officials tried to swat Gorbachev's proposal aside by claiming that there could
be no such agreement without on-site inspections, he said fine, inspect away! That was an
unprecedented concession from the Soviet Union.
President Reagan was surrounded by men like then-Assistant Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz
(later to become infamous for his role in promoting a post-9/11 invasion of Iraq), who assumed
Gorbachev was a typical Soviet "master of deceit." But for all his hawkishness, the president
had other instincts as well. Events would show that, on the subject of nukes (SDI
notwithstanding), Reagan had indeed recognized the threat to the human future posed by the
open-ended accumulation of ever more of those weapons and had become a kind of nuclear
abolitionist. Even if ending that threat was inconceivable to him, his desire to mitigate it
would prove genuine.
At the time, however, Reagan had other problems to deal with. Just as Gorbachev put forward
his surprising initiative, the American president found himself engulfed in the Iran-Contra
scandal -- a criminal conspiracy to trade arms for hostages with Iran, while illegally aiding
right-wing paramilitaries in Central America. It threatened to become his Watergate. It would,
in the end, lead to the indictments of 14 members of his administration. Beleaguered, he
desperately wanted to change the subject. A statesman-like rescue of faltering arms-control
negotiations might prove just the helping hand he was looking for. So the day before he went
on
television to abjectly offer repentance for Iran-Contra, he announced that he would accept
Gorbachev's INF proposal. His hawkish inner circle was thoroughly disgusted by the gesture.
Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger promptly resigned in protest. (He would later be
indicted for Iran-Contra.)
On December 8, 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev would indeed meet in Washington and
sign the INF Treaty, eliminating more than 2,000 ground-based warheads and giving Europe
the reprieve its people had wanted. This would be the first actual reduction in nuclear weapons
to occur since two atomic bombs were built at Los Alamos in 1945. The INF Treaty proved
historic for turning back the tide of escalation. It showed that the arms race could be not
just frozen but reversed, that negotiations could lead the two superpowers out of what seemed
like the ultimate impasse -- a model that should be urgently applicable today.
In reality, the mutually reinforcing hair-trigger nuclear posture of the United States and
the Soviet Union was not much altered by the treaty, since only land-based, not air- and
submarine-launched missiles, were affected by it and longer range ICBMs were off the table.
(Still, Europe could breathe a bit easier, even if, in operational terms, nuclear danger had
not been much reduced.) Yet that treaty would prove a turning point, opening the way to a
better future. It would be essential to the political transformation that quickly followed, the
wholly unpredicted and surprisingly non-violent end to the Cold War that arrived not quite two
years later. The treaty showed that the arms race itself could be ended -- and eventually, it
nearly would be. That is the lesson that somehow needs to be preserved in the Trump era.
A Man for All Apocalypses
In reality, the Trump administration's abandonment of the INF Treaty has little to do with
the actual deployment of intermediate-range missiles, whether those that the Pentagon may now
seek to emplace in Europe or those apparently already being put in place in Russia. In truth,
such nuclear firepower will not add much to what submarine- and air-launched cruise missiles
can already do. As for Vladimir Putin's bellicosity, removing the restraints on arms control
will only magnify the Russian leader's threatening behavior. However, it should be clear by now
that Donald Trump's urge to trash the treaty comes from his own
bellicosity , not from Russian (or, for that matter, Chinese) aggressiveness. Trump seems
to deplore the pact precisely because of what it meant to Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev,
as well as to the millions who cheered them on long ago: its repudiation of an apocalyptic
future. (As
his position on climate change indicates, the president is visibly a man for all
apocalypses.)
Trump has launched a second nuclear age by rejecting the treaty that was meant to initiate
the closing of the first one. The arms race was then slowed, but, alas, the competitors
stumbled on through the end of the Cold War. Shutting that arms-contest down completely
remained an unfinished task, in part because the dynamic of weapons reduction proved so
reversible even before Donald Trump made it into the Oval Office. George W. Bush, for instance,
struck a blow against arms control with his
2002 abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which rekindled Reagan's Star Wars
fantasy. The way Washington subsequently promoted missile defense systems in Europe, especially
in Poland, where a
nearly $5 billion missile contract was agreed to this year, empowered the most hawkish wing
of the Kremlin, guaranteeing just the sort of Russian build-up that has indeed occurred. If
present Russian intermediate-range missile deployments are in violation of the INF Treaty, they
did not happen in a vacuum.
Barack Obama, of course, won the Nobel Peace Prize
in the early moments of his presidency for his vision of a nuclear-weapons-free world, yet
not even he could curb the malevolent influence of nuclear planning in the Pentagon and
elsewhere in Washington. To get approval of the 2010 New START Treaty, which was to further
reduce the total number of strategic warheads and launchers on both sides, from the Republican
Senate, the Peace Laureate president had to agree to an $80 billion renewal of
America's existing nuclear arsenal just when it was ripe for a fuller dismantling. That devil's
bargain with Washington's diehard nuclear hawks further empowered Russia's similarly hawkish
militarists.
All of this reflects a pattern established relatively early in the Cold War years. U.S. arms
escalations in that era -- from the long-range bomber and the hydrogen bomb to the
nuclear-armed submarine and the cruise missile to the "high frontier" of space -- inevitably
prompted the Kremlin to follow in lockstep (and these days, you would need to
add the Chinese into the equation as well). Americans should recall that, since August 6,
1945, the ratcheting up of nuclear weapons competition has always begun in Washington. And so
it has again.
By the time the Obama administration left office, the Defense Department was already
planning to "modernize" the U.S. nuclear arsenal in a massively expensive way. Last February,
with the release of the
Pentagon's 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, the Trump administration committed to that arsenal's
full bore reinvention, big time, to the tune of at least
$1.2 trillion and possibly $1.6 trillion over the next three decades. ICBM silos only
recently slated for closing will be rebuilt. There will be new generations of nuclear-armed
bombers and submarines, as well as nuclear cruise missiles. There will be wholly new nuclear
weapons expressly
designed to be "usable." And in that context, American nuclear strategy is also being
recast. For the first time, the United States is now explicitly threatening to launch those
"usable" weapons in response to non-nuclear assaults.
The surviving lynchpin of arms control is that New START Treaty that mattered so to Obama in
2010. It capped deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 and implied that there would be
further reductions to come. It must, however, be renewed in 2021. Trump is already
on record calling it a bad deal, but he may not have to wait until possible reelection in
2020 to do it in. His INF Treaty abrogation might do the trick first. Limits on long-range
strategic missiles may not survive the pressures that are sure to follow an arms race involving
the intermediate variety.
No less worrisome, the Trump administration's fervent support for the Pentagon's
modernization, and so reinvention, of the American nuclear arsenal amounts to a blatant
violation of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which required nuclear powers to work toward
"the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date." The president's explicit desire to
maintain an ever more lethal nuclear arsenal into the indefinite future violates that
requirement and will certainly undermine that treaty, too.
It's no exaggeration to say that those arms control treaties, taken together, probably saved
the world from a nuclear Armageddon
"... In that remarkable volume, Schell offered a stunning vision of what a ten-thousand-megaton nuclear strike on the U.S. might mean. ("In the ten seconds or so after each bomb hit, as blast waves swept outward from thousands of ground zeros, the physical plant of the United States would be swept away like leaves in a gust of wind.") In the end, after radiation had also taken its toll, he wrote, the United States -- in a phrase that's haunted me ever since -- "would be a republic of insects and grass." ..."
He was the candidate who, while talking to a foreign policy expert, reportedly
wondered "why we can't use nuclear weapons." He was the man who would never rule anything out or take any "cards," including
nuclear ones, off the proverbial table. He was the fellow who, as president-elect, was
eager to expand
the American nuclear arsenal and
told
Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski, "Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all."
I'm referring, of course, to the president who, early on,
spoke with his top national security officials of returning the country to a Cold War footing when it came to such weaponry and
called for the equivalent of a
tenfold expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. I'm thinking of the president who once
threatened North Korea with "fire and fury like the world has never seen" and
proudly
claimed that he had a "bigger nuclear button" than that country's leader, Kim Jong-un.
Given his fascination with nuclear weaponry, it's hardly surprising that the very same president would
decide to
pull the U.S. out of the Cold War-era 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) or that his vice president would
refuse to rule out -- another potentially treaty-busting act -- the deployment of nuclear weapons in space. It's a gesture that,
as TomDispatch
regular and former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll explains today, could not be more devastating when it comes
to creating a new nuclear arms race on this increasingly
godforsaken
planet of ours. Reading Carroll's piece, I thought of a mobilizing nuclear moment in my own life. It was the time in 1982 when
I read Jonathan Schell's bestselling book The Fate of the Earth , which helped create a global anti-nuclear movement, millions
of active citizens desiring a nuke-free world, that prepared the way for the INF Treaty.
In that remarkable volume, Schell offered
a stunning vision of what a ten-thousand-megaton nuclear strike on the U.S. might mean. ("In the ten seconds or so after each bomb
hit, as blast waves swept outward from thousands of ground zeros, the physical plant of the United States would be swept away like
leaves in a gust of wind.") In the end, after radiation had also taken its toll, he wrote, the United States -- in a phrase that's
haunted me ever since -- "would be a republic of insects and grass."
That, in other words, is what it might mean, in the twenty-first century, as in the previous one, for a president to put all those
nuclear "cards" back on the table and "outmatch and outlast them all."
"... Ellsberg writes: "What has not changed is American preoccupation with threatening Russian command and control The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, passed with bipartisan support and signed by President Obama on December 23, 2016, included a provision which mandated a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Strategic command on 'Russian and Chinese Political and Military Leadership Survivability, Command and Control, and Continuity of Governmental Programs and Activities.' ..."
"... including a detailed description of how the command, control, and communications systems' for the leadership of Russia and China, respectively, are factored into the nuclear war plan. ..."
"... As General Holloway expressed it in 1980, he had confidence that with such a decapitating strategy, a U.S. first strike would come out much better for the United States than a second strike, to the point of surviving and even prevailing. ..."
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Actually, I'll tell you- this is quite relevant, actually, in a way. The
first point you were asking me about, the question who else could push the button.
PAUL JAY: And how did you find this out, that it wasn't just the president?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: The answer was that I was told in the Pacific. I was part of a task force,
a research group, looking into command and control of nuclear forces in the Pacific under the
Commander in Chief Pacific, CINCPAC, Admiral Harry D. Felt. And his particular interest was to
assure that an execute order, a launch order, would get out despite, perhaps, atmospheric
problems, and despite perhaps enemy efforts to disrupt that. But I also looked into especially
the problem of could the order go out without the president having determined that? Or perhaps
even without Admiral Felt having determined? And what I found was absolutely.
On the latter point, by the way, I discovered that the supposed "two-man rule," which we
hear about to this day, that nothing can be done with respect to the launch of nuclear weapons
that doesn't have confirmation by at least two people, as in launch control centers or anywhere
else. And what I found was that the rule, that the procedures to enforce that, such as having
two separate safes with two parts of an execute code, one part in each safe so that only one
officer at a time could know half the code, was invariably violated. They all had both halves
of the code in case one of them was sick, or visiting the PX at that moment, or health, or
whatever reason. They ensured that they could get that order out without having to wait for two
people. There were other forms that that took, but the supposed two-man rule was basically a
myth. On the other hand, the one-man rule, the notion that only the president can do it, turned
out also to be a myth. What I learned was that- I was told that Admiral Felt had received a
letter from President Eisenhower authorizing him, if communications were out with Washington,
or if the president were incapacitated- like in the small case, in the command post, if the
boss or somebody else is sick- the theater commander, Commander in Chief Pacific, could launch
the weapons on his own if he felt it necessary in a crisis. He was about to be attacked, or the
war was starting, or whatever.
Now, in those days, before communications satellites existed, I think, or certainly were
common, communications were out part of every day between Washington and Hawaii, where Felt
was. And that meant that for some significant part of every day, the Commander in Chief Pacific
was on his own, in- perhaps in terms of a crisis, such as the Offshore Islands, the
Quemoy-Matsu crisis of 1958, which was just a year before I was investigating this for CINCPAC.
Then I learned that the Commander in Chief Pacific had, in turn, delegated for the same reason
to lower commanders, like 7th Fleet in WESTPAC, Western Pacific. For the same reason, as I say.
Again, communications were lost between Hawaii and Western Pacific or Korea part of every day,
on this. And so you had to assure, as they saw it, that the of the order would get out despite
an atmospheric disturbance, or cutting of a cable, as had happened at various times.
So there were many fingers on the button, essentially, that could do this, and no locks at
that time. That came much later. The image the public has had, I think, up to this point is
that the president's so-called football, the briefcase that contains, allegedly, codes and
options, they think of those codes as like the lock on a combination lock without which the
weapon can't be fired. That's not true. The codes we talk of, the president codes in that
briefcase, are authentication codes assuring that the person receiving it knows this is the
president, or the boss, and whoever, and enables him to give the order; to be one of those who
can give the order. It's in no way necessary for that order to have that code for the order to
go out at a lower level. And that's always been true.
Now there's a reason- that turned out to be true, what I was told. And I in fact, I informed
McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy's National Security Assistant, of that situation in late
January, 1961. He didn't know of it, and he alerted the president to this. I investigated it
for him, to pin that down. Kennedy renewed the order rather than, as I was told, reverse the
order of the great General by Lieutenant Kennedy, which is his rank in World War II.
PAUL JAY: But when Kennedy becomes president he's not briefed that this is the case?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, he was briefed by McGeorge Bundy after I briefed McGeorge Bundy. But
Bundy had not known this, no, and might not have for some period had I not brought it to their
attention. It was very closely held inside the Defense Department. Many people did not know it.
But in the high chain of command, of course, they did know that this was possible. It was true
not only for CINCPAC, but for the other commanders who had control of nuclear weapons, and they
in turn had delegated.
So it was- the button has always been quite widely distributed, and it's almost surely true
in most of the other nuclear weapons states, if not all of them. Otherwise a single warhead on
the capital, or on the main command post, or in a few command posts, a few weapons, could
paralyze retaliation. The idea of deterrence is said to depend on the possibility that you
would respond. But the notion that you could paralyze the opponent's force by hitting his
command or communications at the top would pretty much nullify deterrence. It's called
decapitation. And our own plans depended on doing that to Moscow, and always have. So have the
French, and the British, from the very first. They don't have even the pretense of disarming
Russia. Their main focus has always been Moscow. The decapitation attack, and so forth.
Now, Moscow's response to that, ultimately, was the same as ours. They developed, as I tell
in the book, discovered by Bruce Blair and others during the period of glasnost in the Soviet
Union under Gorbachev, that they had arranged that if Moscow were destroyed, a rocket would go
up, allowing and authenticating a launch order to go either directly from other distributed
command posts in mountains, caves, elsewhere in the Soviet Union, or even directly to the
missiles. There was a plan for that, though it wasn't instituted. But during a crisis,
definitely, if we hit Moscow it would not paralyze them any more than it would have with us.
That seems logical enough if you're depending on assuring an attack in the event of an attack.
But of course, it allows for the possibility of accidental unauthorized war at any time.
PAUL JAY: In his book The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg says the decapitation strategy
still presents a great danger. He writes:
" Ten days after President Trump's inauguration in 2017, Pravda quoted his statements that
'the United States should strengthen and expand the nation's nuclear capacity,' and 'Let it be
an arms race.' Pravda then reported that 'Not so long ago, the Russian Federation conducted
exercises to repel a nuclear attack on Moscow and strike a retaliatory thermonuclear attack on
the enemy. In the course of the operations, Russia tested the Perimeter System, known as the
'doomsday weapon' or the 'dead hand.' The system assesses the situation in the country and
gives a command to strike a retaliatory blow on the enemy automatically. Thus, the enemy will
not be able to attack Russia and stay alive.'"
Ellsberg writes: "What has not changed is American preoccupation with threatening
Russian command and control The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, passed
with bipartisan support and signed by President Obama on December 23, 2016, included a
provision which mandated a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and
the Strategic command on 'Russian and Chinese Political and Military Leadership Survivability,
Command and Control, and Continuity of Governmental Programs and Activities.' This
provision of the law called for the U.S. Strategic Command to 'submit to the appropriate
congressional committees the views of the Commander on the report including a detailed
description of how the command, control, and communications systems' for the leadership of
Russia and China, respectively, are factored into the nuclear war plan.
Ellsberg writes: " The Pravda news stories quoted above, both appearing in the second week
of the Trump administration, were explicitly responding to these provisions of this law signed
a few weeks earlier in their explanation of the continuing need for Perimeter. Such plans and
capabilities for decapitation encourage -- almost compel -- not only the Perimeter system, but
Russian launch on (possibly false) warning: either by high command (in expectation of being hit
themselves imminently, and in hopes of decapitating the enemy commanders before they have
launched all their weapons) or by subordinates who are out of communication with high command
and have been delegated launch authority.
" As General Holloway expressed it in 1980, he had confidence that with such a
decapitating strategy, a U.S. first strike would come out much better for the United States
than a second strike, to the point of surviving and even prevailing. He was right about
the hopelessness of the alternative forms of preemption. But in reality, the hope of
successfully avoiding mutual annihilation by a decapitating attack has always been as
ill-founded as any other. The realistic conclusion would be that a nuclear exchange between the
United States and the Soviets was -- and is -- virtually certain to be an unmitigated
catastrophe, not only for the two parties but for the world. But being unwilling to change the
whole framework of our foreign and defense policy by abandoning reliance on the threat of
nuclear first use or escalation, policy makers (probably on both sides) have chosen to act as
if they believed (and perhaps actually do believe) that such a threat is not what it is: a
readiness to trigger global omnicide."
And for those of us who don't know the definition of 'omnicide,' it's the total extinction
of the human species as a result of human action.
It's important to note why the INF Treaty was negotiated in the first place.
In the 1970s, the Soviets developed and began deploying a new "intermediate range" nuclear
missile that threatened Europe, Asia, North Africa, and Alaska. The United States responded by
deploying "Pershing II" missiles to Germany and Ground Launched Cruise Missiles to several NATO
nations in Europe. The Soviet SS-20 and American Pershing II ballistic missiles would have been
particularly destabilizing in a crisis by virtue of their short, six- to eleven-minute flight
times to target.
Recognizing the danger, US and Soviet leaders agreed upon the INF Treaty, which prohibited
the entire class of ground-launched intermediate-range nuclear weapons. The INF entered into
force in 1988, and since then 2,692 missiles have been verifiably removed
or destroyed.
The INF contributed to the end of the Cold War and played a significant role in reducing the
global arms race. The INF also opened the door for other historic nuclear disarmament treaties
to be pursued through diplomatic channels. If the United States unilaterally withdrew from the
INF, it would set a dangerous and woefully irresponsible precedent for all nuclear-armed
nations to renege on their disarmament responsibilities.
In a statement responding to the president's announcement, the European Union declared, "The
world doesn't need a new arms race that would benefit no one and on the contrary would bring
even more instability."
They're not alone. In the days since Trump's announcement, foreign policy experts,
diplomats, former US government officials, and even leaders of other nations have spoken out in
opposition to the proposed United States withdrawal from the treaty. Even Mark Hamill, Luke
Skywalker himself, has weighed in .
The United States must negotiate with all nuclear-armed countries for total elimination of
their nuclear arsenals. In the meantime, it is critical that the INF remain in force, with both
parties fully and demonstrably adhering to the terms of this vital international agreement.
If the Trump administration continues along its present foolhardy course, then Congress
should use the power of the purse and refuse to fund anything that would support new
intermediate-range weapons.
To intimidate the Soviet Union and prove to Congress the nuclear program should be
funded, Truman dropped nuclear weapons on Japan to end the war; no scientist came forward
to warn of the dangers to life on earth, says Daniel Ellsberg on Reality Asserts Itself with
Paul Jay
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes. You know, a more even controversial episode is that Heisenberg-
the one who had made the estimate on atmospheric ignition as a possibility, but it would take
too long for the bomb- indicated in various ways that he was reluctant to see a bomb coming to
Hitler's hands, even though he had joined the Nazi party and he was a very patriotic German,
did not want to see Germany to lose the war. But when they learned of the bomb they were
discussing being tapped, wiretapped, by the British where they were in custody saying, you
know, we didn't really want to do it. Had we wanted to, we would have seen through these
obstacles and moved ahead.
American physicists took very great exception to the thesis presented by Thomas Powers on
Heisenberg's war, and so forth, that the Germans might have had more qualms than they did, in
effect, than Heisenberg- you know, that was a very offensive idea. And he had gone to see Niels
Bohr, the father of quantum physics, who came over later and helped the bomb project, in
Denmark in a in a quite controversial issue. Heisenberg indicated that he wanted to see if Bohr
could find a way of collaborating with the Western scientists in not bringing this bomb about
at all. Bohr didn't read what he was saying that way. He thought that he was feeling him out to
discover how advanced the Americans were, the British were. Anyway, they were at odds on this
point. And it's definitely not settled as to what Heisenberg's actual motives were on that
point. But it is interesting how offended, how very the Americans just dismissed any idea.
But actually, it isn't that hard to explain, in a way, because two things. From the American
side, the very plausible idea that the Germans were ahead just dismissed virtually all moral
considerations from what they were doing. And that's understandable. I couldn't say that then
or now, as I am now, I would have felt differently on that point in that light, whether they
should move ahead to try to at least match whatever the Germans had. The Germans for that, from
their side, didn't have that consideration. They weren't that afraid. They might or might not
have been concerned about whether Hitler should have it.
But I will say this. Many of the scientists who were early on in this process, in particular
Leo Szilard, fled Nazi Germany right after the Reichstag fire. He went and became an emigre in
London, then in the U.S. because of what he saw Hitler would mean. He was sure that war was
coming at that point. As he said, by the way, because he was sure the Germans would not resist.
Not because they would be enthusiastic about what he was doing, but they wouldn't oppose him
effectively. And so he left Germany.
He had the thought that very year in 1933, the possibility of a chain reaction- the first to
have that notion- that a heavy element being split by neutrons might emit more neutrons in an
explosive, exponential chain reaction, and produce both energy or an enormous explosion. And he
patented that idea and gave it to the Admiralty so that would not be known, he thought, to the
Germans. He was very anxious that Hitler not get that idea. Later, he was- when he concluded,
after uranium had been split. And he concluded with an experiment that he did that it did
release extra neutrons in the course of this. He said he shut off the device that was showing
this process with a sense that the world was sure to come to grief. In other words, he saw and
others saw right from the beginning that this was something that could threaten civilization,
and possibly the existence of humanity.
Two other points. In concern that the Germans would get it first, it was Szilard who drafted
the letter for Einstein to send- his colleague- to send to Roosevelt, asking, telling about the
German possibility, and that we should start a program so that the Germans did not get it
first. So he was the, Szilard was a critical figure in getting the program started. Finally,
working with Enrico Fermi, that I mentioned earlier, in Chicago, at what they called for cover
the Metallurgical Lab, they started the first working reactor, then called a pile, that would
demonstrate that you could control the reaction and produce plutonium. The reactors were
essential to producing the Pu-239 that was eventually used as the core of the Nagasaki bomb.
For most bombs, now. That night, the scientists who were present all celebrated with a bottle
of Chianti, and Szilard stayed behind and said to Fermi, "This day may go down as a black day
in the history of humanity."
So, some say it was evident from the beginning that this had a potential of, you know, the
most, when we say existential threat, literally the case. Not for the globe. Atmospheric
ignition, even that would not destroy the earth. Just all the conditions for life on it. It
would go like a rock through space. But that was, turned out with a number of tests, finally,
that wasn't a big problem. But destroying cities, that's what it was made for, essentially. And
by '42 the British had made their major project in the war, having been thrown off the
continent earlier, the destroying of cities by firebombing.
PAUL JAY: OK. Before we go there, let me just follow up one thing. When Germany loses
the war, and- as you said- there's no other nuclear power, why didn't the American scientists
quit the program?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: They worked harder. When Germany ended the war they were pressed to
redouble their efforts to get the bomb. Basically, people like Gar Alperovitz, but many others
have concluded in the end, in order to have the bomb before the war ended. Which, with the war
ended there'd be no excuse for demonstrating it on a city.
PAUL JAY: No, I get why the American military and the government wanted to keep it
going. But why didn't the scientists quit?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: They don't have a good answer. Many of them have asked later- they
were pressed to do it for national security. And of course, the Japanese too- for all they
knew, like the American public, not knowing that the Japanese were discussing, and discussing
with their ambassadors in Soviet Union and elsewhere, and with the Soviets their desire to end
the war if the Emperor could be kept. There were other conditions that the Army wanted. They
wanted more than that even after the bombs. But the Emperor and the people close to him and in
the foreign ministry were ready to end the war.
Oppenheimer and the others didn't know that. And they knew that the Japanese were fighting
very hard. And the idea of ending the war sooner rather than later- they were actually
contributing, in effect, to keeping the war going. Had there been no program, the- almost
surely, had there been no bomb program, the offer to negotiate with the Japanese would have
been earlier, instead of waiting for the bomb.
PAUL JAY: But the military wanted to be able to prove they had the bomb.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: No, it wasn't the military so much. It was actually Truman and
Burns, his foreign secretary. No, the military were in favor of making the offer, on the
whole.
And in a matter of fact, here is an almost funny thing in retrospect. LeMay, who was in
charge of dropping the bomb in the Pacific, was under Tooey Spaatz, who was in charge of all
the Pacific Air Forces. Neither of them were very enthusiastic about the idea of demonstrating
the bomb. As Spaatz put it later when he heard about the bomb, how could we justify a large Air
Force when the atom bomb exists? Even against Russia, one plane does the work of 300. Now, we
have 300. But how do you justify ever using them day after day to burn cities to the ground?
And we were doing that. And we killed more people that way, by firebombing, on the night of
March 9 and 10, 1945 in Tokyo than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
In the spring- or actually, after May of 1945 when the Germans had surrendered, so now we're
just facing Japan- for the first time, really, a committee was was put together under James
Franck. A Nobel Prize winner who, by the way, regretted his role and Germany's role in
introducing poison gas to the world in the First World War, and concluded in his own mind that
if the occasion ever arose again, he would demand real consideration in his new country, the
U.S., a role, a voice at least, in the policy implications of this scientific development.
So the Franck committee, which included Szilard, and as its rapporteur Eugene Rabinowitz,
who later became the head of the Federation of American Scientists, and the editor of The
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, with its doomsday clock. Rabinowitz was for many years the
editor of that. And they concluded- as I said earlier, the first group really to be looking at
it, thinking, amazingly enough, at the problem of where are we going with this? What are the
implications of it? What does it mean for the world to have this weapon, and what can we do
about it? Should have been done earlier. As I say, I believe if Rotblat had told people they
were not racing Germany, they would have had this process months, six months earlier, in the
fall, and possibly had much more influence on the final decision.
As I say, their recommendations, that the implications of the U.S. using this as a weapon in
war- one bomb, one city- a weapon that would soon become much larger, there would be thousands
of them, and would be supplanted by a weapon that was a thousand times more than this, that
they thought should not be undertaken. That should be an effort in international control, and
that required not having a monopoly of the bomb and using it in warfare. So we should at least,
as Niels Bohr said, bring the Russians in as partners. The alternative being they would get it
as adversaries within a few years in a cold war, which is what did happen.
So the front committee then met and had these conclusions, which did not get up through
channels to the president. Rabinowitz, I learned only in the last couple of years in a thing
that was not really published until quite recently, during the Franck Committee proceedings
after the report was finished made the proposal that they should reveal, they should go beyond
the bounds of security, and reveal to the public, the press and the public, not the details of
bomb making, but the fact that this enormous weapon was in prospect and was about to be used.
He actually put that in writing. I've never seen anything in writing, ever, like that in
government. In effect, a proposal by a government insider to leak.
Obviously, leaks happen all the time. not with much discussion, usually. people don't want
other people to know they might be a source. But in this case, Rabinowitz actually made that
proposal, and nothing came of it. Then, however, he revealed in a letter to the New York Times
in 1971, in June- a time very vivid in my memory because his letter came out in the New York
Times while Patricia and I, my wife and I, were eluding the FBI. We were they say underground
putting out the Pentagon Papers for 13 days while the FBI was searching for us. So I didn't see
this at the time. I wasn't seeing the New York Times. I saw it many years later that while we
were underground, he put out this letter saying, in the matter of Daniel Ellsberg that his
under public discussion now- they were searching for me- he said, I myself spent sleepless
nights in the spring of 1945 considering that I should reveal to the public this prospect- I'm
paraphrasing here a little bit, but I remember the sleepless nights very well. And how his
letter ended: I still believe that had I done so, I would have been justified. It would have
been the right thing to do. Well, indeed, had Americans known about this, as Rabinowitz said
later, I have no illusions that they might have supported the use of the bomb anyway. But at
least they would have responsibility. They would have known what we were getting into.
And Szilard, by the way, was meanwhile putting a petition together, which eventually had
more than 100 scientists, calling at first for not using the bomb even if it would save lives,
and then to get more signers saying at least it should not be done without a demonstration,
without the serious consideration of the moral concerns. None of this got to Truman. And in
fact, Szilard was forbidden to publish the petition, that it had occurred, for decades. And
when they finally did publish that there had a petition, they were unwilling to release the
names of the scientists with the authority. In other words, that there was this
alternative.
The point of all this is that time after time, I think, decisions were made in secret, at
high levels, without real consideration of long-term implications of this or of alternative
paths; without knowledge that the scientists had of what was coming, or where this might lead,
and so forth. And there were people who saw the dangers of this so clearly, that they knew that
civilization was in danger. I could go into the same story with respect to the H bomb. And in
each case, each one decided to keep his clearance- they were all men- at the time. As a matter
of fact, Hans Bethe's wife was one person, who was a physicist, who when Hans told her about
the H bomb they were imagining in 1942 said, do you really want to be part of this? And she's
the one person on record as sort of having told one of the scientists, think again about this.
But Szilard, as I say, they all wanted to say, well, the Germans are in the process, or later
the Russians are in the process, and they put aside moral considerations. But not one of them
took the step of acting on his concerns and fears to bring the public and the Congress into the
picture, and to have a discussion of whether this was the way that we wanted to go.
The bottom line for me is from the time they knew that Germany did not have the bomb- and
I'm saying now the fall of '45 for the British, at least, and Rotblat- the overwhelming
consideration about that bomb should have been how do we keep it from being an instrument of
national policy, by us or anybody? Now, that was far from the minds of the people at the top.
The idea of having a monopoly of it was so irresistible. There was no discussion whatever of
not doing it at that level. They say the Franck notion didn't get to them. And they didn't-
Franck didn't tell them, Rabinowitz didn't tell them, Szilard didn't tell them. By the way, the
FBI were afraid that Szilard, knowing his views, would leak on this, that he was under constant
surveillance. But as far as we know, it didn't occur to him to actually tell. C.P. Snow, who
had been in charge of scientific recruitment at one point- later a novelist in Britain, I've
read all his novels- commented, actually, on my case, in Esquire, after I was indicted for the
Pentagon Papers, along with several other people. And he said, I would not- you know, I had
sworn an oath not to tell secrets. I would not have done what Ellsberg did. However, I do have
the feeling that if Einstein had been made aware of what was coming, he would have found a way
to tell the public and bring them in.
It's very interesting what if- you know, conjecture. Because as a matter of fact, Szilard
did meet with Einstein in '45 to send his report, or his views, to Roosevelt. And before that
was actually set up Roosevelt died, and he was sidetracked over to Burns, who didn't sympathize
with this at all. But he couldn't tell Einstein why he wanted to see Roosevelt, because
Einstein wasn't cleared. Einstein was a pacifist. Not about World War II, not about Hitler. But
he was generally a pacifist; later head of the War Resisters League. And they didn't trust him.
So he didn't get a clearance, and he was never involved in the Manhattan Project, having laid
the theoretical foundations for it himself earlier. Szilard didn't tell Einstein, because that
would have put his own clearance in jeopardy, frankly. And they warned him. Groves and others
warned him. Keep in mind, this stuff is classified. Your clearance is at stake here, and so
forth.
No one actually came out, in the end. Oppenheimer, others who opposed the H bomb, did not
reveal to a totally unwitting and ignorant public or Congress what they knew, having been
persuaded that that would be unpatriotic. It would be not gentlemanly. That's what Dean Acheson
told them. Don't let them know why you are resigning from the General Advisory Commission. In
fact, don't resign at this time, because people will ask you why. Don't tell them the reason is
because an H bomb threatens the existence of humanity.
Fermi, on the General Advisory Commission at that time along with Isidor Rabi, signed a
report saying the super, the thermonuclear weapon, is in itself an evil thing. It should not
exist. And they even with Rabi proposed something like a test ban, moratorium. We won't test
first unless you do. But Truman overruled Fermi, and worked on the bomb; Bethe worked on the
bomb. They all did, you know, patriotically and whatnot. And that's why we're where we are.
Nobody felt, on the one hand, strongly enough to risk their own careers and their own status.
Or to put in a little better light, their own identity as people who were trusted by the
president to keep his secrets, whatever they were, was so important to them that it didn't even
occur to them that the public maybe ought to know about this. Where Rabinowitz is an
interesting exception is he did wrestle with that.
PAUL JAY: OK. In the next segment of our interview we're going to talk about those
firebombings, and how in 1942 the British established the precedent for it. Please join us for
Reality Asserts Itself with Daniel Ellsberg on The Real News Network.
Russia tried to have resolution passed at the UN in favour of the INF Treaty. It was blocked
by Washington's EU lickspittles including Germany. Never, ever take any pronouncement by
NATzO hyenas at face value. When it comes time to put money where the mouth is, then true
beliefs become apparent. These morons couldn't even support Russia's UN resolution although
they are in harm's way from the death of the INF.
"... Trump appears to have surrendered to the anti-arms control philosophy of John Bolton, who views such agreements as unduly restricting American power. (Bolton was also behind the 2001 decision by President George W. Bush to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an act the Russians viewed as inherently destabilizing.) ..."
"... By involving China, which was not a signatory to the INF Treaty, into the mix, the president appears to be engaging in a crude negotiating gambit designed to shore up a weak case for leaving the 1987 arms control agreement by playing on previous Russian sensitivities about Chinese nuclear capabilities. ..."
"... Although unspoken, both Bolton and Trump appear to be trying to drive a wedge between Russia and China. They're doing so as those two nations are coming together to craft a joint response to what they view as American overreach on trade and international security. While the Russian concerns over Chinese INF capabilities might have held true a decade ago, that doesn't seem to be the case any longer. ..."
"... The deployment of Pershing II missiles to Europe in the fall of 1983 left the Soviet leadership concerned that the U.S. was seeking to acquire a viable nuclear first-strike capability against the Soviet Union. The Soviets increased their intelligence collection efforts against U.S. targets to be able to detect in advance any U.S./NATO first-strike attack, as well as a "launch on detection" plan to counter any such attack. ..."
"... In November 1983, when the U.S. conducted a full-scale rehearsal for nuclear war in Europe, code-named Able Archer 83, Soviet intelligence interpreted the exercise preparations for the real thing. As a result, Soviet strategic nuclear forces were put on full alert, needing only an order from then-general secretary Yuri Andropov to launch. ..."
"... If the U.S. were ever to make use of the Mk-41 in an anti-missile configuration, the Russians would have seconds to decide if they were being attacked by nuclear-armed cruise missiles. Putin, in a recent speech delivered in Sochi, publicly stated that the Russian nuclear posture operated under the concept of "launch on warning," meaning once a U.S. or NATO missile strike was detected, Russia would immediately respond with the totality of its nuclear arsenal to annihilate the attacking parties. "We would be victims of an aggression and would get to heaven as martyrs," Putin said . Those who attacked Russia would "just die and not even have time to repent." ..."
"... There is no master plan here, no eleven dimensional chess. Trump appears to be weak, stupid, ill-informed and easily manipulated because he in fact is weak, stupid, ill-informed and easily manipulated. ..."
Of course he's not the first president the arch hawk has convinced to ditch a nuke
treaty Declaring that "there is a new strategic reality out there," President Donald
Trump's hardline national security advisor John Bolton announced
during a visit to Moscow earlier this week that the United States would be withdrawing from the
31-year-old Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. "This was a Cold War bilateral ballistic
missile-related treaty," Bolton said, "in a multi-polar ballistic missile world."
"It is the American position that Russia is in violation," Bolton told
reporters after a 90-minute meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Russia's
position is that they aren't. So one has to ask how to ask the Russians to come back into
compliance with something they don't think they're violating."
Left unsaid by Bolton was the fact that the Russians have been asking the U.S. to provide
evidence to substantiate its allegations of Russian noncompliance, something it so far has not
done. "The Americans have failed to provide hard facts to substantiate their accusations," a
Kremlin spokesperson noted last
December after a U.S. delegation was briefed NATO on the allegations. "They just cannot
provide them, because such evidence essentially does not exist."
Bolton's declaration mirrored an
earlier statement by Trump announcing that "I'm terminating the agreement because [the
Russians] violated the agreement." When asked if his comments were meant as a threat to Putin,
Trump responded, "It's a threat to whoever you want. And it includes China, and it includes
Russia, and it includes anybody else that wants to play that game. You can't do that. You can't
play that game on me."
Trump appears to have surrendered to the anti-arms control philosophy of John Bolton,
who views such agreements as unduly restricting American power. (Bolton was also
behind the 2001 decision by President George W. Bush to withdraw from the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an act the Russians viewed as inherently
destabilizing.)
By involving China, which was not a signatory to the INF Treaty, into the mix, the
president appears to be engaging in a crude negotiating gambit designed to shore up a weak case
for leaving the 1987 arms control agreement by playing on previous Russian sensitivities about
Chinese nuclear capabilities.
In 2007, Putin had threatened to withdraw from the INF Treaty because of these reasons. "We
are speaking about the plans of a number of neighboring countries developing short- and
mid-range missile systems," Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesperson, said at the time ,
citing China, India and Pakistan. "While our two countries [the U.S. and Russia] are bound by
the provisions of the INF treaty there will be a certain imbalance in the region."
Although unspoken, both Bolton and Trump appear to be trying to drive a wedge between
Russia and China. They're doing so as those two nations are coming together to craft a joint
response to what they view as American overreach on trade and international security. While the
Russian concerns over Chinese INF capabilities might have held true a decade ago, that doesn't
seem to be the case any longer.
"The Chinese missile program is not related to the INF problem," Konstantin Sivkov, a member
of the Russian Academy of Missile and Ammunition Sciences, recently observed .
"China has always had medium-range missiles, because it did not enter into a bilateral treaty
with the United States on medium and shorter-range missiles." America's speculations about
Chinese missiles are "just an excuse" to withdraw from the INF Treaty, the Russian arms control
expert charged.
Moreover, China doesn't seem to be taking the bait. Yang Chengjun, a Chinese missile expert,
observed
that the U.S. decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty would have a "negative" impact on
China's national security, noting that Beijing "would have to push ahead with the modest
development of medium-range missiles" in response. These weapons would be fielded to counter
any American build-up in the region, and as such would not necessarily be seen by Russia as
representing a threat.
Any student of the INF Treaty knows
that the issue of Russia's national security posture vis-à-vis China was understood
fully when the then-USSR signed on to the agreement. During the negotiations surrounding INF in
the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviets had sought to retain an INF capability in Asia as part of its
Chinese deterrence posture. Indeed, the Soviet insistence on keeping such a force was one of
the main reasons behind the "zero option" put forward by the U.S. in 1982, where a total ban on
INF-capable weapons was proposed. The U.S. knew that the total elimination of INF systems was a
poison pill that Russia simply would not swallow, thereby dooming future negotiations.
Mikhail Gorbachev turned the tables on the Americans in 1986, when he embraced the "zero
option" and called upon the U.S. to enter into an agreement that banned INF-capable weapons.
For the Soviet Union, eliminating the threat to its national security posed by American INF
weapons based in Europe was far more important than retaining a limited nuclear deterrence
option against China.
The deployment of Pershing II missiles to Europe in the fall of 1983 left the Soviet
leadership concerned that the U.S. was seeking to acquire a viable nuclear first-strike
capability against the Soviet Union. The Soviets increased their intelligence collection
efforts against U.S. targets to be able to detect in advance any U.S./NATO first-strike attack,
as well as a "launch on detection" plan to counter any such attack.
In November 1983, when the U.S. conducted a full-scale rehearsal for nuclear war in
Europe, code-named Able Archer 83, Soviet intelligence interpreted the exercise preparations
for the real thing. As a result, Soviet strategic nuclear forces were put on full alert,
needing only an order from then-general secretary Yuri Andropov to launch.
The Soviet system had just undergone a stress test of sorts in September 1983, when
malfunctioning early warning satellites indicated that the U.S. had launched five Minuteman 3
Intercontinental missiles toward the Soviet Union. Only the actions of the Soviet duty officer,
who correctly identified the warning as a false alarm, prevented a possible nuclear retaliatory
strike.
A similar false alarm, this time in 1995, underscored the danger of hair-trigger alert
status when it comes to nuclear weapons -- the launch of a Norwegian research rocket was
interpreted by Russian radar technicians as being a solo U.S. nuclear missile intended to
disrupt Russian defenses by means of an electromagnetic pulse generated by a nuclear air burst.
Russia's president at the time, Boris Yeltsin, ordered the Russian nuclear codes to be prepared
for an immediate Russian counter-strike, and was on the verge of ordering the launch when
Russian analysts determined the real purpose of the rocket, and the crisis passed.
The Europeans had initially balked at the idea of deploying American INF weapons on their
territory, fearful that the weapons would be little more than targets for a Soviet nuclear
attack, resulting in the destruction of Europe while the United States remained unharmed. To
alleviate European concerns, the U.S. agreed to integrate its INF systems with its overall
strategic nuclear deterrence posture, meaning that the employment of INF nuclear weapons would
trigger an automatic strategic nuclear response. This approach was designed to increase the
deterrence value of the INF weapons, since there would be no "localized" nuclear war. But it
also meant that given the reduced flight times associated with European-based INF systems, each
side would be on a hair-trigger alert, with little or no margin for error. It was the suicidal
nature of this arrangement that helped propel Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan to sign the
INF Treaty on December 8, 1987.
This history seems to be lost on both Trump and Bolton. Moreover, the recent deployment of
the Mk-41 Universal Launch System, also known as Aegis Ashore, in Romania and Poland as part of
a NATO ballistic missile shield only increases the danger of inadvertent conflict. Currently
configured to fire the SM-3 surface-to-air missile, the Mk-41 is also capable of firing
Tomahawk cruise missiles which, if launched in a ground configuration, would represent a
violation of the INF Treaty. The U.S. Congress has authorized $58 billion in FY 2018 to fund
development of an INF system, the leading candidate for which is a converted Tomahawk.
If the U.S. were ever to make use of the Mk-41 in an anti-missile configuration, the
Russians would have seconds to decide if they were being attacked by nuclear-armed cruise
missiles. Putin, in a recent speech delivered in Sochi, publicly stated that the Russian
nuclear posture operated under the concept of "launch on warning," meaning once a U.S. or NATO
missile strike was detected, Russia would immediately respond with the totality of its nuclear
arsenal to annihilate the attacking parties. "We would be victims of an aggression and would
get to heaven as martyrs,"
Putin said . Those who attacked Russia would "just die and not even have time to
repent."
"We'll have to develop those weapons," Trump
noted when he announced his decision to leave the INF Treaty, adding "we have a tremendous
amount of money to play with our military." Nuclear deterrence isn't a game -- it is, as Putin
noted, a matter of life and death, where one split second miscalculation can destroy entire
nations, if not the world. One can only hope that the one-time real estate mogul turned
president can figure this out before it is too late; declaring bankruptcy in nuclear conflict
is not an option.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former
Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert
Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West's Road to War
.
"Left unsaid by Bolton was the fact that the Russians have been asking the U.S. to provide
evidence to substantiate its allegations of Russian noncompliance, something it so far has
not done. "
Always the bottom line. And that has been our folly since 9/11. We have not had proof to
justify our actions. And the fact that this executive continues mollywog forward based soley
on the accusations of "knowledgeable advisers"
Laugh -- just makes for bad policy.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
But again the president has no ground. He has acknowledged that Russia sabotaged or
attempted to sabotage the US electoral process and believes as to the record that Russia
engaged in murder and attempted murder at the behest of Pres. Putin.
Anything less than aggressive confrontation makes him appear
1. he distrusts the intel and mil. community
2. he is too weak to stand up to Russia
3. actually colluded with Russia in sabotaging the
election
4. a combination of above
Minus the courage to stand his preferred course – foreign policy with Russia has
been relinquished to others. Even if their leadership has been repeatedly a failure.
Comments on the Yahoo message board (aptly named) capture the true reason quite well. We
bankrupted the Russians in the 1980's and we will do it again. There is an axiom Generals
always prepare for the last war.
Why compromise when you can win? Accusing your opponents of aggression and claiming the
moral high ground is just a bonus. We will break up Russia into even smaller pieces, Crimea
gone for good, Chechnya gone, far east gone, arctic claims gone, ?
Agreed, and what's left out of Trump-Russia discussions is how the Israelis wanted Trump
to do a charm offensive to the Russians over Syria. The idea was at Bibi's orders (from as
early as 2016) the US would relieve sanctions on Russia in exchange for Russia forcing
Iranians to leave Syria. It may also be used as Russia's permission for an US-led Iranian
invasion.
However, Israel just cannot help itself and persistent attacks on Syrians (not merely
Iranians) convinced the Russians they were bad faith actors. This was reported in Haaretz
over the summer but I've lost the link.
There is no master plan here, no eleven dimensional chess. Trump appears to be weak,
stupid, ill-informed and easily manipulated because he in fact is weak, stupid, ill-informed
and easily manipulated.
Trump surrenders to whoever's whispering in his ear. It happens to be Bolton, which is bad.
He surrenders because he has to, which is because he's stone ignorant about important
stuff.
That's all there is, baby. Bolton talks, Trump listens, and next thing you know it's fifty
years ago and we're in a nuclear arms race. This "the President wants" stuff you hear from
Bolton is a joke. It's "John Bolton wants, and the President says".
"... The harsh language may not be exactly diplomatic. What it does is reflect plenty of exasperation towards the US conservatives who peddle the absurd notion of a "limited" nuclear war. ..."
"... The harsh language also reflects a certainty that whatever the degree of escalation envisaged by the Trump administration and the Pentagon, that won't be enough to neutralize Russian hypersonic missiles. ..."
"... So, it's no wonder that EU diplomats, trying to ease their discomfort, recognize that this, in the end, is all about the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine and the necessity of keeping the massive US military-industrial-surveillance complex running. ..."
By now it's clear the Trump administration's rationale for pulling out of the INF Treaty is
due, in Bolton's words, to "a new strategic reality". The INF is being dismissed as a
"bilateral treaty in a multipolar ballistic missile world", which does not take into
consideration the missile capabilities of China, Iran and North Korea.
But there is a slight problem. The INF Treaty limits missiles with a range from 500 km to
5,000 km. China, Iran and North Korea simply cannot pose a "threat" to the United States by
deploying such missiles. The INF is all about the European theater of war.
So, it's no wonder the reaction in Brussels and major European capitals has been of barely
disguised horror.
EU diplomats have told Asia Times the US decision was a "shock", and "the last straw for the
EU as it jeopardizes our very existence, subjecting us to nuclear destruction by short-range
missiles", which would never be able to reach the US heartland.
The "China" reason – that Russia is selling
Beijing advanced missile technology – simply does not cut it in Europe, as the
absolute priority is European security. EU diplomats are establishing a parallel to the
possibility – which was more than real last year – that Washington could
nuclear-bomb North Korea unilaterally. South Korea and Japan, in that case, would be nuclear
"collateral damage". The same might happen to Europe in the event of a US-Russia nuclear
shoot-out.
It goes without saying that shelving the INF could even accelerate the demise of the whole
post-WWII Western alliance, heralding a remix of the 1930s with a vengeance.
And the
clock keeps ticking
Reports that should be critically examined in detail assert that US superiority over
China's
military power is rapidly shrinking. Yet China is not much of a military technology
powerhouse compared to Russia and its state of the art hypersonic missiles.
NATO may be relatively strong on the missile front – but it still wouldn't be able to
compete with Russia in a potential battle in Europe.
The supreme danger, in Doomsday Clock terms, is the obsession by certain US neocon factions
that Washington could prevail in a "limited", localized, tactical nuclear war against
Russia.
That's the whole rationale behind extending US first-strike capability as close as possible
to the Russian western borderlands.
Russian analysts stress that Moscow is already – "unofficially" – perfecting
what would be their own first-strike capability in these borderlands. The mere hint of NATO
attempting to start a countdown in Poland, the Baltics or the Black Sea may be enough to
encourage Russia to strike.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov starkly refuted Trump and Bolton's claims that Russia was
violating the INF Treaty: "As far as we understood, the US side has made a decision, and it
will launch formal procedures for withdrawing from this treaty in the near future."
As for Russia's resolve, everything one needs to know is part of Putin's detailed
intervention at the Valdai Economic Forum .
Essentially, Putin did not offer any breaking news – but a stark reminder that Moscow
will strike back at any provocation configured as a threat to the future of Russia.
Russians, in this case, would "die like martyrs" and the response to an attack would be so
swift and brutal that the attackers would "die like dogs".
The harsh language may not be exactly diplomatic. What it does is reflect plenty of
exasperation towards the US conservatives who peddle the absurd notion of a "limited" nuclear
war.
The harsh language also reflects a certainty that whatever the degree of escalation
envisaged by the Trump administration and the Pentagon, that won't be enough to neutralize
Russian hypersonic missiles.
So, it's no wonder that EU diplomats, trying to ease their discomfort, recognize that
this, in the end, is all about the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine and the necessity of
keeping the massive US military-industrial-surveillance complex running.
Even as the clock keeps ticking closer to midnight.
"... By Dan Smith, Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute . He is also a part-time Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manchester, affiliated with the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute . Until August, 2015, he was Secretary General of International Alert , the London-based international peacebuilding organization. Originally published at his blog ; cross posted from openDemocracy ..."
At a political rally on Saturday 20 October President Trump announced that the US will
withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty
of 1987. This confirms what has steadily unfolded over the last couple of years: the
architecture of US-Russian nuclear arms control is crumbling.
Building Blocks of Arms Control
As the Cold War ended, four new building blocks of east-west arms control were laid on top
of foundations set by the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of
1972:
1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) reduced the numbers of strategic nuclear
weapons; further cuts were agreed in 2002 and again in 2010 in the New START agreement.
– The 1990 Treaty on
Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty) capped at equal levels the number of heavy
weapons deployed between the Atlantic and the Urals by the then-members of both the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO). –
The 1991
Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs) were parallel, unilateral but agreed actions by
both the US and the USSR to eliminate short-range tactical nuclear weapons, of which
thousands existed.
Taken together, the nuclear measures – the INF Treaty, START and PNIs – had a
major impact, as this graph from the Federation of American
Scientists shows:
The fastest pace of reduction was in the 1990s. A deceleration began just before the new
century started, and there has been a further easing of the pace in the last six years. But
year by year, the number continues to fall. By the start of 2018 the global total of nuclear
weapons was 14,700 compared to an all-time high of some 70,000 in the mid-1980s. Nuclear
weapons are more capable in many ways than before; the reduction is, nonetheless, both large
and significant.
Cracks Appear: Charge and Counter-Charge
Even while the numbers continued to drop, problems were emerging. Not least, in 2002 the US
unilaterally withdrew from the ABM Treaty. That did not stop the US and Russia signing the
Strategic
Offensive Reductions Treaty in 2002 or New START in 2010 but perhaps it presaged
later developments.
Trump's announcement brings towards its conclusion a process that has been going on
for several years . The US declared Russia to be violating the Treaty in July 2014. That,
of course, was during the Obama administration. The allegation that Russia has breached the INF
Treaty, in other words, is not new. This year the USA's NATO allies also aligned themselves
with the US accusation, albeit somewhat guardedly (cf the careful wording in paragraph 46 of
the July Summit
Declaration ).
The charge is that Russia has developed a ground-launched cruise missile with a range over
500 kilometres. Many details have not been clearly stated publicly but it seems Russia may have
modified a sea-launched missile (the Kalibr ) and combined it with a mobile
ground-based launcher (the Iskander K system). The modified system is known sometimes
as the 9M729 , or t he SSC-8, or the
SSC-X-8 .
Russia rejects the US accusation. It makes the counter-charge that the US has itself
violated the Treaty in three ways: first by using missiles banned under the Treaty for target
practice; second because some US drones are effectively cruise missiles; and third because it
has taken a maritime missile defence system and based it on land ( Aegis Ashore )
although its launch tubes could, the Russians say, be used for intermediate range missiles.
Naturally, the US rejects these charges.
A further Russian criticism of the US over the INF Treaty is that, if the US wanted to
discuss alleged non-compliance, it should have used the Treaty's Special Verification
Commission before going public. This was designed specifically to address questions about each
side's compliance. It did not meet between 2003 and November 2016; it was during that 13-year
interval that US concerns about Russian cruise missiles arose.
Now Trump seems to have closed the argument by announcing withdrawal. Under Article XV of
the Treaty, withdrawal can happen after six months' notice. Unless there is a timely change of
approach by either side or both, the Treaty looks likely to be a dead letter by April 2019.
It could be, however, that the announcement is intended as a manoeuvre to get concessions
from the Russian side on the alleged missile deployment or on other aspects of an increasingly
tense US-Russian relationship. That is what Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov,
implied by calling it "blackmail".
Arms Control in Trouble
Whether the imminence of the INF Treaty's demise is more apparent than real, its plight is
part of a bigger picture. Arms control is in deep trouble. As well as the US abrogation of the ABM Treaty
in 2002,
effectively withdrew
from the CFE Treaty in 2015 arguing that the equal cap was no longer fair when five former
Warsaw Pact states had joined NATO. – The 2010 New START agreement on strategic
nuclear arms lasts until 2021 and there are currently no talks about prolonging or
replacing it. – Russia
claims that the US is technically violating New START because some launchers have been
converted to non-nuclear use in a way that is not visible to Russia so it cannot verify
them in the way the Treaty says it must be able to. The Russian government's
position is that until this is resolved, it is not possible to start work on the
prolongation of New START, despite its imminent expiry date.
It seems likely that the precarious situation of US-Russian arms control will simultaneously
put increasing pressure on the overall nuclear non-proliferation regime, and sharpen the
arguments about the Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons . For the advocates of what is often known as the nuclear
ban, the erosion of arms control reinforces the case for moving forward to a world without
nuclear weapons. For its opponents, the erosion of arms control shows the world is not at all
ready for or capable of a nuclear ban.
The risk of a return to nuclear weapons build-ups by both Russia and the US is visible. We
risk losing the degree of safety we gained with the end of the Cold War and have enjoyed since
then. With US National Security Advisor John Bolton in Moscow as I write, and more importantly
with the well-earned reputation for springing surprises that the US and Russian Presidents both
have, there may be more developments in one direction or another in the coming days or
weeks.
The British author John Wyndham once wrote that 95 per cent of the human race wants to
live in peace while the other 5 per cent was always considering its chances if it should risk
starting anything. It was chiefly because no one's chances looked too good, what with nuclear
weapons, that the lull after WW2 continued. Now it looks like a new generation of wonks who
are not reality-based want to put the US in the position of being able to launch a
pre-emptive nuclear attack on at least Russia with missiles based in Europe. Like with the
old Pershing missiles, tough luck if you live in Europe. Russia has already said that they
will target any European country that houses these missiles with nukes.
Saw a hint on RT that if the US continues these efforts, that Russia may develop missiles
that could set off the Yellowstone Caldera. That would be not good. The Russians are always
ready to negotiate but the problem is that the US now has a reputation of being
agreement-incapable. Remember that Bush was stationing missiles in Europe as a shield against
non-existent Iranian nukes on top of Iranian missiles that did not have the range. Russia
suggested that the missiles be located in Turkey but the US refused. After the Iran treaty
went into effect, the US announced that – surprise, surprise – the missiles were
for use against Russia after all. How do you negotiate with something like that?
In regard to the INF Treaty the Russian newspapers have had some stories that they
consider that particular treaty likely the worst they ever signed. That's because the USSR
gave up many more missiles than the US did. The articles also mention that the Russians feel
they are many counties that have those type of missiles all around them. For example, China,
Pakistan, Iran and Israel are specially mentioned. Lastly the technology has changed so much
in the 30 or so years since that treaty was signed.
In a better time a new series of treaties might be negotiated but these are not better
times.
But there is a larger question here – I think one that applies to both Russia and
the United States – and that's the countries that are producing intermediate range
ballistic missiles and cruise missiles right now, specifically Iran, China and North Korea.
We have this very unusual circumstance where the United States and Russia are in a
bilateral treaty, whereas other countries in the world are not bound by it. Now some of the
successor states to the Soviet Union are bound by it, but it's really only Russia that has
the wherewithal to have this kind of program. So it has been the view of the United States,
in effect, that only two countries were bound by the INF treaty.
It appears that Mr. Trump likes bilateral trade agreements and multi-lateral arms
agreeements.
This is all part of Bolton's war on Russia. Like Trump, he indulges in old score-settling
with Beltway & Pentagon colleagues as well as proving he was right all along to oppose
these and most other treaties. I am highly suspicious of this entire fiasco.
Why are we so preoccupied with a country that has an economy a fifth the size of the US
alone (much less NATO/EU)? Even if allied with China and NATO ally (?) Califwannabe Erdogan,
Russia is more annoying than a threat.
Bolton, on the other hand, scares the crap out me. He's just plain nuts.
I'm very glad this post is up. That this isn't a huge story is a fine example of "The
tyranny of the urgent." (Those who read the transcript of Putin at the Valdai Club may recall
this passage :
[PUTIN] Look, we live in a world where security relies on nuclear capability. Russia is
one of the largest nuclear powers. You may be aware, I have said it publicly, we are
improving our attack systems as an answer to the United States building its missile defence
system. Some of these systems have already been fielded, and some will be put into service
in the coming months. I am talking about the Avangard system. Clearly, we have overtaken
all our, so to speak, partners and competitors in this sphere, and this fact is
acknowledged by the experts. No one has a high-precision hypersonic weapon. Some plan to
begin testing it in one or two years, while we have this high-tech modern weapon in
service. So, we feel confident in this sense.
Naturally, there are many other risks, but they are shared risks, such as environment,
climate change, terrorism, which I mentioned, and proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction. If we are unable to put an effective end to this, it is not clear where it
will lead to, and in whose hands this deadly weapon may end up.
So, in this sense, nothing has changed. We are not going anywhere, we have a vast
territory, and we do not need anything from anyone. But we value our sovereignty and
independence. It has always been this way, at all times in the history of our state. It
runs in the blood of our people, as I have repeatedly said. In this sense, we feel
confident and calm.
And this:
I have said that our nuclear weapons doctrine does not provide for a pre-emptive strike.
I would like to ask all of you and those who will later analyse and in one way or another
interpret my every word here, to keep in mind that there is no provision for a pre-emptive
strike in our nuclear weapons doctrine. Our concept is based on a reciprocal counter
strike. There is no need to explain what this is to those who understand, as for those who
do not, I would like to say it again: this means that we are prepared and will use nuclear
weapons only when we know for certain that some potential aggressor is attacking Russia,
our territory. I am not revealing a secret if I say that we have created a system which is
being upgraded all the time as needed – a missile early warning radar system. This
system monitors the globe, warning about the launch of any strategic missile at sea and
identifying the area from which it was launched. Second, the system tracks the trajectory
of a missile flight. Third, it locates a nuclear warhead drop zone.
Only when we know for certain – and this takes a few seconds to understand –
that Russia is being attacked we will deliver a counter strike. This would be a reciprocal
counter strike. Why do I say 'counter'? Because we will counter missiles flying towards us
by sending a missile in the direction of an aggressor. Of course, this amounts to a global
catastrophe but I would like to repeat that we cannot be the initiators of such a
catastrophe because we have no provision for a pre-emptive strike. Yes, it looks like we
are sitting on our hands and waiting until someone uses nuclear weapons against us. Well,
yes, this is what it is. But then any aggressor should know that retaliation is inevitable
and they will be annihilated. And we as the victims of an aggression, we as martyrs would
go to paradise while they will simply perish because they won't even have time to repent
their sins.
I've see a video of a fancy new weapon. Is it real?
The Avangard is in testing or just completed testing. Depending what stories you see it
has been successfully tested at least once. Even successful testing may not mean deployment.
Earliest estimate for deployment is about 2020 in very limited numbers. I'm not sure how big
a deal this thing is as it launched from an ICBM. How much faster than an incoming ICBM
warhead does it move?
The Avangard has nothing to do with the INF.
The Russian nuclear doctrine does allow for the use of nuclear weapons – at least in
fairly narrow circumstances. The wording implies the circumstances would "have to threaten
the collapse of the state". First use in those circumstances might not be considered
preemptive. Putin help write to doctrine when he was Secretary of the Russian National
Security Council Staff .
Just a general thing, for those interested in excellent technical (both scientific and
legal/compliance) commentary on arms control, I highly recommend Arms Control Wonk . The level of discussion is very
high, the kind of level NC readers would appreciate. I'm in no way associated with it except
for being a longtime reader.
The UN was created not to sell Sustainable Development but to prevent Apocalyptic Riot.
During the Cold War & a Bi Polar power balance of separate economics it did the job.
However flawed it was, it did that one job.
Now it sits there selling Sustainable Development, which is great, but not what it was really
made to do.
If the UN, or a new one with an overt and covert armed forces becomes the World's Unitary
Power intent on eliminating nuclear weapons it could negotiate them away and fight a war or
two, and be involved in a permanent level of conflict to keep the fields free of nukes.
In fact the banning of nuclear weapons would give a UN the power to enforce transformational
energy programs. I have strong doubt that the UN as it exists now will prevent apocalyptic
riot.
Human nature being what it is does not get excited and passionate about the environment.
Humans get excited about big new power systems and war.
There has been a demonstrated desire to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war. The Cold War
worked. During that period it was long only the US & the USSR that had nuclear bombs and
delivery systems.
Russia moved into the Ukraine with tanks, took Crimea and got away with it. Pretty much the
situation is that wherever you see tanks move you may see the employment of tactical nuclear
weapons. A conventional ability to stop all tanks then is important for those nations
vulnerable to tank attacks.
In fact I say that you cannot expect to reduce nuclear devices unless you address the reason
for them, and that is to stop tanks. Reducing tanks first is then the right order to do
things. Come to tank treaties first and then tackle nuclear weapons and the rest of the WMDs
is what I say.
'Tactical' nuclear weapons are not the only way to stop tanks. The Russian move into
Crimea is hardly an argument for the superiority of a tank invasion or the need for tactical
nuclear weapons. Tanks are effective in open relatively flat even terrain, and as long as you
have control of the air and sufficient infantry support around them. If the objective is to
stop a tank rather than destroy it there are ways. You could stop a tank by spraying glue
over their weapons sight, or vision blocks, or the camera port for some of the more recent
armored vehicles. Even if you can't stop a tank you can stop parts from coming in to make
repairs or diesel to run the their hungry engines if their supply lines are not well
protected. The tanks will quickly stop on their own. You could also stop tanks with opposing
tanks if you're ready to absorb the costs for building the force and keep it ready to roll
near an attack corridor. Tactical nuclear weapons might save a little money (???) but they
are a hellish invention for increasing the threats to our fragile world as we transition
through Climate Disruptions into the new Anthropocene Climate Regime.
While you're working on those tank treaties, please include ground mines especially those
with plastic casings -- oh! and don't forget to eliminate those nasty spent-uranium
shells.
"Russia moved into the Ukraine with tanks, took Crimea and got away with it" Rather a
warped interpretation of a situation where the USA had overthrown the Ukrainian government
and Crimea had been part of Russia and the population overwhelmingly voted to return. NO
bloodshed at all. The video "Crimea, the way back Home" is worth a look.
"The basic plans of nuclear war today are essentially the same as those developed in the
1960s, which is essentially a system of thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at Russian cities
and military targets ready to be launched at a moment's notice.
The US strategy has always been for a first strike: not necessarily a surprise attack but not
an attack which came "second" in a nuclear war.
Every US president, all the way to Trump, has used the threat of nuclear war as deterrence to
their adversaries.
The US threat of nuclear attack has precluded any "effective nonproliferation campaign" among
other nation-states which have decided to acquire nuclear weapons themselves.
US nuclear war plans, and the hypothetical and real scenarios under which they unfold, are
far more extensive than the public can imagine. Ellsberg writes how the public perception of
a "nuclear button" with one finger on it, presumably the President's, is a lie. In fact,
there are many fingers on many buttons, to delegate authority to launch nuclear missiles in
case the President and the leadership were incapacitated. These same systems exist in Russia,
and probably other nuclear-armed powers as well.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was even more dangerous than previously thought, as demonstrated in
a highly classified study in 1964 which was never made public until this book.
The strategic nuclear war systems are much more prone to "accidents" and false alarms than
previously thought, risking the threat of unauthorized launchings.
The potential risk of nuclear war has been systematically covered up from the public,
including the aforementioned graph showing hundreds of millions of deaths, a third of the
planet at the time. Ellsberg notes that in 1961 when the document was made, it was two
decades before the concept of nuclear winter and nuclear famine were accepted, which meant
that in reality most humans would die along with most other large species after a nuclear
war."
As for a non-nuclear war between Russia and USA/NATO waged in Western Europe.
@PO and Mark and other stooges
I don't see how one is possible. Unless Scotty et al with working teleporter equipment are
able to teleport NATO armor and troops into Russia , their columns moving through Belarus
,Ukraine and Poland would be massacred. There wouldn't be much left by the time they got to
the Russian frontier. where waiting Russian armor and artillery would have all routes of
approach thoroughly zeroed in and sighted. Not to mention waves of Iskander and cruise
missile strikes together with attacks from Russian aircraft . The NATO forces would almost
certainly not have the crucial element of air superiority thanks to Russian S-400
systems.
The Russians wouldn't have to actually DO anything on the offensive other than to show up
at the signing of the surrender document by Stoltenberg, Merkel ,Morawiecki ,May and
Bolton.
(France capitulated within 72 hours of the start of hostilities )
I just don't see a NATO conventional attack on Russia as even remotely feasible.
Just my opinion .
Well, the way it is supposed to work, you don't start at Day One with your forces deep inside
enemy territory. You start on your own side, and one attacks the other and each tries to
prevent penetration by the other (if you'll forgive such an image) while achieving
penetration into enemy territory himself, usually only seizing territory which follow-up
forces are available to hold, so as not to be encircled and wiped out. It is demonstrably
quite possible for huge amounts of US forces and armor to be assembled in England and the
Netherlands and France and so forth, because it has already been done once on that scale.
Likewise, Russia would not start out with troops in any of those countries.
Missiles are dandy for wiping out enemy forces at the touch of a button, but you still
have to seize that territory, once vacated, and prevent the enemy from simply flowing into
the vacuum and re-taking it. That sort of doctrine is pretty much like the US vision of air
superiority, where the USAF would simply fly over and bomb the shit out of everything, no
troops required. That's how it was supposed to go in Iraq, except it didn't. Fortunately, I
guess, because otherwise the phrase "Boots on the ground" might never have been coined, and
then what would journalists say when they wanted to appear salty and battle-jaded?
A conventional attack on Russia is not preferred – let's just get that up front. But
I don't see any other way for the west to have a war with Russia (and it has run out of ways
short of war to assert its control) without it going nuclear. And Washington is not quite
that crazy yet. It still wants Europe to be around afterward to be a consumer of American
goods and services.
Although it is almost off topic, I did find one point in Putin's Valdai
speech quite telling. It was his point about the Russian automated system for detection and
tracking of missile launches. Putin tried to boost the credibility of the Russian nuclear deterant by advertising this system for detecting the First Strike launches.
Although I do not believe that this system is as reliable as advertised, I am most
encouraged by the apparent Putin's realisation that the First Strike is possible now if not
even likely.
If the Russians expect an attack they are much less likely to be totally surprised, as
usual. In fact, never in history was such attack by the West more likely than now, for various
reasons which would take a while to explain.
I just hope that the Russian office corps is as prepared as Putin is to be productive
martyrs (no more Arkhipovs please).
"In simplified terms, the implants on Supermicro hardware manipulated the core operating
instructions that tell the server what to do as data move across a motherboard, two people
familiar with the chips' operation say. This happened at a crucial moment, as small bits of
the operating system were being stored in the board's temporary memory en route to the
server's central processor, the CPU. The implant was placed on the board in a way that
allowed it to effectively edit this information queue, injecting its own code or altering the
order of the instructions the CPU was meant to follow. Deviously small changes could create
disastrous effects.
The illicit chips could do all this because they were connected to the baseboard
management controller, a kind of superchip that administrators use to remotely log in to
problematic servers, giving them access to the most sensitive code even on machines that have
crashed or are turned off."
"The Intel Management Engine (ME), also known as the Manageability Engine, is an
autonomous subsystem that has been incorporated in virtually all of Intel's processor
chipsets since 2008. The subsystem primarily consists of proprietary firmware running on a
separate microprocessor that performs tasks during boot-up, while the computer is running,
and while it is asleep.As long as the chipset or SoC is connected to current (via battery or
power supply), it continues to run even when the system is turned off. Intel claims the ME is
required to provide full performance. Its exact workings are largely undocumented and its
code is obfuscated using confidential huffman tables stored directly in hardware, so the
firmware does not contain the information necessary to decode its contents. Intel's main
competitor AMD has incorporated the equivalent AMD Secure Technology (formally called
Platform Security Processor) in virtually all of its post-2013 CPUs.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and security expert Damien Zammit accuse the ME
of being a backdoor and a privacy concern. Zammit states that the ME has full access to
memory (without the parent CPU having any knowledge); has full access to the TCP/IP stack and
can send and receive network packets independent of the operating system, thus bypassing its
firewall. Intel asserts that it "does not put back doors in its products" and that its
products do not "give Intel control or access to computing systems without the explicit
permission of the end user."
"... Plus according to Microsemi's own website, all military and aerospace qualified versions of their parts are still made in the USA. So this "researcher" used commercial parts, which depending on the price point can be made in the plant in Shanghai or in the USA at Microsemi's own will. ..."
"... The "researcher" and the person who wrote the article need to spend some time reading more before talking. ..."
"... You clearly have NOT used a FPGA or similar. First the ProASIC3 the article focuses on is the CHEAPEST product in the product line (some of that model line reach down to below a dollar each). But beyond that ... Devices are SECURED by processes, such as blowing the JTAG fuses in the device which makes them operation only, and unreadable. They are secureable, if you follow the proper processes and methods laid out by the manufacturer of the specific chip. ..."
"... Just because a "research paper" claims there is other then standard methods of JTAG built into the JTAG doesn't mean that the device doesn't secure as it should, nor does it mean this researcher who is trying to peddle his own product is anything but biased in this situation. ..."
"... You do know that the Mossad has been caught stealing and collecting American Top Secrets. ..."
"... The original article is here. [cam.ac.uk] It refers to an Actel ProAsic3 chip, which is an FPGA with internal EEPROM to store the configuration. ..."
"... With regard to reprogramming the chip remotely or by the FPGA itself via the JTAG port: A secure system is one that can't reprogram itself. ..."
"... When I was designing VMEbus computer boards for a military subcontractor many years ago, every board had a JTAG connector that required the use of another computer with a special cable plugged into the board to perform reprogramming of the FPGAs. None of this update-by-remote-control crap. ..."
"... It seems that People's Republic of China has been misidentified with Taiwan (Republic of China). ..."
"... Either the claims will be backed up by independently reproduced tests or they won't. But, given his apparent track record in this area and the obvious scrutiny this would bring, Skorobogatov must have been sure of his results before announcing this. ..."
"... Where was this undocumented feature/bug designed in? I see plenty of "I hate China" posts, it would be quite hilarious if the fedgov talked the US mfgr into adding this backdoor, then the Chinese built it as designed. Perhaps the plan all along was to blame the Chinese if they're caught. ..."
"... These are not military chips. They are FPGAs that happen to be used occasionally for military apps. Most of them are sold for other, more commercially exploitable purposes. ..."
"... The page with a link to the final paper actually does mention China. However, it's an American design from a US company. I suspect we will find the backdoor was in the original plans. It will be interesting to see however. ..."
"Today's big news is that researchers have found proof of Chinese manufacturers putting
backdoors in American chips that the military uses. This is false. While they did find a
backdoor in a popular FPGA chip, there is no evidence the Chinese put it there, or even
that it was intentionally malicious.
Furthermore, the Actel ProAsic3 FPGA chip isn't fabricated in China at all !!
1) Read the paper http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/Silicon_scan_draft.pdf
2) This is talking about FPGAs designed by Microsemi/Actel.
3) The article focuses on the ProAsic3 chips but says all the Microsemi/Actel chips tested
had the same backdoor including but not limited to Igloo, Fusion and Smartfusion.
4) FPGAs give JTAG access to their internals for programming and debugging but many of the
access methods are proprietary and undocumented. (security through obscurity)
5) Most FPGAs have features that attempt to prevent reverse engineering by disabling the
ability to read out critical stuff.
6) These chips have a secret passphrase (security through obscurity again) that allows you to
read out the stuff that was supposed to be protected.
7) These researchers came up with a new way of analyzing the chip (pipeline emission
analysis) to discover the secret passphrase. More conventional analysis (differential power
analysis) was not sensitive enough to reveal it.
This sounds a lot (speculation on my part) like a deliberate backdoor put in for debug
purposes, security through obscurity at it's best. It doesn't sound like something secret
added by the chip fab company, although time will tell. Just as embedded controller companies
have gotten into trouble putting hidden logins into their code thinking they're making the
right tradeoff between convenience and security, this hardware company seems to have done the
same.
Someone forgot to tell the marketing droids though and they made up a bunch of stuff about
how the h/w was super secure.
I don't think anyone fully understands JTAG, there are a lot of different versions of it
mashed together on the typical hardware IC. Regardless if its a FPGA, microcontroller or
otherwise. The so called "back door" can only be accessed through the JTAG port as well, so
unless the military installed a JTAG bridge to communicate to the outside world and left it
there, well then the "backdoor" is rather useless.
Something that can also be completely disabled by setting the right fuse inside the chip
itself to disable all JTAG connections. Something that is considered standard practice on
IC's with a JTAG port available once assembled into their final product and programmed.
Plus according to Microsemi's own website, all military and aerospace qualified versions
of their parts are still made in the USA. So this "researcher" used commercial parts, which
depending on the price point can be made in the plant in Shanghai or in the USA at
Microsemi's own will.
The "researcher" and the person who wrote the article need to spend some time reading more
before talking.
The so called "back door" can only be accessed through the JTAG port as well, so unless
the military installed a JTAG bridge to communicate to the outside world and left it there,
well then the "backdoor" is rather useless.
With pin access to the FPGA it's trivial to hook it up, no bridges or transceivers needed.
If it's a BGA then get a breakout/riser board that provides pin access. This is off-the-shelf
stuff. This means if the Chinese military gets their hands on the hardware they can reverse
engineer it. They won't have to lean very hard on the manufacturer for them to cough up every
last detail. In China you just don't say no to such requests if you know what's good for you
and your business.
Not being readable even when someone has the device in hand is exactly what these secure
FPGAs are meant to protect against!
It's not a non-issue. It's a complete failure of a product to provide any advantages
over non-secure equivalents.
You clearly have NOT used a FPGA or similar. First the ProASIC3 the article focuses on is
the CHEAPEST product in the product line (some of that model line reach down to below a
dollar each). But beyond that ... Devices are SECURED by processes, such as blowing the JTAG fuses in the device which makes
them operation only, and unreadable. They are secureable, if you follow the proper processes
and methods laid out by the manufacturer of the specific chip.
Just because a "research paper" claims there is other then standard methods of JTAG built
into the JTAG doesn't mean that the device doesn't secure as it should, nor does it mean this
researcher who is trying to peddle his own product is anything but biased in this
situation.
"Even if this case turns out to be a false alarm, allowing a nation that you repeatedly
refer to as a 'near-peer competitor' to build parts of your high-tech weaponry is
idiotic."
Not to mention the non-backdoor ones.
'Bogus electronic parts from China have infiltrated critical U.S. defense systems and
equipment, including Navy helicopters and a commonly used Air Force cargo aircraft, a new
report says.'
The US military should have a strict policy of only buying military parts from
sovereign, free, democratic countries with a long history of friendship, such as Israel,
Canada, Europe, Japan and South Korea.
Didn't the US and UK governments sell crypto equipment they knew they could break to their
'allies' during the Cold War?
Second problem.... 20 years ago the DOD had their own processor manufacturing facilities,
IC chips, etc. They were shut down in favor of commercial equipment because some idiot
decided it was better to have an easier time buying replacement parts at Radioshack than
buying quality military-grade components that could last in austere environments. (Yes,
speaking from experience). Servers and workstations used to be built from the ground up at
places like Tobyhanna Army Depot. Now, servers and workstations are bought from Dell.
Fabs are expensive. The latest generation nodes cost billions of dollars to set up and
billions more to run. If they aren't cranking chips out 24/7, they're literally costing
money. Yes, I know it's hte military, but I'm sure people have a hard time justifying $10B
every few years just to fab a few chips. One of the biggest developments in the 90s was the
development of foundries that let anyone with a few tens of millions get in the game of
producing chips rather than requiring billions in startup costs. Hence the startup of tons of
fabless companies selling chips.
OK, another option is to buy a cheap obsolete fab and make chips that way - much cheaper
to run, but we're also talking maybe 10+ year old technology, at which point the chips are
going to be slower and take more power.
Also, building your own computer from the ground up is expensive - either you buy the
designs of your servers from say, Intel, or design your own. If you buy it, it'll be
expensive and probably require your fab to be upgraded (or you get stuck with an old design -
e.g., Pentium (the original) - which Intel bought back from the DoD because the DoD had been
debugging it over the decade). If you went with the older cheaper fab, the design has to be
modified to support that technology (you cannot just take a design and run with it - you have
to adapt your chip to the foundry you use).
If you roll your own, that becomes a support nightmare because now no one knows the
system.
And on the taxpayer side - I'm sure everyone will question why you're spending billions
running a fab that's only used at 10% capacity - unless you want the DoD getting into the
foundry business with its own issues.
Or, why is the military spending so much money designing and running its own computer
architecture and support services when they could buy much cheaper machines from Dell and run
Linux on them?
Hell, even if the DoD had budget for that, some bean counter will probably do the same so
they can save money from one side and use it to buy more fighter jets or something.
30+ years ago, defense spending on electronics formed a huge part of the overall
electronics spending. These days, defense spending is but a small fraction - it's far more
lucrative to go after the consumer market than the military - they just don't have the
economic clout they once had. End result is the military is forced to buy COTS ICs, or face
stuff like a $0.50 chip costing easily $50 or more for same just because the military is a
bit-player for semiconductors
You do know that the Mossad has been caught stealing and collecting American Top Secrets.
In fact most of the nations above save perhaps Canada have at one time or another been caught
either spying on us, or performing dirty deeds cheap against America's best interest. I'd say
for the really classified stuff, like the internal security devices that monitor everything
else... homegrown only thanks, and add that any enterprising person who's looking to get paid
twice by screwing with the hardware or selling secrets to certified unfriendlies get's to
cools their heels for VERY LONG TIME.
We investigated the PA3 backdoor problem through Internet searches, software and
hardware analysis and found that this particular backdoor is not a result of any mistake or
an innocent bug, but is instead a deliberately inserted and well thought-through backdoor
that is crafted into, and part of, the PA3 security system. We analysed other
Microsemi/Actel products and found they all have the same deliberate backdoor. Those
products include, but are not limited to: Igloo, Fusion and Smartfusion.
we have found that the PA3 is used in military products such as weapons, guidance,
flight control, networking and communications. In industry it is used in nuclear power
plants, power distribution, aerospace, aviation, public transport and automotive products.
This permits a new and disturbing possibility of a large scale Stuxnet-type attack via a
network or the Internet on the silicon itself. If the key is known, commands can be
embedded into a worm to scan for JTAG, then to attack and reprogram the firmware
remotely.
emphasis mine. Key is retrieved using the backdoor. Frankly, if this is true, Microsemi/Actel should get complete ban from all government
contracts, including using their chips in any item build for use by the government.
I would not be surprised if it's a factory backdoor that's included in all their products,
but is not documented and is assumed to not be a problem because it's not documented.
With regard to reprogramming the chip remotely or by the FPGA itself via the JTAG port: A
secure system is one that can't reprogram itself.
When I was designing VMEbus computer boards
for a military subcontractor many years ago, every board had a JTAG connector that required
the use of another computer with a special cable plugged into the board to perform
reprogramming of the FPGAs. None of this update-by-remote-control crap.
No
source approved [dla.mil] for Microsemi (Actel) qualified chips in China. If you use
non-approved sources then, well, shit happens (although how this HW backdoor would be
exploited is kind of unclear).
It seems that People's Republic of China has been misidentified with Taiwan (Republic of
China).
Either the claims will be backed up by independently reproduced tests or they won't. But,
given his apparent track record in this area and the obvious scrutiny this would bring,
Skorobogatov must have been sure of his results before announcing this.
Even though this story has been blowing-up on Twitter, there are a few caveats. The
backdoor doesn't seem to have been confirmed by anyone else, Skorobogatov is a little short
on details, and he is trying to sell the scanning technology used to uncover the
vulnerability.
Hey hey HEY! You stop that right this INSTANT, samzenpus! This is Slashdot! We'll have
none of your "actual investigative research" nonsense around here! Fear mongering to sell ad
space, mister, and that's ALL! Now get back to work! We need more fluffy space-filling
articles like that one about the minor holiday labeling bug Microsoft had in the UK! That's
what we want to see more of!
The back-door described in the white paper requires access to the JTAG (1149.1) interface
to exploit. Most deployed systems do not provide an active external interface for JTAG. With
physical access to a "secure" system based upon these parts, the techniques described in the
white paper allow for a total compromise of all IP within. Without physical access, very
little can be done to compromise systems based upon these parts.
Where was this undocumented feature/bug designed in? I see plenty of "I hate China" posts,
it would be quite hilarious if the fedgov talked the US mfgr into adding this backdoor, then
the Chinese built it as designed. Perhaps the plan all along was to blame the Chinese if
they're caught.
These are not military chips. They are FPGAs that happen to be used occasionally for
military apps. Most of them are sold for other, more commercially exploitable purposes.
This is a physical-access backdoor. You have to have your hands on the hardware to be able
to use JTAG. It's not a "remote kill switch" driven by a magic data trigger, it's a mechanism
that requires use of a special connector on the circuit board to connect to a dedicated JTAG
port that is simply neither used nor accessible in anything resembling normal operation.
That said, it's still pretty bad, because hardware does occasionally end up in the hands
of unfriendlies (e.g., crashed drones). FPGAs like these are often used to run classified
software radio algorithms with anti-jam and anti-interception goals, or to run classified
cryptographic algorithms. If those algorithms can be extracted from otherwise-dead and
disassembled equipment, that would be bad--the manufacturer's claim that the FPGA bitstream
can't be extracted might be part of the system's security certification assumptions. If that
claim is false, and no other counter-measures are place, that could be pretty bad.
Surreptitiously modifying a system in place through the JTAG port is possible, but less of
a threat: the adversary would have to get access to the system and then return it without
anyone noticing. Also, a backdoor inserted that way would have to co-exist peacefully with
all the other functions of the FPGA, a significant challenge both from an intellectual
standpoint and from a size/timing standpoint--the FPGA may just not have enough spare
capacity or spare cycles. They tend to be packed pretty full, 'coz they're expensive and you
want to use all the capacity you have available to do clever stuff.
This is a physical-access backdoor. You have to have your hands on the hardware to be
able to use JTAG. It's not a "remote kill switch" driven by a magic data trigger, it's a
mechanism that requires use of a special connector on the circuit board to connect to a
dedicated JTAG port that is simply neither used nor accessible in anything resembling
normal operation.
Surreptitiously modifying a system in place through the JTAG port is possible, but
less of a threat: the adversary would have to get access to the system and then return it
without anyone noticing.
As someone else mentioned in another post, physical access can be a bit of a misnomer.
Technically all that is required is for a computer to be connected via the JTAG interface in
order to exploit this. This might be a diagnostic computer for example. If that diagnostic
computer were to be infected with a targeted payload, there is your physical access.
The page with a link to the final paper actually does mention China. However, it's an
American design from a US company. I suspect we will find the backdoor was in the original
plans. It will be interesting to see however.
Kind of Chinagate, but China means her Taivan and the design is US-based. Completely false
malicious rumors -- propaganda attack on China. The goal is clearly to discredit Chinese hardware
manufactures by spreading technical innuendo. In other words this is a kick below the belt.
Bloomberg jerks are just feeding hacker paranoia.
First of all this is not easy to do, secondly this is a useless exercise, as you need access
to TCP/IP stack of the computer to transmit information. Software Trojans is much more productive
area for such activities.
Today, Bloomberg BusinessWeek published a story claiming that AWS was aware of modified
hardware or malicious chips in SuperMicro motherboards in Elemental Media's hardware at the
time Amazon acquired Elemental in 2015, and that Amazon was aware of modified hardware or chips
in AWS's China Region.
As we shared with Bloomberg BusinessWeek multiple times over the last couple months, this is
untrue. At no time, past or present, have we ever found any issues relating to modified
hardware or malicious chips in SuperMicro motherboards in any Elemental or Amazon systems. Nor
have we engaged in an investigation with the government.
There are so many inaccuracies in this article as it relates to Amazon that they're
hard to count. We will name only a few of them here. First, when Amazon was considering
acquiring Elemental, we did a lot of due diligence with our own security team, and also
commissioned a single external security company to do a security assessment for us as well.
That report did not identify any issues with modified chips or hardware. As is typical with
most of these audits, it offered some recommended areas to remediate, and we fixed all critical
issues before the acquisition closed. This was the sole external security report commissioned.
Bloomberg has admittedly never seen our commissioned security report nor any other (and refused
to share any details of any purported other report with us).
The article also claims that after learning of hardware modifications and malicious chips in
Elemental servers, we conducted a network-wide audit of SuperMicro motherboards and discovered
the malicious chips in a Beijing data center. This claim is similarly untrue. The first and
most obvious reason is that we never found modified hardware or malicious chips in Elemental
servers. Aside from that, we never found modified hardware or malicious chips in servers in any
of our data centers. And, this notion that we sold off the hardware and datacenter in China to
our partner Sinnet because we wanted to rid ourselves of SuperMicro servers is absurd. Sinnet
had been running these data centers since we launched in China, they owned these data
centers from the start, and the hardware we "sold" to them was a transfer-of-assets agreement
mandated by new China regulations for non-Chinese cloud providers to continue to operate in
China.
Amazon employs stringent security standards across our supply chain – investigating
all hardware and software prior to going into production and performing regular security audits
internally and with our supply chain partners. We further strengthen our security posture by
implementing our own hardware designs for critical components such as processors, servers,
storage systems, and networking equipment.
Security will always be our top priority. AWS is trusted by many of the world's most
risk-sensitive organizations precisely because we have demonstrated this unwavering commitment
to putting their security above all else. We are constantly vigilant about potential threats to
our customers, and we take swift and decisive action to address them whenever they are
identified.
– Steve Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer
Trumptards are IDIOTs
CashMcCall , 5 hours ago
TRUMPTARDS have an enormous amount of surplus time on their hands to forward their Harry
Potter Styled Conspiracies.
APPLE AND AMAZON DENIED THE STORY. STORY OVER... GET IT CREEPY?
CashMcCall , 5 hours ago
While TRUMPTARDS were posting their Conspiracy Theories and the "TrumpEXPERTS" were
embellishing the ridiculous story with their lavish accounts of chip bug design, I was
enjoying a Bloomberg windfall.
Having confirmed early that the story was False since AMAZON and APPLE BOTH DENIED IT...
and their stock was not moving, I turned to Supermicro which was plunging and down over 50%.
I checked the options, and noted they were soft, so I put in bids for long shares and filled
blocks at 9 from two accounts.
The moronic TRUMPTARD Conspiracy posts continued, Supermicro is now up over 13.
That is the difference between having a brain in your head or having TRUMPTARD **** FOR
BRAINS...
Urban Roman , 5 hours ago
On second thought, this story is just ********. Note that the BBG story never mentions the
backdoors that were talked about for over a decade, nor did they mention Mr. Snowden's
revelation that those backdoors do exist, and are being used, by the surveillance state.
Since the Chinese factories are manufacturing these things, they'd have all the specs and
the blobs and whatever else they need, and would never require a super-secret hardware chip
like this. Maybe this MITM chip exists, and maybe it doesn't. But there's nothing to keep
China from using the ME on any recent Intel chip, or the equivalent on any recent AMD chip,
anywhere.
The purpose of this article is to scare you away from using Huawei or ZTE for anything,
and my guess is that it is because those companies did not include these now-standard
backdoors in their equipment. Maybe they included Chinese backdoors instead, but again, they
wouldn't need a tiny piece of hardware for this MITM attack, since modern processors are all
defective by design.
Chairman , 5 hours ago
I think I will start implementing this as an interview question. If a job candidate is
stupid enough to believe this **** then they will not work for me.
DisorderlyConduct , 4 hours ago
Well, hmmm, could be. To update a PCB is actually really poor work. I would freak my
biscuits if I received one of my PCBs with strange pads, traces or parts.
To substitute a part is craftier. To change the content of a part is harder, and nigh
impossible to detect without xray.
Even craftier is to change VHDL code in an OTP chip or an ASIC. The package and internal
structure is the same but the fuses would be burned different. No one would likely detect
this unless they were specifically looking for it.
Kendle C , 5 hours ago
Well written propaganda fails to prove claims. Everybody in networking and IT knows that
switches and routers have access to root, built in, often required by government, backdoors.
Scripts are no big thing often used to speed up updates, backups, and troubleshooting. So
when western manufacturers began shoveling their work to Taiwan and China, with them they
sent millions of text files, including instructions for backdoor access, the means and
technology (to do what this **** article is claiming) to modify the design, even classes with
default password and bypass operations for future techs. We were shoveling hand over foot
designs as fast as we could...all for the almighty dollar while stiffing American workers. So
you might say greed trumped security and that fault lies with us. So stuff this cobbled
together propaganda piece, warmongering ****.
AllBentOutOfShape , 5 hours ago
ZH has definitely been co-oped. This is just the latest propaganda ******** article of the
week they've come out with. I'm seeing more and more articles sourced from well known
propaganda outlets in recent months.
skunzie , 6 hours ago
Reminds me of how the US pulled off covert espionage of the Russians in the 70's using
Xerox copiers. The CIA inserted trained Xerox copy repairmen to handle repairs on balky
copiers in Russian embassies, etc. When a machine was down the technician inserted altered
motherboards which would transmit future copies directly to the CIA. This is a cautionary
tale for companies to cover their achilles heel (weakest point) as that is generally the
easiest way to infiltrate the unsuspecting company.
PrivetHedge , 6 hours ago
What another huge load of bollocks from our pharisee master morons.
I guess they think we're as stupid as they are.
CashMcCall , 6 hours ago
But but but the story came from one of the chosen money changers Bloomberg... everyone
knows a *** would never lie or print a false story at the market open
smacker , 7 hours ago
With all the existing ***** chips and backdoors on our computers and smartphones planted
by the CIA, NSA, M$, Goolag & friends, and now this chip supposedly from China, it won't
be long before there's no space left in RAM and on mobos for the chips that actually make the
device do what we bought it to do.
Stinkbug 1 , 7 hours ago
this was going on 20 years ago when it was discovered that digital picture frames from
china were collecting passwords and sending them back. it was just a test, so didn't get much
press.
now they have the kinks worked out, and are ready for the coup de grace.
This story seemed to die. Did anyone find anything indicating someone on our side has
actually got a look at the malicious chip, assuming it exists? Technical blogs have nothing,
only news rags like NewsMaxx. If 30 companies had these chips surely someone has one. This
might be one huge fake news story. Why Bloomberg would publish it is kind of odd.
FedPool , 7 hours ago
Probably a limited evaluation operation to gauge the population's appetite for war.
Pentagram market research. They're probably hitting all of the comment sections around the
web as we speak. Don't forget to wave 'hi'.
Heya warmongers. No, we don't want a war yet, k thanks.
underlying , 7 hours ago
Since were on the topic let's take a look at the scope hacking tools known to the general
public known prior to the Supermicro Server Motherboard Hardware Exploit; (P.S. What the ****
do you expect when you have Chinese state owned enterprises, at minimum quasi state owned
enterprises in special economic development zones controlled by the Chinese communist party,
building motherboards?)
Snowden NSA Leaks published in the gaurdian/intercept
This does not include the private/corporate sector hacking pen testing resources and
suites which are abundant and easily available to **** up the competition in their own
right.
Exactly. Why would they ever need a super-micro-man-in-the-middle-chip?
Maybe this 'chip' serves some niche in their spycraft, but the article in the keypost
ignores a herd of elephants swept under the carpet, and concentrates on a literal speck of
dust.
Moribundus , 8 hours ago
A US-funded biomedical laboratory in Georgia may have conducted bioweapons research under
the guise of a drug test, which claimed the lives of at least 73 subjects...new documents
"allow us to take a fresh look" at outbreaks of African swine fever in southern Russia in
2007-2018, which "spread from the territory of Georgia into the Russian Federation, European
nations and China. The infection strain in the samples collected from animals killed by the
disease in those nations was identical to the Georgia-2007 strain." https://www.rt.com/news/440309-us-georgia-toxic-bioweapon-test/
A brand new ice-strengthened containership is heading straight into the annals of
maritime history. As the first containership ever Venta Maersk is on its way through the
still ice-plagued North East passage north of Russia from Asia to Europe.
Venta Maersk belongs to Seago Line, a shipping company owned by Denmark's A.P. Moller
Maersk A/S, the world's largest container-shipping agency
The first stop in Europe, in Bremerhaven, Germany, is expected to take place in late
September before Venta Maersk continues to St Petersburg, Russia.
Venta Maersk is one of seven ice-strengthened containerships that Maersk is currently
having built in China.
The ships are 200 metres long, 35.2 metres wide and capable of shipping 3,600
containers, six metres long, through one metre of ice. ..
Absolutely. Trump
is being led by the nose into WW3. It's only a matter of time, unfortunately. The issue is
that, while most likely there will be no ww3 after this newest crisis, just as there was no
nuclear war after the April crisis, we never know exactly how close we are to a nuclear war,
because previously both parties tried to stay clear of such situations. How many times can
the US illegally strike at Syrian targets without it leading to some Russian response which
would in turn lead to some US response and so on, until we'll face some kind of situation
where the sweating, nervous and sleep-deprived leadership of one of these nuclear superpowers
will in an underground bunker rightly or wrongly contemplate the possibility that if they
don't use their nukes in 20 minutes, they'll lose most of them..? Since we've rarely been in
such situations, we don't really know what the margin of error is, nor what could lead to the
use of nuclear weapons. We have no idea.
"It would be desirable, one presumes, to avoid an open conflict with Russia, which would be
unpredictable "
Quite wrong, and very dangerous. In fact an "open conflict" (or, as we say in English, a
war) against Russia would – very predictably indeed – have one of two possible
outcomes:
1. A catastrophic and decisive defeat for the USA;
"... So the strategy is obvious: Scare Russia with how big your defense budget is, even if you have nothing to show for it. And if 1 trillion can't do the trick, I don't see why 2 trillion shouldn't be able to accomplish the task – winning Cold war 2. ..."
"... The US are perfectly capable by themselves alone in finding a new source of pride in the fact how much they can (ill) afford to spend on the military, thus they want to ensure that on their way to oblivion, history will marvel at what a powerful country they used to be – spending amounts of money on the military that no one else was able to match. ..."
"... Yes, Putin managed to change the world quietly, to the helpless chagrin of the Empire. The fact that the Empire is now using the lowliest scum, like jihadi head choppers and "svidomie" Nazis, shows that it is reduced to hysterics and tantrums. ..."
"... So, if in Cold War 2.0 Putin is using the strategy the US used in Cold War 1.0, he is outsmarting his adversaries admirably. ..."
"... It might be even worse for the Empire and its lackeys. The US and other NATO armies would be totally incapacitated by the absence of bathroom tissue. ..."
"... You need to start with the premise that the US Zioglob wants to destroy Syria and Iran – and you have to take them seriously since much of the Middle East has already been targeted, and is lying in ruins ..."
"... Russia's part in this is that it gets in the way. Without Russian support, Assad and the Iranians would probably already be gone, and Syria would be some kind of ISIS run hellhole ..."
"... But overall, it's unreal that this is happening. If the US attacks Russian warships off the Syrian coast, then things could get completely out of control. ..."
"... Israel would not let America do anything that might start a nuclear war. ..."
"... FSB operational group is in Donetsk now and is dealing with this murder. This is the start of the official recognition of the LDNR–initially as independent entities and, eventually, rejoining Russia. It is especially remarkable after even Kiev admitting a demographic and labor catastrophe, which also feed-backs and drives the whole country into the oblivion even faster. That, plus US military "advisers" are already in place in Ukraine. 2019 is not far away and US wants to "sell" own toxic asset as high as possible. ..."
"... Is the outbreak of nuclear war possible? Of course it is possible, it always is–the main measure of it is how probable this outbreak is. This is way above my pay-grade level, but I will reiterate–Russia is aware of the US and where it stands on the order (if not two) of magnitude more than it is the other way around. Russians actually study the US and I saw a vast improvement of Russian Americanistika in the last 10 years. Dramatic really. On the other end well ..."
"... As far as Israel is concerned, you don't need to target anything in particular: one 500 kiloton device (or a few smaller ones) would wipe the whole Israel off the map (Arabs need not rejoice: that puny territory won't be usable for any mammals for a few thousand years). One can only hope that Israelis and the US neocons don't have a death wish and won't let things to go that far. ..."
"... The US strategy is to make Russia bleed internally with aggressive and violent Military occupations directly as in Syria and by proxy in the Ukraine ..Could this not lead to a coup in Russia? ..."
"... Dempsey and Michael Flynn (while he was head of the DIA) sabotaging the CIA and State department policy on overthrowing Assad the Idiot (he put up the price of basic necessities while the Arab spring was going on) was the origin of Russia gate, the CIA hated Flynn. ..."
"... The US "strategy" on Russia is written by dated "products" of the US "humanities" field, by amateurs and by ignoramuses – that is why US "strategy" on Russia is easily identifiable as one huge tantrum and is exhibit A of how not TO conduct military and foreign policies. In fact, I expect at some point of time many a Ph.D theses written on that–a fascinating topic of a country ran by people with maturity level of teenagers. As per coup–wanna see one? Open any US MSM newspaper or watch any MSM news. ..."
"... I fear you're underestimating the power of messianic delusions. The country with leaders speaking of the End of History, the Moral Arc of History, etc., is not a country with a generalized ability to accept equal status among competing powers. ..."
"... While it may be the case that there are serious people who seriously understand the situation, the default assumption among Regime players is that USG is on top, and this will continue for ever . ..."
"... The other is geopolitical: I strongly suspect that Putin wants to use Donbass as a lever to push Ukraine to a sensible position of neutrality internationally and federation internally. If so, good luck to him: that would make Ukraine viable. ..."
"... I don't know about goats, but naturally radiation-resistant rodents and insects would have been grateful to neocons, if they knew who to thank for gifting them the whole Earth as a kingdom. ..."
"... I fear you're underestimating the power of messianic delusions. The country with leaders speaking of the End of History, the Moral Arc of History, etc., is not a country with a generalized ability to accept equal status among competing powers. ..."
"... Yes, it's definitely a tricky situation living in a large country run by criminals and madmen. ..."
"... If not for nuclear weapons, things would be much simpler, and once they eventually got a bloody military nose, there might be a popular uprising, probably leading to the wholesale massacre of all our ruling political, financial, and intellectual elites. This would definitely serve them right and also provide excellent business to Chinese guillotine-manufacturers. But with nukes in the hands of madmen, a positive outcome is much more doubtful, so I guess there's not all that much we can do except sit around and worry. ..."
I am sorry Andrei, but I am going to have to disagree with your assessment of the current
situation. I think that the US strategy is very sound and its aims are obvious. Since they
can't win any "hot" war of any significance, they decided to lure Russia into Cold war 2. And
we all know who "won" Cold war 1.
Basically the strategy is: Focus on the "wars" that you can "win", instead on the ones
that you can't. And the way they intend to "win" Cold war 2 is the same like they "won" Cold
war 1 – outspend Russia on defense.
For a few years now, the Americans are bragging that their yearly increases in the
military budget are bigger than the total Russian military budget. US now spend around 1
trillion on defense, while Russia is what – in the 50-60 billion range?
So the strategy is obvious: Scare Russia with how big your defense budget is, even if you
have nothing to show for it. And if 1 trillion can't do the trick, I don't see why 2 trillion
shouldn't be able to accomplish the task – winning Cold war 2.
The only difference between Cold war 1 and 2 is that USSR tried to match the spending of
US in Cold war 1 -that's what bankrupted them. This time around, the Russians don't even have
to pretend that they are trying to match US military budget.
The US are perfectly capable by themselves alone in finding a new source of pride in the
fact how much they can (ill) afford to spend on the military, thus they want to ensure that
on their way to oblivion, history will marvel at what a powerful country they used to be
– spending amounts of money on the military that no one else was able to match.
Your argument is nonsensical and uninformed. Russia has recently slashed their defence
spending by a significant margin. If the plan was to lure Russia to spend more via defence
then it has already completely failed.
A Tweet by Nick Griffin,
former leader of the British National Party, on whether decades of mass immigration and
Cultural Marxism have increased or decreased the West's chances of surviving World War
III:
'Here's the bottom line: Even if Nato destroyed the entire military & half the cities
of Russia, she would survive. If the USA & UK lose their militaries & their
electricity supply, their cities will be destroyed by their own citizens. The West has lost
#WW3 before it starts!'
Yes, Putin managed to change the world quietly, to the helpless chagrin of the Empire. The
fact that the Empire is now using the lowliest scum, like jihadi head choppers and "svidomie"
Nazis, shows that it is reduced to hysterics and tantrums.
Sometimes I wish Putin to act more decisively, like after the murder of Zakharchenko in
Donetsk by cowardly terrorist jackals. But I also feel that he must know more than I do. His
strategy seems to be "when you see your enemy committing suicide, do not interfere". So far
it is working. If anything, Russia, without spending too much, prompts the US to spend itself
into financial insolvency.
So, if in Cold War 2.0 Putin is using the strategy the US used in
Cold War 1.0, he is outsmarting his adversaries admirably.
It might be even worse for the Empire and its lackeys. The US and other NATO armies would
be totally incapacitated by the absence of bathroom tissue. And I mean real soldiers, not trannies.
Both of you are way off. The reality trumps race, real or imagined. That's where Russia
wins. Particularly because it includes people of different nationalities, races, religions
(or lack thereof), etc.
You need to start with the premise that the US Zioglob wants to destroy Syria and Iran
– and you have to take them seriously since much of the Middle East has already been
targeted, and is lying in ruins.
Russia's part in this is that it gets in the way. Without Russian support, Assad and the
Iranians would probably already be gone, and Syria would be some kind of ISIS run
hellhole.
Also, the cook in the fable does monologues when angry, but the Neocons have been
described as "Crazies" and act like crazies, so it's a bit risky to only expect "loud talk
and nothing more". Crazies can start throwing things around, and they're not known for
balanced responses, so I find Martyanov's view too complacent.
I would guess that Putin & his generals have a more realistic assessment , and
interestingly they seem to have decided to stick with Assad (which seems to imply that
they're ready to go all the way with the US). Trump & Mattis need to appreciate this and
moderate the Ziocons.
But overall, it's unreal that this is happening. If the US attacks Russian warships off
the Syrian coast, then things could get completely out of control.
Rural Russians do not have electricity, indoor plumbing and running water in many cases.
It is like Eire in the 1920′s except worse because the distances are vastly greater.
Anyway, if Russia got to a point where it was in a full nuclear strategic exchange with the
US, the last act of the Russian leadership would be to order that their missiles hit every
other nuclear power: Britain, France, China and Israel too . Russia would take
everyone else down with them. For that reason Israel would not let America do anything that
might start a nuclear war.
FSB operational group is in Donetsk now and is dealing with this murder. This is the start
of the official recognition of the LDNR–initially as independent entities and,
eventually, rejoining Russia. It is especially remarkable after even Kiev admitting a
demographic and labor catastrophe, which also feed-backs and drives the whole country into
the oblivion even faster. That, plus US military "advisers" are already in place in Ukraine.
2019 is not far away and US wants to "sell" own toxic asset as high as possible.
Also, the cook in the fable does monologues when angry, but the Neocons have been
described as "Crazies" and act like crazies, so it's a bit risky to only expect "loud talk
and nothing more". Crazies can start throwing things around, and they're not known for
balanced responses, so I find Martyanov's view too complacent.
Evidently you missed Ralph Peters' (and he is really bat shit crazy one and passes as
"military experts" among neocon cabal) "performance" and writings when he called on the war
against Russia ONLY inside Syria. And even then with some caveats.
Even if such a psycho as Peters understands limitations–and that was a year ago,
since then things changed in Syria dramatically, such as Syrian and Russian Air Defense among
other things–then I would say that my position is not really "complacent". Russia has a
revolver and it is held to the temple.
Is the outbreak of nuclear war possible? Of course it
is possible, it always is–the main measure of it is how probable this outbreak is. This
is way above my pay-grade level, but I will reiterate–Russia is aware of the US and
where it stands on the order (if not two) of magnitude more than it is the other way around.
Russians actually study the US and I saw a vast improvement of Russian Americanistika in the
last 10 years. Dramatic really. On the other end well
You are a bit under-informed. Practically all Russian villages have electricity now,
although many don't have natural gas, indoor plumbing, and live w/o running water in homes
(some have it in the streets, others rely on wells; most use old-fashioned latrines).
In the worst-case scenario of nuclear war between Russia and the US, Russia won't need to
target nuclear power plants (or anything else) in China. Russian strategy would be to make
sure some people survive, same as Chinese strategy in that case. They might, although I am
not sure that the survivors won't envy the dead after a full-blown nuclear war. The US
vassals will be hit, but given what the world will become, one can consider that an act of
mercy.
As far as Israel is concerned, you don't need to target anything in particular: one 500
kiloton device (or a few smaller ones) would wipe the whole Israel off the map (Arabs need
not rejoice: that puny territory won't be usable for any mammals for a few thousand years).
One can only hope that Israelis and the US neocons don't have a death wish and won't let
things to go that far.
1) the Russian Military and the US Military are separated physically by a very thin line in
Syria and other places ..accidental bumping into each other=Big nuclear accident!!!
2)The US strategy is to make Russia bleed internally with aggressive and violent Military
occupations directly as in Syria and by proxy in the Ukraine ..Could this not lead to a coup
in Russia? Noam Chomsky makes a compelling case that the US actually won the Vietnam War
.Vietnam had it's military victory .but the war turned Vietnam into a dependent basket case
.44 years of being a dependent basket case.
If there exists any other people than me that got curious about Ivan Krylov and want to
read his stories i found a book on archive.org
"Kriloff's original fables translated by Henry Harrison published in 1883."
I found it easier to read the letters in that one than in the link in the article tbh.
Watergate was really about the US losing the war, so I think the Vietnamese won the war,
but the US left benefited . To get rid of Putin and his system the US would have to impose a
clear defeat on Russia, something the US cannot do in Ukraine without Russia
escalating, and
did not care to try in Syria. The American and Russian military would not let the politicians
start a war.
McCAIN: General Dempsey is the most disappointing chairman of the joint chiefs that I
have seen, and I have seen many of them
He says he may request that. He has supported the plan to completely withdraw from
Afghanistan. And he has basically been the echo chamber for the president. And one of the
reasons we are in the situation that we're in in the world today – and particularly
in the Middle East – is because the lack of his either knowledge or candor about the
situation in the Middle East. And it has done great damage, and so all I can say is he only
has eight more months.
In the above video Dunford tells Wicker controlling airspace in Syria means war with
Russia. McCain throws a tantrum, then Dunford refines answer. However, it is perfectly
obvious that the current head of the Joint Chiefs is no more keen than Martin Dempsey was on
aggressive action against Assad.
Dempsey and Michael Flynn (while he was head of the DIA) sabotaging the CIA and State
department policy on overthrowing Assad the Idiot (he put up the price of basic necessities
while the Arab spring was going on) was the origin of Russia gate, the CIA hated Flynn.
Sean -- I hope you are right about Israel. I have seen it argued, though, that Jews would
welcome a nuclear conflagration because, as God's chosen, they would be the only ones certain
to be left standing when the dust had settled. It would be the realization of the Judaic
belief that Heaven and Earth were created solely for the Jews; see Shahak and Mezvinsky's
Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel , page 60.
of course they are, now go back to bed grandpa. you should not let your self get so
agitated either, your heart is weak. it is a long time ago now that "you" beat the nazis and
taught those pesky commies a lesson.
Noam Chomsky makes a compelling case that the US actually won the Vietnam War
Noam Chomsky could be many things, military historian and scholar of a warfare he surely
is not. I believe Carl Von Clausewitz makes much more compelling case about the war than
Chomsky ever did or will.
The US strategy is to make Russia bleed internally with aggressive and violent Military
occupations directly as in Syria and by proxy in the Ukraine ..Could this not lead to a
coup in Russia?
The US "strategy" on Russia is written by dated "products" of the US "humanities" field,
by amateurs and by ignoramuses – that is why US "strategy" on Russia is easily
identifiable as one huge tantrum and is exhibit A of how not TO conduct military and foreign
policies. In fact, I expect at some point of time many a Ph.D theses written on that–a
fascinating topic of a country ran by people with maturity level of teenagers. As per
coup–wanna see one? Open any US MSM newspaper or watch any MSM news.
Your last paragraph .and I thought: Kenneth Adleman Jean Kirkpatrick ..Condelezza Rice(and
this one is too stupid to know she is stupid ), Susan Rice( very inflated opinion of herself
and a dunce ) now this is a real confederacy of dunces
I fear you're underestimating the power of messianic delusions. The country with leaders
speaking of the End of History, the Moral Arc of History, etc., is not a country with a
generalized ability to accept equal status among competing powers.
They will burn the world if they can't have it.
Additionally, I interact (drink) with policy types in DC and elsewhere and to them the
suggestion that USG would not be able to ruin Russia, or China, and not suffer a catastrophe
at home, is laughable. They will actually laugh. While it may be the case that there are
serious people who seriously understand the situation, the default assumption among Regime
players is that USG is on top, and this will continue for ever .
Much reasoned and passionate debate this: should Russia do or not do? Not possessing
military background at the level of many luminaries here, all I can do is lay out an analogy
built around game theory and poker.
You (Russia) are playing poker with a guy (Uncle Sam) known to hide cards up his sleeves.
You do not call for a show of hands because you fear the loser and his servants will rather
blow up the gaming room than lose. And the blowing up the room is not a certainty, only a
probability not subject to quantification.
So the initiative rests with the other guy –
and he keeps doubling the stakes every move. Now what to do you do? Every time the stakes are
doubled the probability of the loser blowing up the gaming room increases should he be called
out. Should you have called for a show of hands when the stakes were lower? Or should you let
the game go on and on, thereby avoiding a big blow up?
The other probem is that not only is
the other guy crooked, he is also slightly crazy and blind. Has he really seen his own hand
of cards correctly? You don't know for sure. It does look like safety might lie in letting
the game go on at the other guy's initiative.
What if it drags on endlessly? Who has the
bigger pile of chips? Who will go bust first? What if piles of chips are ignored as a
constraint on both sides? Well, then how will the game end? All games must have an end
point.
I have no answers.
Having grown up in Donbass, I would like to share your hope.
However, there are several reasons for Russia's reluctance to let Donbass join. One is
purely economic: Donbass is a lot more populous than Crimea, so bringing the living standards
there from Ukrainian to Russian level would cost lots of money. Russia is hardly in a
position to take on an additional huge burden right now.
The other is geopolitical: I strongly suspect that Putin wants to use Donbass as a lever to
push Ukraine to a sensible position of neutrality internationally and federation internally.
If so, good luck to him: that would make Ukraine viable.
If WWIII starts in earnest, having someone left intact would be the least of Russia's (or
anyone else's) worries.
I don't know about goats, but naturally radiation-resistant rodents and insects would have
been grateful to neocons, if they knew who to thank for gifting them the whole Earth as a
kingdom.
I fear you're underestimating the power of messianic delusions. The country with
leaders speaking of the End of History, the Moral Arc of History, etc., is not a country
with a generalized ability to accept equal status among competing powers.
They will burn the world if they can't have it.
Yes, it's definitely a tricky situation living in a large country run by criminals and
madmen.
If not for nuclear weapons, things would be much simpler, and once they eventually got
a bloody military nose, there might be a popular uprising, probably leading to the wholesale
massacre of all our ruling political, financial, and intellectual elites. This would
definitely serve them right and also provide excellent business to Chinese
guillotine-manufacturers. But with nukes in the hands of madmen, a positive outcome is much
more doubtful, so I guess there's not all that much we can do except sit around and
worry.
"... "to destroy the USSR and China as viable societies." ..."
"... "as a viable society" ..."
"... "would no longer be a viable nation," ..."
"... "population loss as the primary yardstick for effectiveness in destroying the enemy society with only collateral attention to industrial damage." ..."
"... "might not be as important," ..."
"... "no-warning US strike" ..."
"... "an unprecedented range and mix of threats" ..."
A review of the US general nuclear war plan by the Joint Staff in 1964, which was recently
published by George Washington University's National Security Archive project, shows how
the Pentagon studied options "to destroy the USSR and China as viable societies."
The review, conducted two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, devises the destruction of
the Soviet Union "as a viable society" by annihilating 70 percent of its industrial
floor space during pre-emptive and retaliatory nuclear strikes.
A similar goal is tweaked for China, given its more agrarian-based economy at the time.
According to the plan, the US would wipe out 30 major Chinese cities, killing off 30 percent of
the nation's urban population and halving its industrial capabilities. The successful execution
of the large-scale nuclear assault would ensure that China "would no longer be a viable
nation," the review reads.
The Joint Staff had proposed to use the "population loss as the primary yardstick for
effectiveness in destroying the enemy society with only collateral attention to industrial
damage." This "alarming" idea meant that, as long as urban workers and managers
were killed, the actual damage to industrial targets "might not be as important," the
George Washington University researchers said.
The 1964 plan doesn't specify the anticipated enemy casualty levels, but – as the
researchers note – an earlier estimate from 1961 projected that a US attack would kill 71
percent of the residents in major Soviet urban centers and 53 percent of residents in Chinese
ones. Likewise, the 1962 estimate predicted the death of 70 million Soviet citizens during a
"no-warning US strike" on military and urban-industrial targets.
The Pentagon continues to rely heavily on nuclear deterrence, and – just like in the
1960s – the US nuclear strategy still regards Russian and Chinese military capabilities
as main "challenges" faced by Washington. The latest Nuclear Posture Review,
adopted
in February, outlined "an unprecedented range and mix of threats" emanating from
Beijing and Moscow. The document, which mentions Russia 127 times, cites the modernization of
the Russian nuclear arsenal as "troubling" for the US.
The existing nuclear strategy also allows the US to conduct nuclear strikes not only in
response to enemies' nuclear attacks, but also in response to "significant non-nuclear
strategic attacks" on the US, its allies and partners.
The newest US Nuclear Posture Review was heavily criticized by Russia and China. Moscow
denounced the strategy as "confrontational, " while Beijing described the Pentagon's
approach as an example of "Cold-War mentality."
"... Some MoA commentators have discussed the possibility of Trump having been installed as the "front man" for the 'Deep State'. Our suspicions are derived from the falseness of Obama, the clear manipulations of the 2016 Presidential election (not by Russians, but by DNC and Hillary) , and Kissinger's cryptic but clear call for MAGA! after the Donbas rebels won in Ukraine (August 2014) ..."
"... A forgotten aspect: USA has a variety of goals in trade policies that inevitably conflict each other. Trump got an idea to change conditions of the trade with China in a way that will improve the manufacturing jobs in USA, but he also wants the negotiation on that issue to hinge on "cooperative attitude" in respect of starving North Korea to submission ..."
"... And there is a long list of issues that confuse trade negotiations: e.g. impunity for Israel, impunity for USA for war crimes, cooperating with American sanctions on Iran that do not have trade purpose. Then we have Trumpian quasi-economic idea to force import of American weapons and unleash sanctions if, say, Russian weapons a for being twice cheaper. ..."
"... North Korea already has the solution for the problem you highlight: the Chinese model of "one country, two systems" mixed with the American model. ..."
"... The problem is: the South (and the USA) doesn't want it. They are betting on the North's collapse, followed by a would be chaebol/American multinationals takeover, followed by an IMF-like "shock doctrine", which would result in the mass enslavement of the Northern population ..."
b: Trump is suddenly binding the continuation of Korea talks to a trade deal with
China.
If Trump previously used trade to coerce China's support for a hardline against NK (as
seems likely) then his claim that CHINA is using NK to strike back at USA over trade must
infuriate the Chinese.
b: There are small and big signs that a deeper conflict [with China] is
developing .
Trump has said that anyone trading with Iran after Nov. 4th will not be trading with USA.
I don't think the signs could be any more clear than that.
... the affirmation of America's exceptional nature must be sustained. History offers no
respite to countries that set aside their sense of identity in favor of a seemingly less
arduous course.
As usual, BigLie Media shows its an impediment to establishing peace as it tries to BigLie
away the reality of the Trump/Kim agreement. Unfortunately, even outlets opposing the
monopoly of BigLie Media like RT and Sputnik further the BigLie regarding denuclearization,
which I then try to correct via comments--I think 9 times so far, which is far too many.
Despite denouncing Fake News, the Trump admin continues to fuel BigLie Media's BigLie by
announcing the appointment of someone to oversee a process--denuclearization--that won't
begin anytime soon. Furthermore, today China
called-out the ongoing prevarications :
"The United States' claims that China has been impacting Washington's talks with Pyongyang
on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula are irresponsible and contradict the facts,
Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, said in a statement on Saturday."
There're no talks about denuclearization occurring because it's not time for them to occur
as DPRK has said on several occasions in denouncing Bolton's & Pompeo's lies while
praising Trump.
3
weeks ago , China reiterated its ongoing policy to assist DPRK's economic development, so
Trump's moves have done nothing to weaken China's resolve.
IMO, what Trump says on the matter doesn't hold much weight as I see Moon and Kim--and the
Korean people, North and South--having more than enough courage and drive to attain the goal
of unification. Nor does it matter which side ends up the "winner" from a Western perspective
as the real winners will be Koreans and all other peoples of the region from Japan to
Indonesia. Just imagine the shock to US Imperialists when RoK and DPRK announce the joining
of their militaries into one overall institution--including DPRK's nukes.
All events in Korea are having a big affect of Okinawa and Okinawans' drive to attain
their freedom from Japanese and US Imperialism. And the shock waves don't avoid Japan proper
either as its economy really doesn't have yen to spare on wasteful military equipment. Not to
mention Japan's business sector's salivation at the monies possible by joining Xi's BRI's
Winwinism.
IMO, the remainder of the 21st Century will witness the metamorphosis of East Asia's
political-economy into a hybrid of Xi's Socialism With Chinese Characteristics, which will
eventually encompass Eurasia because WinWinism is far more desirable than the Outlaw US
Empire's Zerosumism. Furthermore, WinWinism lends itself far more readily to adopting
resiliency as resources dwindle and climate change bites harder.
By continuing to engage in such behavior, "the West" just hastens its journey into
irrelevance as the tenuous Atlanticist ties rupture due to Outlaw US Empire hubris/arrogance.
This site has a global view of Eurasia that
provides an honest comparison in size between it and its European appendage.
The historical
reasons allowing for European ascendency over Eurasia and much of the rest of the planet no
longer apply. The dynamism of Europe's run its course; and as Hesse noted 100 years ago,
Europe's future lies to the East.
A forgotten aspect: USA has a variety of goals in trade policies that inevitably conflict
each other. Trump got an idea to change conditions of the trade with China in a way that will
improve the manufacturing jobs in USA, but he also wants the negotiation on that issue to
hinge on "cooperative attitude" in respect of starving North Korea to submission (some wonder
why USA is so approving toward starving Yemen to submission, this is modus operandi in
general). So, how much of economic goals is he willing to surrender to get this cooperative
attitude?
And there is a long list of issues that confuse trade negotiations: e.g. impunity for
Israel, impunity for USA for war crimes, cooperating with American sanctions on Iran that do
not have trade purpose. Then we have Trumpian quasi-economic idea to force import of American
weapons and unleash sanctions if, say, Russian weapons a for being twice cheaper.
Building
our economy on the basis of piracy is perhaps a sound idea if we cannot compete in other
ways, but that harks to "build better future by stealing office supplies". But the fact is
that USA is not an omnipotent pirate, so to get concessions we need to concede something
else, and the least important are issues that affect jobs (think tanker jobs and other elite
occupations are not threatened after all).
Reunification under what government. When you say, "on its way to reunification", do you
foresee the Kim Jong-Un regime taking over the entire peninsula, or dissolving while a
democratic government similar to the one in South Korea is established across the whole
continent, as was the case in Germany?
North Korea already has the solution for the problem you highlight: the Chinese model of
"one country, two systems" mixed with the American model. In the North's plan, there would be
peace, the frontier would be more porous (families could reunite, more or less freedom of
movement), strategic infrastructural projects that would involve both halves interests would
be joint, foreign policy would be unified but domestic policies would be practically
independent (the American model, where the States of the Federation can decide on tax,
etc.).
The problem is: the South (and the USA) doesn't want it. They are betting on the North's
collapse, followed by a would be chaebol/American multinationals takeover, followed by an
IMF-like "shock doctrine", which would result in the mass enslavement of the Northern
population (slave labor for the chaebols factories, generating a new cycle of high profit
rates) -- precisely what happened to the DPR (which capitulated) and, in the second case, the
Russian SR (shock doctrine).
Over the years, though, agreements with Russia to reduce nuclear arms have not followed a straight path of success.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush announced his intention to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty. Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by announcing that the INF Treaty might no longer be in Russia's
interests. Russia had ratified START II in 2000 but pulled out of the treaty after the U.S. withdrew from the ABM
Treaty.
Most recently, New START took effect in 2011. In addition to placing
a cap
of 1,550 on deployed strategic nuclear warheads, a nearly three-quarters drop from START, New START also cut
in half
the allowable number of strategic nuclear-delivery vehicles, such as missile launchers and heavy bombers.
New START expires in 2021. If either side allows it to simply sunset, it will be the first time in several decades
that a nuclear-arms-reduction treaty between the U.S. and Russia lapses.
... ... ...
Rand Paul
is
the junior United States Senator from Kentucky.
"... Why are they pushing a propaganda war which awfully looks like psychological preparation for a real hot war, when they must know that there cannot ever be a real hot war? ..."
"... How will they prevent escalation if they themselves seem to slowly drink their own Kool-Aid and believe that Russia is "waging hybrid warfare" with them, and therefore that any military action against Russia counts as self-defense, moreover, that it'd be insane not to wage an actual war against Russia? ..."
Exactly. It's a bit frightening because I don't quite get what their endgame is here.
Maybe they truly believe they can decapitate Russia with very little risk or damage to
NATO countries, but from publicly available data it doesn't look like that.
Why are they pushing a propaganda war which awfully looks like psychological
preparation for a real hot war, when they must know that there cannot ever be a real hot
war?
How will they prevent escalation if they themselves seem to slowly drink their own
Kool-Aid and believe that Russia is "waging hybrid warfare" with them, and therefore that any
military action against Russia counts as self-defense, moreover, that it'd be insane not to
wage an actual war against Russia?
"... Russia's economy is weak. Its GDP did not make the world's top 10, yet its military, especially its nuclear power, has sustained its status as one of the most influential nations in the world. Russia and the US have serious geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East and Europe, but Trump suddenly reversed the hardline US stance and showed a low-key response to Putin. That's probably because, as Trump said, Russia is a nuclear power. ..."
"... Yet Trump's respect toward Russia is worth mentioning. Trump is a man who values strength, and he attaches great importance to military strength, especially nuclear strength. ..."
"... China is different from Russia. China has a robust economy and has many tools at its disposal, which is an advantage. Yet China's relatively weak military, especially its nuclear power, which lags behind the US, is a major strategic sore point. ..."
"... Just by looking at the US' aggressive attitude in the South China Sea and the Taiwan question, we know that China's nuclear strength is "far from sufficient." Part of the US' strategic arrogance may come from its absolute nuclear advantage. We are concerned that maybe one day, Washington will turn this arrogance into military provocation, whereby China will face very grave challenges. ..."
Amid the lingering fury from the US media over US President Donald Trump's summit with
Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, the White House announced Thursday that Trump
invited Putin to visit Washington this fall. Trump's attitude has been firm on improving
US-Russia relations. Despite staunch opposition, it is quite likely that US-Russia
relations will halt its slide during Trump's presidency.
Trump has repeatedly stressed that Russia and the US are the two biggest nuclear powers
in the world, with their combined nuclear arsenal accounting for 90 percent of world's
total, and thus the US must live in peace with Russia. On US-Russia relations, Trump is
clearheaded.
Russia's economy is weak. Its GDP did not make the world's top 10, yet its military,
especially its nuclear power, has sustained its status as one of the most influential
nations in the world. Russia and the US have serious geopolitical conflicts in the Middle
East and Europe, but Trump suddenly reversed the hardline US stance and showed a low-key
response to Putin. That's probably because, as Trump said, Russia is a nuclear
power.
We know US-Russia relations cannot be improved overnight because it is difficult for the
two countries to make strategic compromises in Europe and the Middle East. Even if their
relations improve, other frictions may emerge, causing new rifts in bilateral ties.
Yet Trump's respect toward Russia is worth mentioning. Trump is a man who values
strength, and he attaches great importance to military strength, especially nuclear
strength.
The US has defined China as its strategic competitor and is exerting more pressure. The
trade war may be just the beginning. Tensions between the two nations may spread to other
areas. We believe that during this process, the White House will continue to evaluate,
including a look at China's nuclear arsenal.
China is different from Russia. China has a robust economy and has many tools at its
disposal, which is an advantage. Yet China's relatively weak military, especially its
nuclear power, which lags behind the US, is a major strategic sore point.
A popular view among Chinese strategists is that we need only a sufficient number of
nuclear weapons. Too many nuclear weapons cost more and may trigger outside alarm, leading
to strategic uncertainty. Those who hold this view believe China does not need to increase
its strategic nuclear weapons and should instead focus on modernizing its nuclear weapons
to secure the country's capability for a second nuclear strike. We believe this view is a
serious misinterpretation of the major countries' nuclear situation.
China is no small country that needs only a few nuclear weapons to scare off an
intimidator at a critical moment. China has grown into a global influence, facing greater
risks and pressure than smaller countries do. We must reconsider what constitutes
"sufficient" in terms of nuclear weapons.
China's nuclear weapons have to not only secure a second strike but also play the role
of cornerstone in forming a strong deterrence so that outside powers dare not intimidate
China militarily. Once major countries are engaged in military conflicts, each side must
evaluate the determination of the other side to see the conflict through. Nuclear power is
the pillar of that determination. One of the major reasons that the US used a
"salami-slicing" method to push for NATO's eastward expansion but refused to engage in open
conflict in Ukraine and Syria with Russia is probably because it was concerned about what
Moscow might do with its huge nuclear arsenal.
Just by looking at the US' aggressive attitude in the South China Sea and the Taiwan
question, we know that China's nuclear strength is "far from sufficient." Part of the US'
strategic arrogance may come from its absolute nuclear advantage. We are concerned that
maybe one day, Washington will turn this arrogance into military provocation, whereby China
will face very grave challenges.
China must speed up its process of developing strategic nuclear power. Advanced missiles
such as the Dongfeng-41 should materialize as soon as possible. Not only should we possess
a strong nuclear arsenal, but we must also let the outside world know that China is
determined to defend its core national interests with nuclear power.
Of course, we do not believe nuclear power development should override all the other
work or its development should come at the expense of other major developmental interests.
But this work must be made a top priority. We must recognize the urgent need for China to
strengthen its nuclear prowess.
If a nuclear war starts, it is only logical for the initial combatants to target ALL
powers at once, as this may be their last chance to reduce their neighbors' ability to loot
and conquer after the war. So expect Europe & China to be hit. China will in turn target
Japan, India, Korea, etc. The US do not trust Canada or Mexico, so these may well become
targets too. Pakistan and Israel may want to make their move at this point. Pretty soon it
would become clear that no major industrial or population center should be spared. So within
a couple of hours, the world's entire nuclear stockpile would be launched.
After these events, the country with the most extensive tunnel system will emerge as the
new world leader.
"... Trump in fact was not the consensus candidate of the American capitalist class back to the 2016 election. So with respect to these economic policies, especially about his trade protectionist measures, these new tariffs imposed on the Chinese goods, let's put it this way: These are not, certainly not the traditional kind of neoliberal economic policy as we know it. So some sections of the American manufacturing sector [capitalists] may be happy about this. But I would say the majority of the American capitalists probably would not approve this kind of trade war against China. ..."
"... So on the Chinese part, ironically, China very much depends on these overall what Martin Wolf called liberal global order, which might better be called the model of global neoliberal capitalism. So China actually much more depends on that. ..."
"... despite whatever happened to the U.S., China would still be committed to the model of openness, committed to privatization and the financial liberalization. The Chinese government has declared new measures to open up a few economic sectors to foreign investment. ..."
"... for China to rearrange towards this kind of domestic consumption-led model of economic development, the necessary condition is that you have income, wealth redistribution towards the workers, towards poor people. And that is something that the Chinese capitalists will resist. And so that is why and so far China has not succeeded in transforming itself away from this export-led model based on exploitation of cheap labor. ..."
"... first of all, China is not socialist at all today. So income of economic sector, the [space] sector accounts for a small number, a small fraction of the overall economy, by various measurements. ..."
"... And so it's expected China will also become the world's largest importer of natural gas by the year 2019. So you are going to have China to be simultaneously the largest importer of oil, natural gas, and coal. ..."
"... let's say the Chinese government right now, even though is led by the so-called Communist Party, is actually much more committed to the neoliberal global order that the Trump administration in the U.S. ..."
"... The Trump administration of this trade protectionist policy, although not justified, it reflects fundamental social conflicts within the U.S. itself, and that probably cannot be sorted out by the Americans' current political system. ..."
"... So the overall neoliberal regime has become much more unstable. ..."
PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay.
The Financial Times chief economic columnist Martin Wolf has called Trump's trade wars with
Europe and Canada, but obviously the big target is China, he's called this a war on the liberal
world order. Well, what does this mean for China? China's strategy, the distinct road to
socialism which seems to take a course through various forms of state hypercapitalism. What
does this mean for China? The Chinese strategy was developed in what they thought would be a
liberal world order. Now it may not be that at all.
Now joining us to discuss what the trade war means for China, and to have a broader
conversation on just what is the Chinese model of state capitalism is Minqi Li, who now joins
us from Utah. Minqi is the professor, is a professor of economics at the University of Utah.
He's the author of The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy, and the
editor of Red China website. Thanks for joining us again, Minqi.
MINQI LI: Thank you, Paul.
PAUL JAY: So I don't think anyone, including the Chinese, was expecting President Trump to
be president Trump. But once he was elected, it was pretty clear that Trump and Bannon and the
various cabal around Trump, the plan was twofold. One, regime change in Iran, which also has
consequences for China. And trade war with China. It was declared that they were going to take
on China and change in a fundamental way the economic relationship with China and the United
States. And aimed, to a large extent, trying to deal with the rise of China as an equal, or
becoming equal, economy, and perhaps someday in the not-too-distant future an equal global
power, certainly as seen through the eyes of not just Trumpians in Washington, but much of the
Washington political and economic elites.
So what does this mean for China's strategy now? Xi Jinping is now the leader of the party,
leader of the government, put at a level virtually equal to Mao Tse-tung. But his plan for
development of the Chinese economy did not, I don't think, factor in a serious trade war with
the United States.
MINQI LI: OK. As you said, Trump was not expected. Which meant that Trump in fact was not
the consensus candidate of the American capitalist class back to the 2016 election. So with
respect to these economic policies, especially about his trade protectionist measures, these
new tariffs imposed on the Chinese goods, let's put it this way: These are not, certainly not
the traditional kind of neoliberal economic policy as we know it. So some sections of the
American manufacturing sector [capitalists] may be happy about this. But I would say the
majority of the American capitalists probably would not approve this kind of trade war against
China.
Now, on the Chinese part, and we know that China has been on these parts, there was
capitalist development, and moreover it has been based on export-led economic growth model and
with exploitation of cheap labor. So on the Chinese part, ironically, China very much depends
on these overall what Martin Wolf called liberal global order, which might better be called the
model of global neoliberal capitalism. So China actually much more depends on that.
And so you have, indeed there are serious trade conflicts between China and U.S. that will,
of course, undermine China's economic model. And so far China has responded to these new
threats of trade war by promising that China, despite whatever happened to the U.S., China
would still be committed to the model of openness, committed to privatization and the financial
liberalization. The Chinese government has declared new measures to open up a few economic
sectors to foreign investment.
Now, with respect to the trade itself, at the moment the U.S. has imposed tariffs on, 25
percent tariffs on the worth of $34 billion of Chinese goods. And then Trump has threatened to
impose new tariffs on the additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. But this amount at
the moment is still a small part of China's economy, about 3 percent of the Chinese GDP. So the
impact at the moment is limited, but certainly has created a lot of uncertainty for the global
and the Chinese business community.
PAUL JAY: So given that this trade war could, one, get a lot bigger and a lot more serious,
and/or even if they kind of patch it up for now, there's a lot of forces within the United
States, both for economic and geopolitical reasons. Economic being the discussion about China
taking American intellectual property rights, becoming the new tech sector hub of the world,
even overpassing the American tech sector, which then has geopolitical implications; especially
when it comes to the military. If China becomes more advanced the United States in artificial
intelligence as applied to the military, that starts to, at least in American geopolitical
eyes, threaten American hegemony around the world.
There are a lot of reasons building up, and it's certainly not new, and it's not just Trump.
For various ways, the Americans want to restrain China. Does this start to make the Chinese
think that they need to speed up the process of becoming more dependent on their own domestic
market and less interested in exporting cheap labor? But for that to happen Chinese wages have
to go up a lot more significantly, which butts into the interests of the Chinese billionaire
class.
MINQI LI: I think you are right. And so for China to rearrange towards this kind of domestic
consumption-led model of economic development, the necessary condition is that you have income,
wealth redistribution towards the workers, towards poor people. And that is something that the
Chinese capitalists will resist. And so that is why and so far China has not succeeded in
transforming itself away from this export-led model based on exploitation of cheap labor.
PAUL JAY: You know, there's some sections of the left in various parts of the world that do
see the Chinese model as a more rational version of capitalism, and do see this because they've
maintained the control of the Chinese Communist Party over the politics, and over economic
planning, that do see this idea that this is somehow leading China towards a kind of socialism.
If nothing else, a more rational planned kind of capitalism. Is that, is there truth to
this?
MINQI LI: Well, first of all, China is not socialist at all today. So income of economic
sector, the [space] sector accounts for a small number, a small fraction of the overall
economy, by various measurements.
And then regarding the rationality of China's economic model, you might put it this way: The
Chinese capitalists might be more rational than the American capitalists in the sense that they
still use most of their profits for investment, instead of just financial speculation. So that
might be rational from the capitalist perspective. But on the other hand, regarding the
exploitation of workers- and the Chinese workers still have to work under sweatshop conditions-
and regarding the damage to the environment, the Chinese model is not rational at all.
PAUL JAY: My understanding of people that think this model works better, at least, than some
of the other capitalist models is that there's a need to go through this phase of Chinese
workers, yes, working in sweatshop conditions, and yes, wages relatively low. But overall, the
Chinese economy has grown by leaps and bounds, and China's position in the world is more and
more powerful. And this creates the situation, as more wealth accumulates, China is better
positioned to address some of the critical issues facing China and the world. And then, as bad
as pollution is, and such, China does appear to be out front in terms of developing green
technologies, solar, sustainable technology.
MINQI LI: OK. Now, Chinese economy has indeed been growing rapidly. It used to grow like
double-digit growth rate before 2010. But now China's growth rate has slowed down just under 7
percent in recent years, according to the official statistics. And moreover, a significant part
of China's growth these days derives rom the real estate sector development. And so there has
been this discussion about this growing housing market bubble. And it used to be that this
housing price inflation was limited to a few big cities. But for the first half of 2018,
according to the latest data, the national average housing price has grown by 11 percent
compared to the same period last year. And that translates into a pace of doubling every six
years.
And so that has generated lots of social resentment. And so not only the working class these
days are priced out of the housing market. Moreover, even the middle class is increasingly
priced out of the housing market. So that is the major concern. And in the long run, I think
that China's current model of accumulation will also face the challenge of growing social
conflicts. Worker protests. As well as resources constrained and environmental damage. And
regarding the issue of China's investment in renewable energy, it is true. China is the largest
investor in renewable energy development, in the solar panels. And although China is of all the
largest investor in about everything.
And so China is still the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, accounting for
almost 30 percent of the total carbon dioxide emissions in the world every year. And then
China's own oil production in decline, but China's oil consumption is still rising. So as a
result, China has become the world's largest oil importer. That could make the Chinese economy
vulnerable to the next major oil price shock.
PAUL JAY: And how seriously is climate change science taken in China? If one takes the
science seriously, one sees the need for urgent transformation to green technology. An urgent
reduction of carbon emission. Not gradual, not incremental, but urgent. Did the Chinese- I
mean, it's not, it's so not taken seriously in the United States that a climate denier can get
elected president. But did the Chinese take this more seriously? Because you don't get the
same, any sense of urgency about their policy, either.
MINQI LI: Well, yeah. So like many other governments, the Chinese government also pays lip
service to the obligation of climate stabilization. But unfortunately, with respect to policy,
with respect to mainstream media, it's not taken very seriously within China. And so although
China's carbon dioxide emissions actually stabilized somewhat over the past few years, but is
starting to grow again in 2017, and I expect it will continue to grow in the coming year.
PAUL JAY: I mean, I can understand why, for example, Russia is not in any hurry to buy into
climate change science. Its whole economy depends on oil. Canada also mostly pays lip service
because the Alberta tar sands is so important to the Canadian economy. Shale oil is so
important to the American economy, as well as the American oil companies own oil under the
ground all over the world. But China is not an oil country. You know, they're not dependent on
oil income. You'd think it'd be in China's interest to be far more aggressive, not only in
terms of how good it looks to the world that China would be the real leader in mitigating,
reducing, eliminating the use of carbon-based fuels, but still they're not. I mean, not at the
rate scientists say needs to be done.
MINQI LI: Not at all. Although China does not depend on all on oil for income, but China
depends on coal a lot. And the coal is still something like 60 percent of China's overall
energy consumption. And so it's still very important for China's energy.
PAUL JAY: What- Minqi, where does the coal mostly come from? Don't they import a lot of that
coal?
MINQI LI: Mostly from China itself. Even though, you know, China is the world's largest coal
producer, on top of that China is either the largest or the second-largest coal importer in the
world market as well. And then on top of that, China is also consuming an increasing amount of
oil and natural gas, especially natural gas. And so although natural gas is not as polluting as
coal, it's still polluting. And so it's expected China will also become the world's largest
importer of natural gas by the year 2019. So you are going to have China to be simultaneously
the largest importer of oil, natural gas, and coal.
PAUL JAY: The Chinese party, just to get back to the trade war issue and to end up with, the
idea of this Chinese nation standing up, Chinese sovereignty, Chinese nationalism, it's a
powerful theme within this new Chinese discourse. I'm not saying Chinese nationalism is new,
but it's got a whole new burst of energy. How does China, if necessary to reach some kind of
compromise with the United States on the trade war, how does China do that without looking like
it's backing down to Trump?
MINQI LI: Well, yes, difficult task for the Chinese party to balance. What they have been
right now is that on the one hand they promise to the domestic audience they are not going to
make concessions towards the U.S., while in fact they are probably making concessions. And then
on the other hand the outside world, and they make announcement that they will not change from
the reform and openness policy, which in practice means that they will not change from the
neoliberal direction of China's development, and they will continue down the path towards
financial liberalization. And so that is what they are trying to balance right now.
PAUL JAY: I said finally, but this is finally. Do the Americans have a case? Does the Trump
argument have a legitimate case that the Chinese, on the one hand, want a liberal world order
in terms of trade, and open markets, and such? On the other hand are not following intellectual
property law, property rights and law, the way other advanced capitalist countries supposedly
do. Is there something to that case?
MINQI LI: Well, you know, let's say the Chinese government right now, even though is led
by the so-called Communist Party, is actually much more committed to the neoliberal global
order that the Trump administration in the U.S. - but I don't want to make justifications
for the neoliberal global order. But let's put it this way: The Trump administration of
this trade protectionist policy, although not justified, it reflects fundamental social
conflicts within the U.S. itself, and that probably cannot be sorted out by the Americans'
current political system.
PAUL JAY: So the crisis- you know, when you look at the American side and the Chinese side,
including the deep debt bomb people talk about in China, there really is no sorting out of this
crisis.
MINQI LI: So the overall neoliberal regime has become much more unstable.
PAUL JAY: All right. Thanks for joining us, Minqi. I hope we can pick this up again
soon.
MINQI LI: OK. Thank you.
PAUL JAY: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
"... You would do well to consult a dictionary on questions of spelling ..."
"... Trump is not merely mouthing platitudes about farmers or workers or the Rust Belt. He is bringing them back into the game for the first time in ages, and the other side (who considered them dead and gone) is furious. You cannot claim to be for the working class and not cheer a little, if you are being at all honest. ..."
"... But if he succeeds? Wow. ..."
"... According to the Center for Automotive Research's (CAR's) latest trade briefing, applying a 25-percent tariff on all automobile and parts imports would result in 2 million fewer U.S. vehicle sales, 715,000 fewer U.S. jobs and nearly $60 billion in lower U.S. economic output. ..."
"... I was stunned to see that and still don't quite know what to make of it. But the argument is basically, there is no real way to ramp up US auto production without investing in new capacity, which the auto companies are not going to do, period. And since domestic steel and aluminum capacity has already been decimated, and the domestic steel and aluminum producers are even more unwilling to add new capacity than the auto companies, the only effect of the tariffs is to dramatically raise materials costs. ..."
According to Leonard, quite a few key players in China see Trump as having a coherent
geopolitical agenda, with reducing China's influence as a key objective, and that he is doing
an effective job of implementation. From his Financial Times
piece :
I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom
are awed by his [Trump's] skill as a strategist and tactician ..
Few Chinese think that Mr Trump's primary concern is to rebalance the bilateral trade
deficit .They think the US president's goal is nothing less than remaking the global
order.
They think Mr Trump feels he is presiding over the relative decline of his great nation.
It is not that the current order does not benefit the US. The problem is that it benefits
others more in relative terms. To make things worse the US is investing billions of dollars
and a fair amount of blood in supporting the very alliances and international institutions
that are constraining America and facilitating China's rise.
In Chinese eyes, Mr Trump's response is a form of "creative destruction". He is
systematically destroying the existing institutions .as a first step towards renegotiating
the world order on terms more favourable to Washington.
Once the order is destroyed, the Chinese elite believes, Mr Trump will move to stage two:
renegotiating America's relationship with other powers. Because the US is still the most
powerful country in the world, it will be able to negotiate with other countries from a
position of strength if it deals with them one at a time rather than through multilateral
institutions that empower the weak at the expense of the strong.
My interlocutors .describe him as a master tactician, focusing on one issue at a time, and
extracting as many concessions as he can. They speak of the skilful way Mr Trump has treated
President Xi Jinping. "Look at how he handled North Korea," one says. "He got Xi Jinping to
agree to UN sanctions [half a dozen] times, creating an economic stranglehold on the country.
China almost turned North Korea into a sworn enemy of the country." But they also see him as
a strategist, willing to declare a truce in each area when there are no more concessions to
be had, and then start again with a new front.
For the Chinese, even Mr Trump's sycophantic press conference with Vladimir Putin, the
Russian president, in Helsinki had a strategic purpose. They see it as Henry Kissinger in
reverse. In 1972, the US nudged China off the Soviet axis in order to put pressure on its
real rival, the Soviet Union. Today Mr Trump is reaching out to Russia in order to isolate
China.
In fact, Trump made clear on the campaign trail that he wanted to normalize relations with
Russia because he saw China as the much bigger threat to US interests, and that the US could
not afford to be taking them both on at the same time. He also regarded Russia as having more
in common culturally with the US than China, and thus a more natural ally. Given the emphasis
that Trump has placed on US trade deficits as a symbol of the US making deals that are to
America's disadvantage, by exporting US jobs,
However, even if the Chinese are right, and there is more method to Trump's madness than his
apparent erraticness would have you believe, there are still fatal flaws in his throwing bombs
at international institutions.
As anyone who has done a renovation knows, the teardown in the easy part. Building is hard.
And while the young Trump that pulled off the Grand Hyatt deal had a great deal of creativity
and acumen, early successes appear to have gone to Trump's head. He did manage to get out of
the early 1990s real estate downturn in far better shape than most New York City developers by
persuading lenders that his name was so critical to the value of his holdings that creditors
needed to cut him some slack. But the older Trump has left a lot of money on the table, such as
with The Apprentice, by not even knowing what norma were to press for greatly improved
terms.
The fact that the half-life of membership on Trump's senior team seems to be under a year
does not bode well for establishing new frameworks, since they require consistency of thought
and action. And the fact that Trump has foreign policy thugs operatives like
John Bolton and Nikki Haley in important roles works against setting new foundations.
So even if the Chinese are right and Trump has been executing well on his master
geopolitical plan, Trump is at best capable of delivering only on the easy, destructive part,
and will leave his successors to clean up his mess.
Possibly, but the meme's I saw rolling around in the run up to the 2016 election had a
decidedly 40k aesthetic. In either case, that anyone takes it seriously is hilarious.
I'm sorry, but I just can't rap my head around this. It reads like a union piece. "Trump
brilliantly does nothing in the face of oncoming challenges." Thanks to our insane foreign
policy, when Trump doses anything with a modicum of intelligence, it must seem like
"brilliance" to the outside world.
The trick to playing poker isn't having a good hand – but convicting the other
players that you have a better hand than theirs. And when Trump isn't smart enough to know
when he has been dealt a bad hand? You have to look out for two kinds of players – the
ones who know what they are doing, and the ones who don't.
I suspect that they suffer from overprojection, i.e. can't believe he would not be
rational, and project on Trump what they would do in his position. Not unusual behaviour when
one meets with a chaotic behaviour.
It doesn't really surprise me. In China there is still a sort of awe attached to the 'big
man' with power who throws his weight around, even if its not always with subtlety. In my
experience, many Chinese are quite fascinated with Trump, and were so even before he became
POTUS. So it doesn't surprise me that they tend to put the most positive spin on his
blunderbuss approach to international affairs. On the flip side, I also found that the
Chinese never shared the rest of the worlds awe of Obama, they saw him as weak and vain.
That said, I'm pretty sure the strategists in Beijing are well aware of Trumps weaknesses
and will work out (if they haven't already) how to manipulate him. For now, broken
institutions may well suit China very well.
I doubt it. They have been rising like a rocket as they manipulate institutions like WTO,
if this breaks they will do ok one on one with small countries, but poorly wrt Eu and us.
I doubt seriously if anybody in China is impressed by Trump's brilliance. Like all world
leaders, they have realized that if you stroke Trump's ego, he'll sit up and beg –
woof.
I suggest reading Hilda Hookham's " A Short History of
China. " Though published in 1972, the history of China dates back millennia. From that
book, I note that China has cycles of domination followed by economic implosion (often
triggered by revolution – most recently Mao) and a slow crawl back. It has been going
on for centuries. Some of it is endemic to the Chinese culture (how they view the world), and
some of it is likely due to the limits of central control when the country is just too huge
to govern. If Hookam's observations are correct, then we should expect a financial meltdown
at some point. After all, China's personal debt level is high and their housing bubble is
ginormous – the sort of thing that generates recessions.
If this is all the case, it may be partially working. The EU just agreed to buy more
soybeans to make up for what US farmers lost in orders to China as well as offering to build
more facilities to take in US LPG shipments which is by its nature is much more expensive and
less reliable than that coming in from Russia. So the EU has basically surrendered to Trump's
demands.
The implication of this article is that Trump would spend his first term smashing up things
and the second term securing all these you beaut deals to secure his legacy. I doubt that
Russia will go along because they know that the US is not only incapable of keeping an
agreement but can trash a deal and impose all sorts of sanctions in a matter of days. Iran is
already experiencing this. China may be taking note.
I think too that the deep state is also working against this model. I am going to throw out a
theory that what they want is to see the formation of a second Tripartite Pact but this time
between China, Russia and Iran hence the constant pressure against these three nations. With
that in place, it would guarantee ever-increasing defense budgets for decades to meet this
'united threat'. In addition, China may want to be cautious here. Once you pay 'danegeld' it
never stops.
According to the
WaPo it appears Juncker gave Trump a non-concesstion concesstion:
Trump also touted an agreement by the Europeans to buy more American soybeans and
liquefied natural gas. But Juncker in a speech later Wednesday indicated the gas purchases
would only go forward "if the conditions were right and price is competitive." (Anthony
Gardner, a former U.S. ambassador to the E.U., said in a tweet it was "absurd" to believe
liquefied gas could compete with what the continent pipes in from nearer by.) And the E.U.
was already looking to import more U.S. soybeans, since China -- in its own trade fight
with the Trump administration -- has been buying more from Brazil, driving up the price of
the product there.
" they want to see the formation of a second Tripartite Pact but this time between
China, Russia and Iran"
It is a basic necessity for the MIC (in which I include the "deep state") to have a worthy
opponent to continue producing and selling their weaponry to all of the other countries of
the world, or at least the ones on "our" side. Such an opponent also justifies the continuing
massive funding of the surveillance agencies.
The Soviet Union served for decades as the worthy opponent, but since 1991 the US has been
looking for another worthy opponent, i.e., a credible threat. Saddam Hussein served that
purpose for a short time, and then the broader War on Terror. However, neither one of those
was sustainable as a credible threat.
A Tripartite Pact v2.0 would create a very worthy opponent, keeping the MIC companies very
busy and profitable for many years to come.
See Links today. Politico reported that everything that Junkcer promised to Trump (save
maybe soyabeans but not sure there) is stuff the EU was doing/going to do already. So Trump
got nothing new.
I think too that the deep state is also working against this model. I am going to throw
out a theory that what they want is to see the formation of a second Tripartite Pact but
this time between China, Russia and Iran hence the constant pressure against these three
nations.
If so, they would probably be making a huge mistake. Handling China by itself
will soon be more than a chore for an ever-declining west. Handling a "tripartite pact" would
be way, way out of our league. A Russo-Chinese-Iranian alliance in the Eurasian heartland
would have Mackinder turning in
his grave. That's why the neocon strategy is so stupid: it just pushes the Russians further
into the arms of the Chinese. Say what you want about Trump–at least he understands
that much.
Trump, especially in his foreign policy is very rational if chaotic. Chaotic can still be
rational.
He saw what e.g. Obama tried to do. Obama wanted to curb down on US global force projection,
less US instigated wars on 7 continntes. He did it poorly, was stupid even. And when he
didn't want to start new wars, the deep state including the state department (Hillary) or his
allies (France/UK) drew him into new conflicts anyways: Ukraine, Syria, Lybia.
Trump saw this and therefore uses a different strategy, basically a crazy Ivan. Be so
outrageous, chaotic, etc, that the US is simply not welcome anymore. Not in Syria, not in
Ukraine, but even more important: not with their own allies. UK/France could be sure their
ally US would bail them out when it was clear that Lybia was a total clusterfuck for them.
Would any NATO ally be able to depend on Trump today for one of their stupid wars anymore?
Exactly.
Trump is no pacifist of course. He still likes to sell weapons to anyone who pays, but the
crucial difference is, Saudi-Arabia and UAE pays, it's not a "deliver weapons for free via
CIA" as before to some shitty terrorist cel^W^Wfreedom fighter.
On the tradefront it's the same: he ruthlessly tries to exploit the hegemonial position
the US still enjoys here. That's why he asked Merkel several times about a bilateral trade
agreement in the beginning. He knows in one on one treaties the US always has the advantage
due to its size. I'm sure he asked everybody he ever met that. Germany loudly and publically
declined and pointed to the EU for that, but maybe not every country would: eg. Poland or any
other eastern european country might agree to a quiet "we protect you from Russia, but we
need a consideration for this" treaty mafia style.
He will try to exploit every kind of advantage like this all the while giving the impression
of being a moron, crazy or both.
Same with his constant tries to bring back industry to the US any way he can, gutting NAFTA,
etc. He doesn't care if he pollutes to high heaven, for him it's actually bringing the
industry back first and foremost. You cannot really have both which sucky but that's physics.
The left however wants both, and gets neither btw.
This is a high risk strategy, and far from certain it will work, but it's much better than
the constant decline over the last 20 years with perpetual wars draining the coffers,
generating unrest at home, hobbling the economy in the process only lining the pockets of the
rich and creating two worldwide major economical crises. Not counted the by now millions of
deaths the US is almost solely responsible for.
It actually uses the power that the US still has fairly optimally cause when the power is
totally gone, it's too late. We all know free trade and globalism do not help "the economy"
much less the common man, so when someone is actually doing something practical instead of
writing useless books so the NC commentariat can gripe or fap to Mr. Hudson in an embarassing
fanboi way, then he's vilified.
You can vilify him for his corruption, e.g. his self serving tax reform, the personal
credit for his private ventures from UAE/Saudi Arabia or ZTE, gutting of financial oversight
or EPA, but especially his foreign policy has some method in his madness.
Of course he is not a shining liberal progressive saviour, but a right wing reactionary evil
capitalist so the way he does it is his way the evil way. The US already tried a
compassionate, smiling "peace for all mankind" ineffective moron from 2008-2016. It didn't
help, it made it all around much worse everywhere and was indistinguishable from the criminal
evil moron before him.
There are pearls of wisdom mixed in with a goodly dose of horse hooey here. You would do
well to consult a dictionary on questions of spelling (it's not LYbia, but Libya; not
hegemonial but hegemonical, etc.).
Like the FT piece itself, it is hard to parse what perspective you are coming from. I will
focus here on the piece itself, which I read yesterday. The FT piece could be genuine: "Hey,
look at this guys! The Chinese really seem to think Trump is a genius strategist!" It could
be a CYA operation by an increasingly hostile FT editorial board worried by the increasing
vehemence of commentators on both ends of the spectrum and some of its columnists who appear
to be suicidal over the rise of Trump AND Brexit. Or, the 3rd option, it is a concerted
strategy by the Chinese to appeal to Trump's vanity in a way that calls to mind a brilliant
episode of South Park where Pokeman is a mind control plot by the Japanese to take over
America and the worried parents keep getting distracted from their efforts to get to the
bottom of it by Japanese proclamations of wonder at the size of their male members.
Classic!
Time will tell. But one thing is certain, Trump is not a fool, at least not in the classic
sense of the term. For my part, I get the sense of someone who has a map of the minefield and
is deftly maneuvering through it, but whose luck could run out at any time. In the meantime,
the world as a whole finally gets a chance to see the minefield, which we have been told
repeatedly does not exist.
You would do well to consult a dictionary on questions of spelling
FWIW it's Pokémon, not Pokeman. Orthography aside, I agree that Trump has shown the
world the "map of the minefield", although my preferred metaphor is that Trump has sent (and
continues to send) impulses through the liberal international order, and in doing so, has
revealed the liberal international order's impulse response function.
In signal processing, the impulse response , or impulse response
function (IRF), of a dynamic system is its output when presented with a brief input signal,
called an impulse. More generally, an impulse response is the reaction of any dynamic
system in response to some external change. In both cases, the impulse response describes
the reaction of the system as a function of time (or possibly as a function of some other
independent variable that parameterizes the dynamic behavior of the system).
In all these cases, the dynamic system and its impulse response may be actual physical
objects, or may be mathematical systems of equations describing such objects.
Since the impulse function contains all frequencies, the impulse response defines the
response of a linear time-invariant system for all frequencies.
I'm not sure whether the liberal international order is a linear time-invariant system
though, but " The End of History and
the Last Man " appears to suggest that it is.
Trump and his appointees have no policies that will benefit the common person, and many
that will do them great harm. There's no path from smashing "globalism" to the common good
under such a regime.
Balanced trade is better for our workers than the status quo.
And reduced immigration is similar all this is the unwind of the Corp push, aided by both
parties, to push down wages because profits. Unwinding means breaking agreements.
It is not news that we have let other countries take advantage of our workers, or that, as
trump said, winning trade wars is easy, given that you're the big importer. Or that in trade
wars it is the exporter that is hurt the most in the 30's it was the us. True, Apple might
get hurt since most stuff is made in Asia, so what? How many us workers do they have? Not
like GM.
Trump certainly wanted his tax cuts, but it seems he has not forgotten flyover.
What hurts workers is predatory capitalism. That's why we don't have good wages, safe
workplaces, universal healthcare, robust social programs, sustainable food and energy
supplies, clean air and water, infrastructure maintenance and improvement .etc.
Trump and his appointees are neglecting or working against all those things now. Why would
that change under protectionist capitalism, even for the white flown-overs who attend his
rallies and cheer his bigotry, let alone the rest of the common people?
"Predatory capitalism" is not a thing in and of itself. It is the end product of
globalisation breaking all the old rules of reciprocity and communal obligations/rights.
Trade unions got a (deservedly) bad rap in post-war America for hindering productivity and
making off-shoring attractive to management. What gets less play is their place in western
labor/economic history where they held the line against robber barons, big finance, and their
political cronies as a link in a chain going back to the Middle Ages, when noblesse oblige
was an actual thing and not a vague concept. When we focus too much on one player in a
complex chess match, we lose the importance of the shared authority of both sides. JohnK is
correct. Trump is not merely mouthing platitudes about farmers or workers or the Rust Belt.
He is bringing them back into the game for the first time in ages, and the other side (who
considered them dead and gone) is furious. You cannot claim to be for the working class and
not cheer a little, if you are being at all honest.
Trump is not merely mouthing platitudes about farmers or workers or the Rust Belt. He
is bringing them back into the game for the first time in ages, and the other side (who
considered them dead and gone) is furious. You cannot claim to be for the working class and
not cheer a little, if you are being at all honest.
While I agree with this in principle, what matters is actual practice, not principle. The
farmers here in Wisconsin are going berserk. The commodity soybean producers are seeing their
Chinese market go away. The dairy farmers are losing their undocumented help while dairy
prices stay depressed. While we have a relatively large organic and small scale farm sector
compared to many other places, it is still peanuts in the grand scheme of things and no one
in that sector believes Trump is out to help them.
According to the Center for Automotive Research's (CAR's) latest trade briefing,
applying a 25-percent tariff on all automobile and parts imports would result in 2 million
fewer U.S. vehicle sales, 715,000 fewer U.S. jobs and nearly $60 billion in lower U.S.
economic output.
I was stunned to see that and still don't quite know what to make of it. But the argument
is basically, there is no real way to ramp up US auto production without investing in new
capacity, which the auto companies are not going to do, period. And since domestic steel and
aluminum capacity has already been decimated, and the domestic steel and aluminum producers
are even more unwilling to add new capacity than the auto companies, the only effect of the
tariffs is to dramatically raise materials costs.
I do not wish to make light of the real pain of real people, but there was always going to
be short to mid-term disruption to "the system" to stop the outflow of capital and redirect
growth domestically. It's like trimming a tree or pruning a grape vine. The branches that
were growing are definitely feeling the pain and would protest if they could. But the
productivity and long term prospects of the plant and/or crop are infinitely improved.
You cannot negotiate with a gun to your head, and if the gun is pointed by your supporters
and political opposition, it is nevertheless potentially lethal. Were he the most popular
political leader ever, Trump would still face this backlash, and the backlash is legitimate.
He is NOT the most popular, so this is very dangerous. But if he succeeds? Wow.
If you mean success the way I mean success, there will need to be some sort of fundamental
change to US/MNC corporate leadership. I don't see how Trump achieves this. Not even
convinced he really wants it.
Why would a rational person believe this is anything more than a ploy from a bullsh1tter
to win votes? Or that Trump cares about anything beyond 2020 (if that far out)?
Also, I think your (best case) argument only applies to manufacturing, not farming. For
better or worse, US agriculture is heavily export oriented. And I have never heard Trump
mutter one word about growing our own food.
From what I understand the US has been overproducing dairy for quite some time now which
benefits the big midwestern farms and hurts the smaller farms, like those in New England.
When the New England diary compact came up for renewal by Congress several years ago they
declined to renew after pressure from the larger corporate dairy enterprises.
My family has milked 60 cows for decades now no matter what the price of milk is. Others
have expanded their herds when prices go up, thinking they would cash in, which annoys my
father to no end. As long as we're under a capitalist system, increasing production without
increasing demand is going to cause prices to drop. I don't know how all the other farmers in
Vermont did over the years, but I do know that my family's farm is still milking 60 cows
while all up and down the road nearby other barns are crumbling to dust. My family has never
hired any undocumented workers and very few documented ones either, and none in the half
century I've been around. The herd is kept to a size they can manage by themselves.
I believe someone here linked the astronomical amount of government cheese we currently
have lying around that nobody wants. What exactly is the point of all this overproduction? No
small farmers I know are retiring early from any great windfall they've received.
Now if Trump's idea was to cut production and decrease the perceived 'need' for
undocumented workers, I'd be all for it. Without the US overproducing cheap dairy and dumping
it on other nations, the undocumented might be able to begin farming in their own countries
again. But since Trump seems to want Canada, which has evidently managed its dairy industry
much better, to start accepting cheap US dairy, I don't think that's his plan. I'm still not
convinced he has a coherent strategy on anything, despite what the Chinese think.
But if the result turns out to be less overproduction and less illegal immigration, fewer
corporate farms and a return to the smaller family farm, that can't be a bad thing.
At this point global warming can't be denied. If these policies result in less
overproduction which means less industrial activity and fewer overall large ruminants with
their own food requirement, I would count that as a victory.
Staying the course means capitalism ruins the planet even quicker.
The system needs to change. I'd much rather have someone other than Trump doing the
changing, but there seems to be almost noone else in DC willing to upset the apple cart (or
the milk wagon) for fear that their corporate bribes will dry up. If someone could convince
Trump of a little MMT, and make sure all the workers who do lose their jobs when
overproduction is cut will be taken care of, then I think we're on the right track.
I'm no dairy expert. But I found a very informative article in the local ag rag from Sept
2017: Total dairy farms in Wisconsin were just less than 9000, down 500 from the year before,
with an average herd size of 142. (That average masks a number of 5000 cow mega-dairies.)
Compared to 1997, when there were 50,000 dairy farms with average herd size of 37. 1.8
million total dairy cows then, 1.2 million now producing twice as much milk per cow. (In
1957, 103,000 dairy farms in the state.)
against robber barons, big finance, and their political cronies as a link in a chain
going back to the Middle Ages, when noblesse oblige was an actual thing and not a vague
concept.
Noblesse Oblige was more of a guideline than a practice. It certainly was not law.
Not true. There were wide variations depending on country and period, but the vassal/liege
model replicated all the way down society. Nobles who broke customary law could face serious
uprisings and when agricultural labor was in short supply, as after a plague outbreak, their
serfs might simply run away, leaving them with worthless estates.
No, you have it backwards. Predatory capitalism, if you want to call it that, goes back to
the Thatcher/Reagan revolutions, which received legitimation from the raiders of the 1980s,
who took overdiversified conglomerates that were trading at a discount, bought them with tons
of debt, and sold the parts for more than the purchase price. All the money they made was
depicted as a victory for entreprenurship over corporate norms of considering the needs of
all of what would now be called stakeholders, not just shareholders.
The actions of the raiders and the gospel of "maximizing shareholder value) predate the
globalization/outsourcing fetish, which really took hold in the 1990s.
There's no path from smashing "globalism" to the common good under such a regime.
Maybe. But there's definitely no path from globalism to the common good, so Trump is just
a risk we're going to have to take. One thing is beyond dispute here: we gave those jokers in
Washington (and Brussels) a full eight years after the economic crash of 2008 to fix the
situation, and they did nothing. Not a damn thing! Now the situation is really dire, and it
looks like we might have to–forgive the metaphor–break a little china.
Trump has zero interest in the welfare of ordinary workers save for optics to fool the
rubes. If you think he's breaking things for your benefit, you are smoking something very
strong.
But he does want to be re-elected.
Dems refuse to consider giving up any income stream from donors, trump, though beholden to
Sheldon and Israel, will toss any Corp group save real estate under the bus if that helps.
M4a would do it, so I think he might get the reps to give up that income stream.
And could be very gradual, two years down every year.
'They think Mr Trump feels he is presiding over the relative decline of his great
nation'
And he is, of course, as a nearby post about the downwardly mobile middle class makes
clear.
Unfortunately flake-o-nomics will not make America great again. The Republican party's
crackpot fiscal stimulus pumps hundreds of billions into negative rate of return global
military domination during Trump's first and only term.
This is money flushed down the toilet which should have been invested in fixing the
substandard features of America's late-Soviet-era economy: failing infrastructure, failing
education, a failed health care system. It's high times for looters defense
contractors though.
Don't mistake Chauncey Gardner Trump for a very stable genius.
I would expect the domestic money hoses to be turned on for the 2020 election. By the way,
education and medical care are weird sinkholes of very large amounts of money now and the
hosemasters may try to avoid them. If you waste billions on a highway at least at the end of
the process you may have a highway, whereas it's clear that the education and medical care
industries can make infinite amounts of money vanish leaving behind no tangible signs of
their passage.
It depends on the speed at which the Chinese can build a self-sustaining consumer economy.
That is, become an Autarchy.
Their imports are raw materials and Oil. They will solve the oil problem, as most
oilfields are associated with large rivers, and the Chinese have a number of large rivers
where they can explore for oil.
Chinese have a trump card: a sovereign currency. Like one other nation: Ecuador. When the
state issues the scrip (and not commercial banks) it gives you many options. Michael Hudson
is one of the very few to point out the importance of this glaring fact.
I think there's also a chance the Chinese are just lying, because whatever he's doing is
something where they feel it actually gives them the upper hand. It's impossible to say
either way at this point, as far as I can tell.
So much projection by readers, so little time until the next election. Shouldn't y'all
spend more time promoting the right kind of populist candidates and getting them elected?
Focusing on Trump is taking your eye off the ball (again).
Yes, the Chinese are mercantilist, and so is Trump. They recognize their own. Kissinger
has never sold a single ice cube to a single Inuit. Followers of Plato's Republic, frequently
are mesmerized by academic nonsense.
Get back to work, I would like some populists to vote for (not same as progressives).
Agreed that the all Trump all the time focus of much of the left is fruitless. The reality
is that nobody knows for sure what Trump is up to including, perhaps, Trump himself.
Speculation about a strategic plan is mostly useful for curbing the hysteria that says Trump
must be stopped, now, immediately, and that's all that matters. Even Sanders has fallen prey
with his recent denunciation of the Russia summit. It makes one wonder whether Sanders has a
plan either.
And while Kissinger was certainly amoral and had his own crackpot notions, his "realist"
view of foreign policy would be a refreshing change from the fake solicitude that says we
have to bomb one country after another in order to save them.
Sanders' capitulation to the Russiagate narrative was sad, as was his capitulation to
Clinton and the DNC after knowing they stabbed him AND THOSE WHO SUPPORTED HIM in the back.
As one who worked hard for Bernie and deeply appreciates what he did for
America–demonstrating that an effective national campaign can be crowd-funded, and that
socialism is no longer a dirty word–I hope that he does not run the next time around.
He was John the Baptist. We await "the one who comes after" to carry the revolution forward
and take it home. Horizontalism and the grass roots have their important places, but history
shows that nothing happens, nothing changes, without the key ingredient of leadership
well that's what he did to chile, via coup rather than bombing, there's a quote about "not
letting chile go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people". sanders'
capitulation on russia gate bothers me a great deal.
True, so amoral "realism" can be just as bad as (effectively) amoral R2P.
But in this particular case Kissinger has said that Russia should be given its sphere of
influence and given Russia's nuclear status it's hard to see why that isn't sensible and
true. It's hard to see what the American interests would be in the Ukraine.
That depends on what you think America's interests are. That is, its ruling class's
interests. If one conceives of America's interests as dominating a weakened Russia, then of
course one wants to get them kicked out of Syria and the Middle East in general, and to turn
Ukraine into a hostile pro-Western bastion by whatever means necessary. The risk that these
moves would result in hostility and countermoves was accepted, and some of the threats have
now come to pass. From my point of view, it was stupid to provoke them, but as government
seems to attract psychopaths, perhaps inevitable.
I think this article misses the fact that the Chinese are far more subtle than P45 could
ever understand. They may appear "awed", but they are not the least bit fooled. If P45 reads
any book before dealing with the Chinese, it should be the Art of War.
*****
Allure the enemy by giving him a small advantage. Confuse and capture him. If there be
defects, give an appearance of perfection, and awe the enemy. Pretend to be strong, and so
cause the enemy to avoid you. Make him angry, and confuse his plans. Pretend to be inferior,
and cause him to despise you. If he have superabundance of strength, tire him out; if united,
make divisions in his camp. Attack weak points, and appear in unexpected places.
Strategy or tactics aside, on the math Trump's retraction of his tariff menace against
Europe, at the price of a few bags of soybeans, seems a huge victory for Juncker, right?
Teasing out Trump's merits is a little like diving for quarters in the sewer. You'll find
some for sure, but
As to the Reno analogy, if the frame of a building is rotten throughout, then tearing down
walls even by temper tantrum appears strategic in that it's guaranteed to uncover
issues that must be addressed. The established method of diplomacy, for instance, has become
so formalized and drawn out that for all it's merits in caution, the simple act of a human
meeting between one leader and – GASP – the POTUS can contribute significantly to
unexpected success. It's not easy to tell if Trump upsets the apple cart of protocal because
he's a spoiled brat who thinks he's the greatest negotiator ever to walk upright, or because
he has an intuitive grasp of human nature or a bit of both.
Glen Greenwald strikes me as one of the better Trumpticians who can discuss Trump
intellegently without having to put on a wet suit. He presents the facts and highlights the
positives and let's the cards fall where they may as far as merit goes and indeed it puts a
certain shine on Trump which he may or may not deserve and even then without necessarily
being a great tactician.
I'll go for Sanders cause we can all make mistakes ? Is there a right answer? All of the
above? None o the above? All of the above and none of the above simultaneously?
that's what i like about reading the comments here. lots of people more witty than me
cranking out quality lines before i've even finished my 2nd coffee
I am trying to come with up a historical Chinese example where flattery won a dynasty.
The first emperor – through sheer military might
There was the Feast at Hong Gate ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_at_Hong_Gate
), and Liu Bang escaped with the help of an insider from the opposition (treason) to later
establish the second Chinese dynasty – the Han empire.
The Qing conquerors did not win with flattery – with again through the treasonous
act of a Ming general guarding the gate to Manchuria (Shanhaiguan).
Throughout Chinese history, I can recall, at this moment, only flattery on the part of the
subservient Mandarins or eunuchs, presuming a superior and inferior hierarchy.
And it worked sometimes, and failed disastrously other times, for the flatter.
Couple points
Your earlier point was that his modus was to keep firing until he is happy with his team I
can imagine his not being happy yet. And he has to keep hiring people he doesn't know.
Minefields certainly deep, msm and dems are making it as difficult as they can to be nice to
Russia, and to pivot from China to them. He's got to keep both the base and elected reps
reasonably happy, lots to juggle. Amazing how Twitter keeps to base engaged and opp off
guard.
China they really, really don't want existing world order upset or broken, they're doing
well, and change that leads to unemployment can slip into revolution, given their only excuse
to rule is ever rising living standard. There are always thousands of protests that need
suppressing. So why would they say anything that encourages his behavior? Sounds like
grudging admiration.
Omelettes require breaking eggs. Reversing 40 years of wage repression attacks profits Bernie
wants 15/hr, but stopping immigration while balancing trade would naturally push up wages
without mandate. And, of course, push down profits Apple and others in jeopardy.
Amplifying:
The US corporate class does very little business with Russia. They have little to lose by
siding with the neocons on Russia. Also very good for defense budgets, military
contractors.
The US corporate class is deeply invested in China. The neocons obviously see this and
tread much more lightly on the China issue. Also, "we need to protect the WTO and the world
trade order" so that our allies see us as a "responsible" trade partner and aren't driven
into the arms of China – even though our corporate class is completely wedded to China
at this point. Inconsistency on China also not bad for defense budgets, military
contractors.
Where does Trump fit in all this? Hard to say. I have been surprised by his continued
willingness to push the trade issue despite the complete opposition of the corporate class.
On the other hand, I don't see how he actually benefits the working person if the
corporations refuse to reinvest in the USA. And I see no evidence that they are or ever will
again. So my conclusion at this point is that he simply sees it as an electoral winner even
if no substantive change is ever achieved. And my second conclusion would be to follow
Trump's money. I'm still of the opinion that Trump taking on the "community" is more about
knee-capping their ability to dig into, or at least do anything about, his finances than
about any geo-strategic America-first thinking.
25% tariff brings a lot of car mfg, whether our own or Japanese or Europe japan now labor
short anyway, they can quickly expand.
Grant that trump doesn't care about working class, but he clearly wants to be re-elected.
Most dems still aren't paying any attention to working class, all about Russia, a losing
strategy even from Bernie.
I could imagine trump pushing m4a thru, great for his hotel workers, not clear even Bernie
could beat him if he does. Why not? He's already going against most Corp in attacking
China.
Course he makes mistakes, but shouldn't let personal distaste convince you he's stupid.
I posted this (with link) above. Not saying it's gospel but the link between tariffs and
domestic manufacturing runs though the US corporate class, who seem very disinterested in US
mfg:
According to the Center for Automotive Research's (CAR's) latest trade briefing,
applying a 25-percent tariff on all automobile and parts imports would result in 2 million
fewer U.S. vehicle sales, 715,000 fewer U.S. jobs and nearly $60 billion in lower U.S.
economic output.
I was stunned to see that and still don't quite know what to make of it. But the
argument is basically, there is no real way to ramp up US auto production without investing
in new capacity, which the auto companies are not going to do, period. And since domestic
steel and aluminum capacity has already been decimated, and the domestic steel and aluminum
producers are even more unwilling to add new capacity than the auto companies, the only
effect of the tariffs is to dramatically raise materials costs.
He would need someone to explain how Medicare works, and how it would be expanded to M4A.
Probably not the person he appointed to administer it though.
Verma said the focus of Medicare should be on seniors and disabled individuals and that
expanding the program to cover younger, healthier people will drain the program of funding
and deprive seniors of the coverage they need.
"By choosing a socialized system, you are giving the government complete control over
the decisions pertaining to your care or whether you receive care at all. It would be the
furthest thing from patient-centric care," Verma said.
Verma also said the CMS would likely deny waivers from states that seek to implement
their own single-payer systems.
Trump's been developing real estate in New York and running casinos. He doesn't need to
read the book by Sun Tzu. Underestimation is mentioned where as a recommended strategy? I
think Trump has planned his work and is working his plan. That's for strategy. The tactics
develop in play. I also think that Mr. Pompeo will be around for a while. Take out your pens.
History is being written, and yes, it involves risk.
I wonder how much of this would be gaslighting on the part of the Chinese, or at least a
hint the direction they would like to nudge Trump. What made me wonder that was the all too
true quip tearing down is easy, building is hard . As someone who has gone through
renovation I can attest to that! But it's not only me, in the aftermath of WWII America was
the only 'great power' that hadn't been shattered by the war, and can thank its postwar
dominance on that fact. Even the USSR, though victorious, had lost millions of lives and been
thoroughly ravaged by the Nazis. And the best the US could come up with against this fairly
broken rival was Cold War!
The thing is, today no other 'great power' is in such as state as they were after WWII.
None are at the mercy of the US the way they were then. Trump can take swings and smash
stuff, but will not be able to rebuild anything on his own terms because the situation is
nowhere near the same. In fact, the more damage Trump does can only put the US in a worse
position. We become the loose canon that may vote in another Trump at any time, who may again
overtly smash things and try to be more aggressively dominant in the world, and China can
portray themselves as a model of stability in comparison.
" even if the Chinese are right and Trump has been executing well on his master
geopolitical plan, Trump is at best capable of delivering only on the easy, destructive part,
and will leave his successors to clean up his mess."
What you refer to as a mess, may be the next stage, following the Chinese perception that
there is a coherency to the chaos.
Over and over again, it's been shown that the allowed choices by the establishment are
neoliberalism (what is currently defined as liberal democracy) or its kissing cousin (maybe
siamese twin) overt fascism.
"Overt" is an important word doing a lot of work here.
For the USA, Trumps alliances with supporters of theocracy means the cleanup is going to
be a baton pass to actual ideologues with a horrifying domestic agenda that we are not
prepared for.
Maybe it won't be so much a matter of cleaning up a mess as just modestly building
international linkages that don't stupidly favor a bunch of leech-like allies.
In spite of the face-saving flattery, I think the Chinese are right. But I also think that
this is pablum for the egos of us Americans who don't understand the world anymore. If they
say rational things about Trump it makes it easier for the US public. I must wonder what
Rachel is gonna make of what almost appears to be an orchestrated, cooperative international
effort to adjust trading relationships and, clearly, to avoid war. The Chinese know full well
they have exported a fatal dose of deflation to the American economy; they knew it would
happen as far back as 1980. And so did our big corporations – which explains why they
dumped American labor like garbage. I really think the fix was in back then and it is in
today.
Our European allies are behaving interestingly, calmly. In Canada they all gathered
around a sitting, stubborn looking Trump for a photo op that depicted them all wanting to
talk reason – all the while following a set plan. Notice how they stood by us when
China wanted to do trade treaties with them that harmed us. And they have been very patient
with us over Russia – they didn't rush into Ukraine even though Vicki publicly said
"Fuck the EU" and they didn't turn their backs on us when we asked for 2% NATO payments.
And
Russia has really kept her powder dry . it all looks orchestrated to me. The big question is
Where to now?
Germany just advised India to buy oil from Iran (because Germany is in on the
Saudi pipeline no doubt). We and Europe are acting like a big family – and I just heard
the most profound description of "family" – it is where "things are left unsaid." I
certainly hope that is the reason nobody is talking about what an emergency global warming is
– and that they are actually getting ready for some big changes. Always hopeful.
> In Chinese eyes, Mr Trump's response is a form of "creative destruction". He is
systematically destroying the existing institutions
So, "
volatility voters " have brought forth a "Volatility Executive." If you're playing in a
rigged game and losing, the upside comes from kicking over the table .
Absolutely.
Maybe delayed on account of Russia Russia, but he seems to have consolidated power and might
be on course now. Granted vol voters don't have absolute control over a vol exec, but his
moves so far likely encourage them.
I personally doubt dems will get enough house seats by appealing to moderate reps.
And it's also granted trump moves have huge Corp and political enemies, flyover knows this,
IMO will be patient.
I've been talking to HK expats in Toronto, they didn't know what flyover meant, but quickly
understood the shift in voter pref. My point to them is that the side hurt the most in a
trade war is the big exporter they don't need to be told China is particularly vulnerable,
can't take unemployment. We're used to it here
I think Beijing is just acknowledging it's a new world kind of like the people during the
last years of the Han dynasty.
That was when the famed Three Kingdom Period commenced. One of the two or three greatest
Chinese novels was written in the late Yuan/early Ming dynasty – more than 1,000 years
later and Chinese adults and kids still remembered – about the battles of wits,
strategizing and brave deeds of various heroes during that period. The novel is called
Romance of the Three Kingdom
How the three kingdoms played one off another would be quite relevant today, with three
major world powers trying to cope.
China knows Trump is the first American (or Western) leader, in a long time, and likely to
be the only American one in the foreseeable future, to stand up to Beijing.
That they don't just say that, but have to say this, indicates the game has changed for
them.
And to think one can bury one's stupid opponent by lauding him can be not too smart. It
implicitly under-estimate that opponent, by presuming.
Shu – in Sichuan – had great generals and the greatest strategist in Chinese
history (more famous than Sun Zi), Zhuge Liang.
Wei – in Honan, near the old Eastern Han capital of Luoyang – had all the
official institutions, as the first Wei king's father, Cao Cao, was the first Shogun, who
ruled for the child Han emperor. So he controlled those institutions (equivalent to today's
UN, IMF, World Bank, reserve currency, propaganda centers like Hollywood).
As it turned out, Wei provoked Shu and Wu to war against each other, with the latter
killing a great general Guan Yu (who was honored by later Chinese through even today as the
Martial Saint/Duke/God). Not much later, Wei first defeated Wu and then conquered Shu.
"... We know year by year what's going to happen, and they know that we know. It's only you that they tell tall tales to, and you buy it, and spread it to the citizens of your countries. You people in turn do not feel a sense of the impending danger - this is what worries me. How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction? While they pretend that nothing is going on. I don't know how to get through to you anymore. ..."
Putin railed against the journalists for their "tall tales" in blindly repeating lies and
misinformation provided to them by the United States on its anti-ballistic missile systems
being constructed in Eastern Europe. He pointed out that since the Iran nuclear deal, the claim
the system is to protect against Iranian missiles has been exposed as a lie.
The journalists were informed that within a few years, Russia predicted the US would be able
to extend the range of the system to 1000 km. At that point, Russia's nuclear potential, and
thus the nuclear balance between the US and Russia, would be placed in jeopardy.
Putin completely lost patience with the journalists, berating them for lazily helping to
accelerate a nuclear confrontation by repeating US propaganda. He virtually pleaded with the
western media, for the sake of the world, to change their line:
We know year by year what's going to happen, and they know that we know. It's only you
that they tell tall tales to, and you buy it, and spread it to the citizens of your
countries. You people in turn do not feel a sense of the impending danger - this is what
worries me. How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible
direction? While they pretend that nothing is going on. I don't know how to get through to
you anymore.
Does anyone in the reeking garbage heap that is mainstream western media have a conscience?
Do they even have enough intellect to get what Putin is saying - that they are helping to push
the planet towards World War III?
In a conversation with the Financial Times last week, Henry Kissinger made a highly
significant remark about President Donald Trump's attempt to improve the United States'
relations with Russia. The conversation took place in the backdrop of the Helsinki summit on
July 16. Kissinger said: "I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from
time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences. It doesn't
necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could
just be an accident."
Kissinger did not elaborate, but the drift of his thought is consistent with opinions he has
voiced in the past – the US' steady loss of influence on global arena, rise of China and
resurgence
of Russia necessitating a new global balance .
As far back as 1972 in a discussion with Richard Nixon on his upcoming trip to China,
signifying the historic opening to Beijing, Kissinger could visualize such a rebalancing
becoming necessary in future. He expressed the view that compared with the Soviets (Russians),
the Chinese were "just as dangerous. In fact, they're more dangerous over a historical period."
Kissinger added, "in 20 years your (Nixon's) successor, if he's as wise as you, will wind up
leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese."
Kissinger argued that the United States, which sought to profit from the enmity between
Moscow and Beijing in the Cold War era, would therefore need "to play this balance-of-power
game totally unemotionally. Right now, we need the Chinese to correct the Russians and to
discipline the Russians." But in the future, it would be the other way around.
Of course, Kissinger is not the pioneer of US-Russia-China 'triangular diplomacy'. It is no
secret that in the 1950s, the US did all it could to drive a wedge between Mao Zedong and
Nikita Khrushchev. The accent was on isolating "communist China". Khrushchev's passion for
'peaceful co-existence' following his summit with Dwight Eisenhower in 1959 at Camp David
became a defining moment in Sino-Soviet schism.
But even as Sino-Soviet schism deepened (culminating in the bloody conflict in Ussuri River
in 1969), Nixon reversed the policy of Eisenhower and opened the line to Beijing, prioritizing
the US' global competition with the Soviet Union. The de-classified Cold-War archival materials
show that Washington seriously pondered over the possibility of a wider Sino-Soviet war. One
particular memorandum of the US State Department recounts an incredible moment in Cold War
history – a KGB officer querying about American reaction to a hypothetical Soviet attack
on Chinese nuclear weapons facilities.
Then there is a memo written for Kissinger's attention by then influential China watcher
Allen S. Whiting warning of the danger of a Soviet attack on China. Clearly, 1969 was a pivotal
year when the US calculus was reset based on estimation that Sino-Soviet tensions provided a
basis for Sino-American rapprochement. It led to the dramatic overture by Nixon and Kissinger
to open secret communications with China through Pakistan and Romania.
Will Putin fall for Trump's bait? Well, it depends. To my mind, there is no question Putin
will see a great opening here for Russia. But it will depend on what's on offer from the US.
Putin's fulsome praise for Trump on North Korean issue and the latter's warm response was a
meaningful exchange at Helsinki, has been a good beginning to underscore Moscow's keenness to
play a broader role in the Asia-Pacific.
Beijing must be watching the 'thaw' at Helsinki with some unease. The Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokesperson welcomed the Helsinki summit. But the mainstream assessment by Chinese
analysts is that nothing much is going to happen since the contradictions in the US-Russia
relations are fundamental and Russophobia is all too pervasive within the US establishment.
The government-owned China Daily carried an editorial – Has the meeting
in Helsinki reset US-Russia relations? – where it estimates that at best, "
Helsinki summit represents a good beginning for better relations between the US and Russia."
Notably, however, the editorial is pessimistic about any real US-Russia breakthrough, including
on Syria, the topic that Putin singled out as a test case of the efficacy of Russian-American
cooperation.
On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party tabloid Global Times featured an editorial
giving a stunning analysis of what has prompted Trump to pay such attention ("respect") to
Russia -- China
can learn from Trump's respect for Russia . It concludes that the only conceivable
reason could be that although Russia is not an economic power, it has retained influence on the
global stage due to military power:
Trump has repeatedly stressed that Russia and the US are the two biggest nuclear powers
in the world, with their combined nuclear arsenal accounting for 90 percent of world's
total, and thus the US must live in peace with Russia. On US-Russia relations, Trump is
clearheaded.
On the contrary, if the US is piling pressure on China today, it is because China, although
an economic giant, is still a weak military power. Therefore:
China's nuclear weapons have to not only secure a second strike but also play the role
of cornerstone in forming a strong deterrence so that outside powers dare not intimidate
China militarily Part of the US' strategic arrogance may come from its absolute nuclear
advantage China must speed up its process of developing strategic nuclear power Not only
should we possess a strong nuclear arsenal, but we must also let the outside world know
that China is determined to defend its core national interests with nuclear power.
Indeed, if the crunch time comes, China will be on its own within the Kissingerian triangle.
And China needs to prepare for such an eventuality. On the other hand, China's surge to create
a vast nuclear arsenal could make a mockery of the grand notions in Moscow and Washington that
they are the only adults in the room in keeping the global strategic balance.
"... While if star wars* were anything other than a very profitable science project, it has already violated ABM, which RS 26 is in part hardened to missile defenses. ..."
"... Worst, if a miracle occurred and the pentagon trough could actually make something work star wars enables a first strike which is far more destabilizing! ..."
"... Given star wars, START is not in Russia's interests. ..."
"... This from soft spoken, occasionally logical Robert Reich. The depths of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) and the willingness to scream for war on allegations of cyber attack on "sacred US democracy"* while the money (oil sheik, AIPAC, etc) in government and the DNC dirty tricking Sanders leave huge holes in the claims of "sacred US democracy". ..."
"... Sen Shaheen (D NH)+ was all over Trump about his scaring US allies in NATO! She is a co-chair on the Senate NATO Observer Group whose purpose is to meddle in execute branch operations of foreign policy specifically to turn NATO into an offensive alliance where "collective security" requires surrounding Russia and assuring the new "allies" that the US will go nuclear over their "integrity". ..."
"... Best bet is for Russia to want to trade with the US and Europe. The gas pipe line will not be enough leverage on Germany as it provides 9% of their needs. ..."
"... I am sorry I sent this thread "off the rails". The topic is timely and important. We all should push for new START and INF. From what I have read, it was mentioned but nothing has come out of the executive offices. ..."
The Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) was agreed to in Dec. 1987 by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Gorbachev.
It is a permanent treaty requiring no special extension. It bans missiles of intermediate range of especial danger to NATO nations
in western Europe. Until 2014 it was followed by both sides. Then in 2014 Putin adopted the RS-26 missile that violates the treaty,
although he has denied it does. But US SecDef Mattis thinks it does.
So, what Trump should have had as his top priority in Helsinki and before while visiting NATO allies, whom he dissed, including
the EU as our "worst foe," would have been to demand that Putin get rid of the RS-26 missile that violates the INF treaty. Instead
we are told that he and Putin have agreed to "extend" it and the START. This is plain awful, but not surprising.
Barkley Rosser
ilsm , July 22, 2018 10:39 am
wkik reports the RS 26 is on "hold". We might consider (or Putin might bring up) US respect for deals with Iran and ABM treaty.
I worked a project involved in implementing the INF treaty years ago. I also have had dealing with related weapon systems.
I should keep up with the INF kerfuffle.
RS-26 and such "weapons is [are] to deter Western forces from coming to the aid of the NATO's newer eastern members that
are located closer to Russia's borders.[15] "
Seems RS 26 has been put in some kind of hold, there are better techie things for the Russian's to use for the nuclear trip
wire sitting on the Dnieper.
The US needs to meet with Russia about START while spending a trillion bucks upgrading nukes over the next generation.
While if star wars* were anything other than a very profitable science project, it has already violated ABM, which RS 26
is in part hardened to missile defenses.
Ai=sideon the sundered ABM treaty and star wars:
The St Ronald approach to star wars: he did not want to be "Henry Fonda in Fail Safe". It has now grown to systems that are
not so useful for missile defense but are enablers of other tactics which have moved in to former Warsaw area and Korea. Worst,
if a miracle occurred and the pentagon trough could actually make something work star wars enables a first strike which is far
more destabilizing!
Given star wars, START is not in Russia's interests.
Karl Kolchak , July 22, 2018 4:48 pm
Yeah, the U.S. violates every agreement with Russia and brings NATO right up to their doorstep, yet Russia should give up the
one weapon that is key to protecting it from NATO aggression. You want to carry some MORE water for the unaccountable empire?
Dan , July 22, 2018 6:32 pm
While the issue of defensive missiles is important, the immediate concern is the rabid anti-Russian stance of the liberals
who, up until 2016, were just fine with "discussions" or "negotiations" with the Russians to keep antagonism to a moderate and
manageable level. Then, with Trump's election, the rails came off the rational train of thought in liberals' heads. Now they are
seeking confrontations with the Russians who they blame for Hillary Clinton's defeat rather than the fact that enough people saw
her for the sociopath that she is. So, any chance they have to poke the bear, they take it.
This from soft spoken, occasionally logical Robert Reich. The depths of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) and the willingness to scream for war on allegations of cyber attack on "sacred
US democracy"* while the money (oil sheik, AIPAC, etc) in government and the DNC dirty tricking Sanders leave huge holes in the
claims of "sacred US democracy".
Sen Shaheen (D NH)+ was all over Trump about his scaring US allies in NATO! She is a co-chair on the Senate NATO Observer Group
whose purpose is to meddle in execute branch operations of foreign policy specifically to turn NATO into an offensive alliance
where "collective security" requires surrounding Russia and assuring the new "allies" that the US will go nuclear over their "integrity".
Opposing that aggressive alliance is not treason it is the best way to assure the future of the world.
The democrats have gone from soft on defense to raving war mongers. TDS is not the main cause.
*in a constitutional republic owned by money foreign and domestic!!
+I will work and contribute to unseat all democrats in NH.
run75441 , July 23, 2018 2:02 pm
ilsm:
If it was just a matter of talking to another world leader, this would be a so what. The fact is, Putin is not just another
world leader the same as Merkel, May, or Macron. You have cited Robert Reich's post of July 19, 2018 in general without specifics
you would find wildly exaggerated, half true, or just plain lies. Trump's wildly fallacious comments and bizarre actions in light
of his past public blundering nationally and globally leave much to the imagination and do not breed trust. He is a liar who makes
things up as he goes along.
Shaheen calling for a congressional hearing with an interpreter is a call to war? It is kind of funny we have to interrogate
an interpreter to find out what Trump actually said because by the next day he will have forgotten. That is the danger of his
forgetting what he actually promised.
Maybe too you meant Bush II placement of missiles in Poland and Czech republic, canceled by Obama due to techie issues, and
to be placed elsewhere closer to Iran in 2018 with an improved version (feign south?). Czechs did not want them and the nationalistic
Poles did want them. Obama did not want to spend the money on something (Aegis, Patriot?) of which earlier versions did not work
effectively. Trump signed off on a $10.5 billion deal with the Poles giving them an advanced version. And Dems are clamoring for
war?
A while back Russia was testing hypersonic weapons. You said it earlier that Russia can not afford a large War budget as it
takes from the economy. Large amounts of money spent on war materials helped lead to their collapse previously. Best bet is
for Russia to want to trade with the US and Europe. The gas pipe line will not be enough leverage on Germany as it provides 9%
of their needs.
I think you are right that the RS-26 is on some sort of hold, which seems to date to the Obama era. This is a big deal, but
nobody wants to talk about it publicly, which is why you have to have somebody like me to bring up this deep shit, :-).
JBR
EMichael , July 23, 2018 8:48 am
So Russia ratfckes our election and the problem is liberals looking for a confrontation with them?
Like to see the reaction of these so called americans when they show up to vote and find they are not registered any longer
for reasons no one knows.
ilsm , July 23, 2018 4:29 pm
Barkley Rosser,
I am sorry I sent this thread "off the rails". The topic is timely and important. We all should push for new START and INF.
From what I have read, it was mentioned but nothing has come out of the executive offices.
While Kim may be watching how Trump and Putin deal with the really big stuff.
Donald Trump's press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the
threshold of "high crimes & misdemeanors." It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only
were Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots:
Where are you???
Senator John McCain released a scathing
statement :
... "President Trump proved not only unable, but unwilling to stand up to Putin. He and Putin
seemed to be speaking from the same script as the president made a conscious choice to defend
a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press, and to grant Putin an uncontested
platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.
...
"No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant. Not only did
President Trump fail to speak the truth about an adversary; but speaking for America to the
world, our president failed to defend all that makes us who we are -- a republic of free
people dedicated to the cause of liberty at home and abroad. ...
These imbeciles do not understand the realism behind Trump's grand policy. Trump knows the
heartland theory of
Halford John Mackinder. He understands that Russia is the core of the Eurasian landmass. That
landmass, when politically united, can rule the world. A naval power, the U.S. now as the UK
before it, can never defeat it. Trump's opponents do not get what Zbigniew Brzezinski, the
National Security Advisor of President Carter, explained in his book The Grant Chessboard
(pdf). They do not understand why Henry Kissinger
advised Trump to let go of Crimea.
Trump himself professed his view (vid)
of the big picture and of relations with Russia in a 2015 press conference:
"I know Putin. And I tell you that we can get along with Putin. Putin has no respect for
President Obama. Big Problem, big problem. And you know Russia has been driven - you know I
always heard, for years I have heard - one of the worst things that can happen to our
country, is when Russia ever gets driven to China. We have driven them together - with the
big oil deals that are being made. We have driven them together. That's a horrible thing for
this country. We have made them friends because of incompetent leadership. I believe I would
get along very nicely with Putin- okay? And I mean where we have the strength. I don't think
we need the sanctions. I think that we would get along very, very well. I really believe
that. I think we would get along with a lot of countries that we don't get along with today.
And that we would be a lot richer for it than we are today.
It took 45 years, not 20 as Kissinger foresaw, to rebalance the U.S. position.
After the Cold War the U.S. thought it had won the big ideological competition of the
twentieth century. In its exuberance of the 'unilateral moment' it did everything possible to
antagonize Russia.
Against its promises it extended NATO to Russia's border. It wanted to be the peerless
supreme power of the world. At the same time it invited China into the World Trade Organisation
and thereby enabled its explosive economic growth. This unbalanced policy took its toll. The
U.S. lost industrial capacity to China and at the same time drove Russia into China's hands.
Playing the global hegemon
turned out to be very expensive. It led to the 2006 crash of the U.S. economy and its people
have since seen little to no gains. Trump wants to revert this situation by rebalancing towards
Russia while opposing China's growing might.
Not everyone shares that perspective. As security advisor to Jimmy Carter Brzezinski
continued the Nixon/Kissinger policy towards China. The 'one China policy', disregarding Taiwan
for better relations with Beijing, was his work. His
view is still that the U.S. should ally with China against Russia:
"It is not in our interest to antagonize Beijing. It is much better for American interests to
have the Chinese work closely with us, thereby forcing the Russians to follow suit if they
don't want to be left out in the cold. That constellation gives the U.S. the unique ability
to reach out across the world with collective political influence."
But why would China join such a scheme? Brzezinski's view of Russia was always clouded. His
family of minor nobles has its roots in Galicia, now in west-Ukraine. They were driven from
Poland when the Soviets extended their realm into the middle of Europe. To him Russia will
always be the antagonist.
[I]n the emerging multipolar order, Russia should be perceived as an essential element of any
new global equilibrium, not primarily as a threat to the United States.
Kissinger is again working to
divide Russia from China . But this time around it is Russia that needs to be elevated,
that needs to become a friend.
Trump is following Kissinger's view. He wants good relations with Russia to separate Russia
from China. He (rightly) sees China as the bigger long term (economic) danger to the United
States. That is the reason why he,
immediately after his election , started to beef up the relations with Taiwan and continues
to do so. ( Listen to
Peter Lee for the details). That is the reason why he tries to snatch North Korea from
China's hands. That is the reason why he makes nice with Putin.
It is not likely that Trump will manage to pull Russia out of its profitable alliance with
China. It is true that China's activities, especially in the Central Asian -stans, are a long
term danger to Russia. China's demographic and economic power is far greater than Russia's. But
the U.S. has never been faithful in its relations with Russia. It would take decades to regain
its trust. China on the other hand stands to its commitments. China is not interested in
conquering the 'heartland'. It has bigger fish to fry in south-east Asia, Africa and elsewhere.
It is not in its interest to antagonize Russia.
The maximum Trump can possibly achieve is to neutralize Russia while he attempts to tackle
China's growing economic might via tariffs, sanctions and by cuddling Taiwan, Japan and other
countries with anti-Chinese agendas.
The U.S. blew its 'unilateral moment'. Instead of making friends with Russia it drove it
into China's hands. Hegemonic globalization and unilateral wars proved to be too expensive. The
U.S. people received no gains from it. That is why they elected Trump.
Trump is doing his best to correct the situation. For the foreseeable future the world will
end up with three power centers. Anglo-America, Russia and China. (An aging and disunited
Europe will flap in the winds.) These power centers will never wage direct war against each
other, but will tussle at the peripheries. Korea, Iran and the Ukraine will be centers of these
conflicts. Interests in Central Asia, South America and Africa will also play a role.
Trump understands the big picture. To 'Make America Great Again' he needs to tackle China
and to prevent a deeper Chinese-Russian alliance. It's the neo-conservatives and neo-liberals
who do not get it. They are still stuck in Brzezinski's Cold War view of Russia. They still
believe that economic globalization, which helped China to regain its historic might, is the
one and true path to follow. They do not perceive at all the damage they have done to the
American electorate.
For now Trump's view is winning. But the lunatic reactions to the press conference show that
the powers against him are still strong. They will sabotage him wherever possible. The big
danger for now is that their view of the world might again raise to power.
Posted by b on July 17, 2018 at 07:41 AM |
PermalinkJen , Jul 17, 2018 8:54:40 AM |
8
BTW it is worthwhile to keep in mind that back in 2001, Russia and China signed a treaty of
friendship in which, among other things, both nations renounced all and any territorial
designs on one another's territory. This meant that China would have renounced any claims on
parts of Primorsky Kray in the Russian Far East along the Amur River, that used to be part of
the old Ming and Qing empires.
There is one significant paragraphy to be noted: Neither party will join any alliance or group that harms the other's sovereignty, security
and territorial integrity. Neither of them will conclude such treaties with any third party,
or allow a third country to use its territory to harm the other's sovereignty, security and
territorial integrity.
Well ... there goes any attempt by Trump to prise apart Russian and Chinese
friendship.
"Playing the global hegemon turned out to be very expensive. It led to the 2006 crash of the
U.S. economy and its people have since seen little to no gains".
To continue the theme: "People? We don't need no stinkin' people". US government has long
been directed towards the enrichment of a tiny clique of the super-rich and powerful. It is
nothing more than a bloodsucking parasite on the USA itself.
Looks like a hacking operation by China. They nailed Clinton's completely unprotected system and then inserted code that gave
them all her traffic over e-mail subsequent to that.
That included all her State Department classified traffic which she had her
staff illegally scan and insert in her private e-mail. We are talking about 30,000+ messages.
Strzok was told that by the Intelligence
Community Inspector General WHILE he was running the Clinton e-mail investigation and chose to ignore it. pl
Given the likely culprits, China made the most sense. Thanks for the confirmation!
Meanwhile, under the radar, another segment of the "Gordian knot" is getting ready to be cut.
White House Orders Direct Taliban Talks to Jump-Start Afghan Negotiations
https://www.nytimes.com/201...
The Trump administration has told its top diplomats to seek direct talks with the Taliban, a significant shift in American policy
in Afghanistan, done in the hope of jump-starting negotiations to end the 17-year war.
The Taliban have long said they will first discuss peace only with the Americans, who toppled their regime in Afghanistan in
2001. But the United States has mostly insisted that the Afghan government must take part.
The recent strategy shift, which was confirmed by several senior American and Afghan officials, is intended to bring those
two positions closer and lead to broader, formal negotiations to end the long war.
-----------------------
I am an independent. I voted for Obama twice because his opponents were so unappealing. I am starting to hate the left. I view
them and the neocon establishment behavior nothing short of treasonous.
Trump bluster stars to look pretty unnerving. He really so not care or just can't calculate the reaction to his
moves even a couple of moves forward. And that might be a joint Russia-China space forces. From comments: "Fools
rush in where angels would fear to tread. And psychopaths see threats everywhere... "
Notable quotes:
"... I watched some of Ken Burns Vietnam documentary, and I was struck by how many times "Communist threat" was mentioned. It should be realized that "threat" and "security" are the first go-to bullshit terms out of the propaganda files. There is no threat, there are only "obstacles" in the way of domination. There are those who simply will never give up the attempt to dominate everything, including the moon, and the stars. ..."
The reality is that the United States does indeed have a major national security interest in
protecting its network of satellites in orbit as well as related infrastructure, but there is
still quite a lot in the Trump remarks that is disturbing. Trump is basically saying two
things. The first is that he will be weaponizing outer space and the second is that he is doing
so because he intends for the United States to become dominant in that domain. It is a complete
ass-backwards approach to the problem of potential development of threats coming from beyond
the atmosphere. Instead of arming outer space, Washington should be working with other
countries that have capabilities in that region to demilitarize exploration and both commercial
and government exploitation. Everyone has an interest in not allowing outer space to become the
next site for an arms race, though admittedly working with other countries does not appear to
be something that the Trump Administration enters into lightly. Or at all.
And Trump should also abandon his insistence that the United States develop "dominance" in
space. The use of such language is a red flag that will make any agreement with countries like
Russia and China impossible to achieve. It virtually guarantees that there will be a
competition among a number of nations to develop and deploy killer satellites employing lasers
and other advanced electronic jamming technologies to protect their own outer space
infrastructure.
Trump appears to have internalized a viewpoint that sees the United States as surrounded by
threats but able to emerge victorious by being hyper-aggressive on all fronts. It is a posture
that might unnerve opponents and bring some success in the short term but which ultimately will
create a genuine threat as the rest of the world lines up against Washington. That day might be
coming if one goes by the reaction to recent U.S. votes in the United Nations and Trump's
behavior at G-7 are anything to go by.
No one in his right mind would allow Trump to dominate outer space based on Washington's
track record of irresponsible leadership since 9/11. It has wrecked the Middle East, South Asia
and North Africa, killing possibly as many as 4 million Muslims in so doing. It has bullied
allies into joining its projects in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria while also
disparaging foreign governments and entering into trade wars. It has bankrupted itself in all
but name, systematically dismantled the rights of its own citizens, and has become a rogue
nation by virtually every measure.
The U.S. Strategic Command includes a forward element in Colorado. Since some Army
officers want to play war in space, the Army formed a space battalion that grew that into the
1st Space Brigade in 2003. While the Army's 100th Missile Defense Brigade there makes sense,
the Space Brigade has a vague mission to provide "space support" to everyone, which is
already provided by the Air Force and other agencies. Any essential components can move into
the 100th Brigade structure.
I watched some of Ken Burns Vietnam documentary, and I was struck by how many times
"Communist threat" was mentioned. It should be realized that "threat" and "security" are the
first go-to bullshit terms out of the propaganda files. There is no threat, there are only
"obstacles" in the way of domination. There are those who simply will never give up the
attempt to dominate everything, including the moon, and the stars.
BTW, my Dad always thought I was going to be an astronaut – I took up space in
college.
Well, maybe NASA can finally get some funding for the interplanetary NERVA they have been
tinkering with for a long time. That would at least be of some conceivable use.
The United
Launch Alliance , however, looks like a moaning white elephant of MIC glitterati. Maybe
it could be edged away from the trough.
"The creation of an independent Space Corps, with the corresponding institutional growth
and budget implications, does not address our nation's fiscal problems in a responsive
manner."
That's rich, shedding crocodile tears over another massive influx of tax monies to the
gluttonous Pentagon, while America's infrastructure goes to hell from lack of money.
That space is not to be weaponized, according to past treaties–which the USA
signed–matters not to the self-proclaimed rulers of the world and now, outer space.
You can see their psyop articles all over the MSM, spreading fear about Russia and China
building hyper-sonic missiles and killer satellites.
Reminds me of the late 1950′s and '60′s, when Americans were scare stiff about
bomber and missile gaps, that could only be cured with a massive chunk of tax money.
You can go to this link and see the huge number of bombers the US built, some only to be
dropped after spending billions on production.
We've got the third-world flooding into out country both from the southern border and at
major U.S. airports. And yet we spend billions to send troops to Norway & Poland to be
vigilant about "protecting" the integrity of the borders of those countries. And we base our
military in Syria and threaten war over foreign territories where we have no legal to even
be. Now we need a space command. As our country becomes a third-world flophouse and our
middle class is decaying at an exponential rate, we need a space command? For what? To
protect the hollowed-out and third-world America??
Trump is clearly a Zionist crypto-jew and he never could have made it to the presidency
without a kosher seal of approval anyway.
One reason the US MIC looks like such idiots all the time is because they clearly are not
the ones really calling the shots. So often, especially in the middle east, Trump or some
other Poobah will make some proclamation, and withing hours the military will be bombing or
invading in direct contravention.
What is happening is the all these people are merely figure heads with little authority.
Whenever the real powers bark their orders, the entire chain of command snaps into action. We
see it happen between nations when Nato makes some decision like bombing Libya, and all of
Nato steps in line. Or Russians sanctions. Or recently when most of Nato expelled Russian
diplomats for a blatant chem warfare false flag.
These orders are coming straight out of Jerusalem. Even the highest level puppets like
Trump, Macron, Merkel or May have no idea what the real agenda is, or what is coming next.
This is why these pronouncements often seem so idiotic. What to jewish supremecists care if
anyone of these political bufoons looks like an ass. It is the same reason they force macho
movie stars and music idols to be seen dressed as women.
So for some reason ZOG wants attention brought to the weaponization of space. Knowing from
Talpiot and wikileaks that they already have control over most US technology (Spectre), it
seems clear to me that the Zionists want to maintain and increase their control of space,
likely as part of some milestone on their path to building the third temple. Clearly Israel
does not have the resources to accomplish this task of dominating space on her own, so once
again the task falls on the #1 stooge, the JooSA. Trump is the perfect retard to announce the
planned "space force", they used Obama for idiotic announcements on things like global
warming.
Maybe the real goal is to prevent smaller nations from launching satellites without US
permission. Shooting down Iranian satellites would serve as an object lesson to other
countries that it is pointless to develop satellite launch capabilities (and long range
ballistic missiles) if Uncle Sam objects. Of course, this plan would completely contravene of
the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
A real war in space would create so much orbital debris that it could cause a cascade of
destruction and threaten America's own assets up there. Unless they develop Star Trek style
phasers that completely vaporize their targets, space war will be pretty much impractical.
So the same decorated Junkers infesting the Pentagon who have been floundering around in
Afghanistan for 17 years now are salivating at the prospect of a public-funded boondoggle in
outer space.
I was going to comment, but anonymous266 already said pretty much everything I wanted to
say.
This country is turning into a overused toilet, meanwhile we have a political, economic and
cultural elite living in their own world happily insulated from the consequences of their
actions.
Trump forgot to say that USA needs to buy and use Russian rocket engines to lift them up at
all
( 'space forces' needs one general up there at leas t : )
Trump's Space Force is not for domestic consumption. It's intended to worry the Russians and
Chinese. It's possible Trump thinks he can win an arms race. If so he is a fool. More likely
he is puffing himself up prior to negotiations.
When our satellites start failing mysteriously and signs point to Chinese technology
doing it, we will all be glad that the President started this initiative. Better late than
never.
Is that anything like the "signs" that the evil Rooskies hacked the DNC's
state-of-the-fart computer systems? Yeah, can't wait until "the intelligence community"
issues some sort of consensus document saying that those mysterious, sinister Chinamen done
did in our satellites, and it's time to kick off another stupid war. Just can't wait. "Better
late than never," indeed.
Maybe this is Trump's stab at fiscal policy. It reminds me of when Krugman suggested faking
an alien invasion to stimulate the economy. If so, get ready for a false flag involving the
International Space Station and a retaliatory cruise missile strike aimed at some empty
craters on the moon.
No one in his right mind would allow Trump to dominate outer space based on Washington's
track record of irresponsible leadership since 9/11. It has wrecked the Middle East, South
Asia and North Africa, killing possibly as many as 4 million Muslims in so doing. It has
bullied allies into joining its projects in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria while
also disparaging foreign governments and entering into trade wars. It has bankrupted itself
in all but name, systematically dismantled the rights of its own citizens, and has become a
rogue nation by virtually every measure.
Spot on. Trump's ravings about "dominating" space make me think the American
exceptionalist crowd will never accept a United States that shares power with other
strong nations like China and Russia. Will saner minds prevail and relegate the
exceptionalists to the cellar (or the gallows if it gets really crazy) or will they hold on
to power and decide a nuclear showdown is preferable to the United States joining the UK and
Russia as a post-empire nation?
The US elites have lost their collective mind a while ago. This is yet another manifestation
of their cluelessness, yet another step towards self-destruction. Unfortunately for us all,
they will bring the country down with them. As Mr. Giraldi aptly ended his piece, stay tuned.
This is why we can't have anything nice. Most Americans have less than $1000 to their name
and live paycheck to paycheck, health care sucks and is unaffordable. Veterans homeless and
suiciding themselves. Someones gotta pay for the MIC robbing America blind for 17 years now,
it won't be the rich. 21 trillion in the hole now, probably far more than that in
reality.
The MIC and foreign lobbies are out of control. These wars are not benefiting 90% of
Americans, but we will be the ones to pay for it. They'll be droning people here in America
before long. Count on it.
Congress May Declare the Forever War
A proposed law with bipartisan support would dramatically weaken the ability of legislators
to extricate the United States from perpetual armed conflict.
I'm curious. Is there nothing in this world that is not a problem? And a problem created
by Jews? And then a conspiracy by Jews to cover up their involvement.
I realize this is UNZ and a piece by Philip Giraldi, but it is about a perceived
ridiculousness of having a Space Force.
You were real quick on the trigger with this Jews thing.
So lemme get this straight. They control Hollywood AND the weather? Jesus. This is
serious.
and the National Infrastructure Recovery and REcontruction Plan???? preparing America for the
21th century global commerce, educating the young for the LABOR demands of the
future.???Rebuilding the INNercities? roads, bridges, airports, digital utilities, futuristic
public transportation systems, smart cities??? Reforming and revamping the VA+private
options?? merging the EDD/Labor dept?? Expanding the Pentagon nexus with SMALL businesses
mom&pop vendors, unions apprenticeship programs and the armed forces (VA retraining) US
military branches and and Charter tech/Vocational schools???
Yeah, can't wait until "the intelligence community" issues some sort of consensus
document saying that those mysterious, sinister Chinamen done did in our satellites, and
it's time to kick off another stupid war.
China is not exactly a soft target. This isn't Iraq we're talking about, and Iraq was
plenty bad enough.
A war with China would bring about the end of the US Imperium under any scenario.
Uncle sham [1]
the Russkies and chicoms are deploying deadly space weapons, we have to close this vast
missile gap in space pronto.
typical murkkan circular logic
They started weaponising the space, when the other side deploy counter measures, uncle use
that response to justify its provocation.
[1]
Trump is just the latest iteration of uncle sham.
murkkans still cant figure out potus is just a front manager for the deep state.
So lemme get this straight. They control Hollywood AND the weather? Jesus. This is
serious.
LOL!
As much as I see a Jew behind every rock even I find your comments funny and true.
However in Palestine 'they' are deliberately rerouting rivers to dry out the
Palestinians, so they are controlling an aspect of weather there, just sayin' .
A very stupid move by Trump, likely leading to the U.S.A. abrogating the treaty against
the militarisation of space.
The U.S.A. Air Force already has the mysterious XB-37, I would guess that Russia and China
have a better idea about its true intended role than anybody outside the U.S.A.F.
IIRC, XB is the designation for 'experimental bomber .'
I am not against much of what Trump was campaigning on, but he seems to have little
interest in it.
As for uniforms, Starship Troopers is a much classier example than Star Trek, Verhoeven
and his costume desgners seem to have a knack for prediction, look at the police outfits in
Robocop, they are real now.
The largely Third-Reich-based designs in Troopers were stylish, so my vote is for
that.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public
believes is false."
Hi Heros,
Revealing how the Zionist Casey freely used the term "our disinformation."
Given correct memory, I believe Casey was near having to sit for a Congressional
investigation that needed his testimony on unAmerican activities, the Reagan administration's
Iran-Contra transactions.
Just prior to the hearing, Casey was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and
"departed."
Excellent point. Trump is a distraction. He is nastier, but as shallow as Reagan. Mr. Reagan
is the one who handed the two most vital organs of the US, the Pentagon and the State
Department, to the Zionists, and America has been sinking ever since!
The Space Force may well turn out to be Trump's long term legacy.
It is needed for a very good reason: shooting at and breaking into smaller, safer pieces
large objects that are about to fall dangerously to earth. Like satellites, space stations,
ICBMs, asteroids .
When pies in the sky start going somewhat stale, it is time to turn people's eyes to pies in
space.
Who cares about mundane things like roads, schools, airports, electricity and water
infrastructures? Much of this earthly stuff will become obsolete as America launches itself
into space.
The Chinese will of course gladly finance the enterprise by buying even more US
treasuries, and the Russians will gladly supply the rocket engines to help the US achieve
total dominance of space, the stars, the moon, the sun, angels if any actually dwell there,
and perhaps God himself. If you want to achieve big, think big! The thousand year Reich set
its goals much too low and mundane.
Whilst at it, why not also create an outer space command, a department for space security,
and launch projects to bring freedom and democracy to all the galaxies out there? We got to
tame them out there if we don't want them to attack us here, right? Just think of the new
recruitment posters that will have all of American teenagers lining up to enrol in these
departments. The whole of the US will get starry-eyed – or should it be
galactical-eyed?
Scientists and the best of brains will flood into the US from Mexico, India, Russia,
Africa to take part in the grand drive to create new realities. The economy will boom (as in
BOOM?); even if it doesn't, who cares about this miserable little planet – it is but a
dot in the galaxy.
Fools rush in where angels would fear to tread. And psychopaths see threats everywhere,
even in space.
According to Bank of America's
Mike Hartnett
, the "trade war" of 2018 should be recognized for what it really is: the
first stage of a new arms race between the US & China to reach national superiority in
technology over the longer-term via Quantum Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Hypersonic
Warplanes, Electronic Vehicles, Robotics, and Cyber-Security.
This is hardly a secret, as the China strategy is laid out in its "Made in China 2025"
blueprint: It aims to transform "China's industrial base" into a "smart manufacturing"
powerhouse via increase competitiveness and eroding of tech leadership of industrial trading
rivals, e.g. Germany, USA, South Korea; this is precisely what Peter Navarro has been raging
against and hoping to intercept China's ascent early on when it's still feasible.
The China First strategy will be met head-on by an America First strategy. Hence the "arms
race" in tech spending which in both countries is intimately linked with defense spending. Note
military spending by the US and China is forecast by the IMF to rise substantially in coming
decades, but the stunner is that by 2050, China is set to overtake the US, spending $4tn on its
military while the US is $1 trillion less, or $3tn.
This means that some time around 2038, roughly two decades from now, China will surpass the
US in military spending, and become the world's dominant superpower not only in population and
economic growth - China is set to overtake the
US economy by no later than 2032
- but in military strength and global influence as well.
And, as
Thucydides Trap clearly lays out
, that kind of unprecedented superpower transition - one
in which the world's reserve currency moves from state A to state B - always takes place in the
context of a war.
Which explains BofA's long-term strategic recommendation: " We believe investors should thus
own global defense, tech & cybersecurity stocks, particularly companies seen as "national
security champions" over the next 10-year s ."
And
in April
, an
unclassified
50-page transcript on Advance Policy Questions warned that Beijing has the capability and
capacity to control the South China Sea "in all scenarios short of war with the United
States."
In written testimony to the US Senate Armed Services Committee, Adm. Davidson said China is
seeking "a long-term strategy to reduce the U.S. access and influence in the region," which he
claims the U.S. must maintain its critical military assets in the area. He views China as "no
longer a rising power," but rather a "great power and peer competitor to the United States in
the region." Adm. Davidson agreed with President Trump's recent assessment on China, calling
the country a "rival."
In response to questions about how the U.S. Navy in the South China Sea should handle the
increased military presence in the region. Adm. Davidson advocated for a sustained U.S.
military approach, with the increased investment in new high-tech weaponry.
"US operations in the South China Sea -- to include freedom of navigation operations --
must remain regular and routine. In my view, any decrease in air or maritime presence would
likely reinvigorate PRC expansion."
And in regards to the type of weapons, Adm. Davidson outlined some critical technologies for
immediate investment:
" A more effective Joint Force requires sustained investment in the following critical
areas: undersea warfare, critical munitions stockpiles, standoff weapons (Air-Air,
Air-Surface, Surface-Surface, Anti-Ship), intermediate range cruise missiles, low cost / high
capacity cruise missile defense, hypersonic weapons, air and surface lift capacity, cyber
capabilities, air-air refueling capacity, and resilient communication and navigation systems.
"
Adm. Davidson's testimony to the US Senate Armed Services Committee, provided us with the
much-needed knowledge that American exceptionalism is quickly deteriorating in the South China
Sea after more than seventy years of control. The transcript reveals how America's military
will continue to drain the taxpayers, as it will need an increasing amount of investments and
military assets in the Eastern Hemisphere to protect whatever control it has left. The clash of
exceptionalism between Beijing and Washington is well underway, will war come next?
I am waiting for the typical response from the anti Jew ZH
crowd, to the effect that there won't be a wart in China until
Jews want authentic Chinese food on Sunday nights rather than
the American Chinese food.
More to the point, this article
is informative but looks at the trees without considering the
forest. China has a number of problems ahead in the not too
distant future that will sink their battleships and ruin their
plans for an expanded military that can fight wars.
First of all, they are in the early stages of seeing their
export empire get scaled back considerably. First the tariffs
will take a bite out of their income, then the inevitable
global recession, which will be as deep if not deeper than in
2009 and last longer as Central Banks don't have the bullets
this time to save the financial system. On top of that,
production costs inside China have been rising so much that
their huge price advantage over developed countries is
shrinking to the point where outsourcing to China does not
return an adequate enough amount of profit to justify the
outsourcing. In addition, China has some very large debts to
the external world, and the accruing interest over time will
take a progressively larger bite out of Chinese profits in the
future.
And then, in the final analysis, China's size precludes it
from getting involved in a war. Because of their huge
population, the only way to defeat the Chinese at war is to
nuke the rice out of them. As there are so many delivery
systems that can deliver nuclear payloads today, the Chinese
will not be able to defend against such an attack, and the
results would be horrific.
The Chinese are practical people who have little history as
war mongers. Its totally out of their character to be acting
in such a militaristic way. They are doing it to play the part
of the up and coming global power who uses its economic might
to project a military strength. Its all for show. The Chinese
do not want a large scale military war with a significant
world power, and they will not cause such to happen. The best
course for China is to take its export profits and start
developing the interior of its country.
I agree, this article doesn't discuss the increasing
fragility of the Chinese market. A great deal of fraud and
government manipulation underlies the Chinese economy,
including debts which are much greater than those of the
US. Throw in leverage that is based, oftentimes, on
nothing.
And there is always the Mandate of Heaven.
Empires rise and fall based on that and no Chinese leader,
not even the commies, ignore that.
From a purely military and strategic point of view, the USA is extremely vulnerable. It doesn't matter how much money Trump flushes down the toilet to the mega corp war machine, what is missing is a unified nation, under God (let's call it the Highest Good that each person seeks in all good faith on a daily basis). This nation is badly divided, and considerably weakened by the third world invasion. The niggas, la raza, antifa, the luciferians, the asians, they won't show up to fight, nor will the fairies and all their homosexual behaviorist sympathizers. And neither will the feminists and social justice warriors, and nor will the rank and file of the demonrat party. And neither will the hollyscum freaks, and all their sycophantic off shoots.
Did I miss anybody?
This nation has no soul. It is a place inhabited by narcissists, nihilists, the decadent and self indulgent, the immoral, and blasphemous, lovers of self and disloyal to everything and everyone except their carnal appetite.
The nation is overrun by the psychologically insane (definitely from a foreign power's point of view, whose mouths are drooling at the prospect of taking the nation for their own), and a government that promotes the insanity.
The only ppl left that might fight will be the handful of hired mercenaries already on the payroll, but they are only a few in number compared to the 2 billion Chinese. What's left of who else might fight are ppl who hate the government because it is a satanic institution riddled with jews who control it and wish for its total annihilation.
You can't save a country like this from an external attack.
And the US has no allies. Push come to shove, all those 'allies' will just step away and watch the destruction of the USA from afar. The jew can find another 'New York' to infest, or, like they did in Poland, made nice with Hitler once they saw Hitler was the man of the hour - the jew will do the same with the Chinese.
In a country where its own declaration of independence is determined to be 'hate speech' by an American corporation, where the nation is so weak as to not obliterate this corporation (fakebook), you tell me, exactly where is the core strength of the nation to defend itself?
I don't see it.
Don't be surprised to wake up one day to nukes and other sorts of bombs and missiles. Hated by all, totally divided within, controlled by lucifer, the USA is ripe for the picking - low lying fruit.
Which explains BofA's
long-term strategic
recommendation: "
We
believe investors should
thus own global defense,
tech & cybersecurity
stocks, particularly
companies seen as
"national security
champions" over the next
10-year
s
."
The Bankers recommend you
send them your money, so
you
can pay
for
their
war. Isn't that nice of
them.
Historically Japan is China's
rival. The US spends about 2.8X
more on the military, but it's
being wasted meddling in oppressive
countries civil wars. Our economy
(if Chinese numbers are believable)
is about 60% bigger than China's.
And as others have said, there's a
lot of corruption and debt in
China. They also have their MIC.
But most importantly, I don't
believe Xi wants to get into a war,
especially with the US. It's too
destructive, and they prefer to win
in the economic marketplace.
Maybe the US's military spending
is completely wasteful, but
maybe it isn't. What if the
reason for our invasion of
middle eastern countries served
a vital national interest (at
least, in the empire's eyes)
such that they were able to
shore up support for the current
global monetary paradigm (the
petrodollar) and also do the
bidding of Israel in the Middle
East? I mean, we must remember
back in the early aughts when
Saddam threatened to stop
accepting dollars and instead
accept euros and also gold I
believe. This was back when the
US was much more feared and
respected. We did this to
ourselves to some degree, but
also it is the cycle of empire.
Nothing is the same forever.
As bad as we may think the US's
global leadership is (and I'm
not making any apologies for it)
imagine when China assumes this
position how they would act? The
world under Chinese global
governance would probably be
much more authoritarian and much
less free. The US is trying to
continue the last vestiges of
it's republican heritage at home
while practicing Empire abroad.
Hoping to keep the current
global system intact. History
shows us that this is a losing
battle. I believe that the US
will always be a great power if
it's constituted the same as it
is now. Maybe after the mantle
of world hegemony is passed, the
US will revert back to how it
was pre-WW2. By all accounts,
economically, socially, in terms
of technological innovation, we
were the envy of the world and
everybody wanted to be part of
it. I would love to see us
return back to that state.
China's economy is fragile. Just the TALK
of tariffs has brought their stock market
down 25%. US still at record highs. Look
how every little tick up or down in their
currency causes instability. Yet simpletons
here think they can just wave their hands
and become the reserve currency. It's nuts.
China is still a turd world country with a
few showcase modern cities. They still have
600 million dirt poor slaves working for a
daily bowl of rice.
If they upgrade their military, in 2
decades they might challenge japan or south
korea. Right now either of them would stomp
china flat without US help. And Trump is on
to their tricks. The trade war will bring
back not only the jobs, but the investment
capital that they need for modernization.
China fucked up bigly by being too greedy
and arrogant. Now they will see their world
domination dreams fade away.
Stock market shmarket, given the
multicultural genetic crap flushing the
USA down the drain, my money is on the
Chinese long term. They have staying
power of a few thousand year history.
Bush-Clinton-Obama were happy to sell out to
the Chinese. That party is now over. There is a
new crew in charge. I don't know all the
players besides USA and Russia but China is not
invited.
The name of the game now is tech
isolation of the Dragon.
Would those leaks have been anything like the
US leaks, not so leaky. Leaks a way of making a
public statement, whilst neither confirming nor
denying the content of that statement.
The
way for the government of China to issue a
warning, without issuing a warning. No joke the
game they play is one of autocrats, they have
no qualms about taking out corporate leaders,
they are not a part of government in an
espionage assassination sense.
Many main land China businesses will have
little problem with paying bounties on the
random deaths of US troops when the US
interferes with their business via criminal
methods, fake terrorism et al. It will get
pretty messy and the message from China, yeah
they know the US will not attack them but use
terrorist like tactics to damage them and they
have no qualms about engaging in similar
tactics (not the government, just corporate
executives who know the government will not act
against them unless they fuck up in a big way).
They know more about what is going on in the
US deep state and US shadow government, than
those entities realise. Always keep in mind,
the punishment for failure at the high end of
town in China, is to be executed for
corruption, no fucking about, that is what they
do to their own, how do you think they will
treat others. They know, they absolutely know,
the US will not attack directly, as a result
the endless yapping dog screams about attacking
(played that card way, way too often) and when
it comes to a dirty war, China will win because
they will target the real heads of the snake,
not the sellout empty suit politicians or
equally worthless political appointees.
Honestly I am kind of comfortable with the
various psychopaths in suits running
corporations 'er' sanctioning each other (as
long as they avoid collateral damage), US
executives travelling abroad will need to be
quite careful if they are playing attack China
game for global domination, the only thing they
will end up dominating is a very tiny plot of
land. The Chinese are very skilled herbalists
be careful what you eat.
A society that never existed. America's great strength has always been
(and still is) geography. We have the best farmland in the world and
its dissected by a river system that allows us to ship production
anywhere. We have an ocean to the east, and ocean to the west, Canada
(the ultimate beta country) to the north and Mexico (dirt poor and
reliant on us) to the south. Freedom was the most useful concept in
the history of the world. Tell the serfs they own the land and they'll
work their asses off to make it better. When they do, we'll take it
back. I'm not wrong...
This isn't about who's nicer or least war prone. Countries act in their
own best interests, except The Anglo countries, which run chronic trade
debt for their parasitic banking sectors. Since so much of the world
depends on The American export market, they will align with The U.S. The
PRC won't buy their manufactured goods. If the author believes Europe and
East Asia will align with The PRC in a war, he has little experience with
East Asian people, and he ignores NATO.
whilst I agree on a lot of what you say about China, you'd have to
offset this with a state of the union analysis - what is so great about
the decaying US imperium and its zero crumbling infrastructure... on
the subject of debt, well the US has it all - domesric, national,
personal to the extent that unless it can carry on printing the dollar,
it more or less will collapse instantly. And this is really where the
danger is, I agree that China is definitely not interested in a war -
never has been. But Washington on the other hand is fast approaching
the point where war is the only option...
I pray this doesn't happen
but on the other hand, Washington will need to be brought to heel one
way or another for the world to become normal again. And for this, you
can count on China to deliver some strikes the likes of which America
has never seen if it comes to that. Destruction of major american
cities will very quickly bring America down if this war scenario
unfolds. Because america has never seen war on its own turf, it will be
totally unable to cope.
Is this kind of misleading and sensational headline
what's known as "click bait?"
The documents do NOT say "war is unavoidable" as per the headline.
Instead, the leaked documents say that at least someone in China
believes a strong military is the best way to "
escape the
obsession
that war is unavoidable between an emerging power
and a ruling hegemony".
Why (Oh Why) do they hate the Russians so much? Let me try to answer that question. Most
armies in history were created for the purpose of enriching the host country by looting
foreign lands. US are bucking that trend – they have an army that's looting mostly the
host country for enriching the same army and those who support it (domestically).
Also, the best armies in history usually belonged to whoever happened to be the economic
powerhouse at the moment – examples are too many to list them all – ancient Rome,
Great Britain 16-19 century, France 19 century, Germany 19-20 century.
There are exceptions to this rule, of course – Genghis Khan – the Mongols
hardly an economic powerhouse, yet a number one military power of its time.
Then we come to Russia. I don't know when exactly Russia underwent the Genghis Khanisation
process, but it's apparent that they did and it served them well throughout their history.
Meaning that their army usually outperforms their economy, and that's what's driving the west
mad at least since Napoleon's times.
They think that Russia doesn't deserve to be a powerhouse like they are thanks to their
military, because they believe that other than their military, the Russians are culturally,
economically, civilizationally, and yes – even genetically inferior to the west.
Tough luck, chums. I have one answer to that: Maybe it's not Russia's fault that
militarily they have always managed to outperform the west. Maybe the fault lies with you.
How can you blame Russia for the fact that your armies suck? But, as they say in the US
– you got to support the troops.
China and the B&R have been topics of interest to me for a while, B&R I have follow
from its first announcement in 2013. (I have often found it curious that B&R and the US
Imperial "Pivot to Asia" announced by Obama came so close together in time.)
I think it is a mistaken point of view that accuses China of "economic imperialism." The
big problem with Western analysis, in my view, is that it assumes a zero sum game, a game
where trade is a weapon in hegemonic zero sum game of monopoly control of markets. China does
not seek hegemony commercially or in any other way. China has no interest - as does the
Imperial US - to take over the world. Building a community of common destiny is not
"Imperial."
I would urge everyone to spend time watching the comment and analysis shows on CGTN -
compare them to CNN and you'll see the Chinese "censored" news is so much more informative
and offers a wider range of views.
We already live in a multi-polar world, China is very important, so is Russia and India.
If you read the international press the impression you get is that all these countries plus
Europe and even Canada now are trying to trade and get along while they all have to manage
the burden of the US military interventions and aggression, the world's biggest problem for
the vast majority of the 7+ billion people, over half of global land mass is not trade it is
how to manage the threats of the Imperial US. Today without question the SCO is more
important than the G7-6-8 but of course it is almost impossible to find coverage about the
organization even in the most progressive of press outlets.
The so called left in the West needs to get over its elevation of democracy to that of a
timeless law of nature (there is no such thing)- that "free speech" supposedly suppressed in
China negates China bringing 700+ million people out of poverty, something no nation or
culture has ever achieved in human history.
Please at least try to find some survey courses on Chinese history, nothing in it would
suggest China has any interest what-so-ever in Western style Imperialism. China spent
thousands of years focusing on uniting China from the 56+ ethnic groups that make up modern
China not project power elsewhere.
Progressives are still living in a unipolar world they seem to know almost nothing about
China especially, but Russia, India and more. The progressive view is limited to zero sum
geopolitical hegemony much of its analysis is based on analysis of Zbigniew Brzezinski in the
70s and 80s.
China and the rest of the world has a far different view of Central Asia as a place of
commerce and trade, not territory essential to global domination as Brzezinski
calculated.
I hope to see more China coverage here and everywhere, covering China opens thought to
question long held underlying assumptions.
There is no god - there is lust for power. No creator "endowed" us with "rights" or
anything else - we have them and something better "The Will to Power" without mystical
permission.
From the Bloomberg article: "The U.S. plans to speak with the governments of Turkey, India
and China, all of which import Iranian oil, about finding other supplies."
Iranian condensate will most likely replace US condensate to China as much as possible.
China is the key to if/when this harsh "embargo" of Iran will ease. They have the strength to
stand up against the US and then others will follow suit (e.g. India). A barter system (goods
vs. goods trade) or payment in yuan could probably be a good enough way to avoid american
banking sanctions. But if China wants to stand up against US at this point is uncertain. If
this strangling of Iran is highly successful, it is hard to see the rewards. A high oil price
that will be the tipping point for the global economy in the wrong direction or indirectly
(hopefully not directly – who needs another war now?) overthrow the Iranian government
and thus the creation of new political problems in the country; a repeat of the Iraq
experience almost. I almost forgot that there is the nuclear issue there as well, maybe that
is also a driver
"... Once underway, however, an Iranian-Israeli conflict could very easily draw in Russia and the US. ..."
"... Indeed, Putin reportedly warned Netanyahu last week that he can no longer expect to attack Syria with impunity. And once Israelis start getting killed by Russian hardware, it is hard to see how the US could not get involved. ..."
Just over a quarter-century before the outbreak of the First World War, global capitalism
was in the throes of a deep economic crisis. This original 'Great Depression', which lasted
from 1873 to 1896, saw tens of millions perish
from famine as the 'great powers' shifted the burden as far as possible onto their
colonies; whilst, at home, anti-systemic movements such as the 'New Unionism' burst onto the
scene in the capitalist heartlands, presenting a serious challenge to bourgeois rule. Africa
was torn apart by imperial powers desperate to secure monopoly access to its riches, and
rivalries between these powers constantly threatened to erupt into outright war. In the midst
of all this, one particularly astute political commentator gave a disturbingly prophetic
insight as to how the crisis would ultimately be resolved, predicting a: "world war of an
extent and violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other's
throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The
depredations of the Thirty Years War compressed into three or four years and extended over the
entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism, both of the armies and
people, in the wake of acute misery; irretrievable dislocation of our artificial system of
trade, industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their
conventional political wisdom to the point where crowns will roll into the gutter by the dozen,
and no one will be around to pick them up; the absolute impossibility of seeing where it will
all end and who will emerge as victor from the battle; only one consequence is absolutely
certain: general exhaustion and the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working
class."
The commentator was Marx's lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels. The accuracy of his
prediction – right down to the numbers killed and the length of the war, not to mention
the revolutions and collapse of empires that would result – is truly remarkable. Yet
Engels had no crystal ball. What he foresaw was nothing more than the logical outcome of the
workings of the global capitalist-imperialist system, which constantly and inexorably pushes
towards world war.
The logic is basically this. Capitalism, with its combination of rapid technological
progress plus derisory wage payments – both tendencies a 'natural' result of competition
– leads to a situation where markets cannot be found for its goods. This is because
capital's capacity to produce constantly outstrips the capacity of consumers to consume, as
these very consumers are, in the main, the very workers whose wages are driven down, or who are
made redundant altogether, by improved technology. Ultimately, this results in a crisis of
overproduction, with markets glutted, and workers thrown out of work in their millions. Already
in 1848, four decades before his prediction of world war, Engels (and Marx) had written that
such crises tended to be "resolved" through "the enforced destruction of a mass of productive
forces" – in other words, the wholesale closure of industry. Through closures of the most
inefficient industries, surplus production would eventually be reduced, and profitability
restored. But in so doing, capitalists were effectively increasing the concentration of capital
in the hands of the most 'efficient' industries, whose productive capacity in the future would
render the underlying contradiction yet more insoluble still, and were thereby "paving the way
for more extensive and more destructive crises, and diminishing the means whereby crises are
avoided". For Engels, the crisis underway by the 1880s was so extensive that the destruction of
capital required to overcome it would take more than mere closures – it would take
all-out war.
The destruction of capital, however, is not the only means by which to overcome
overproduction crises. The other option, said Marx and Engels, is "the conquest of new markets
or the more thorough exploitation of old ones". The period of the late-nineteenth century saw a
renewed 'Scramble for Africa' as each imperial power sought to grab territories which might one
day serve as both sources of raw materials and markets for surplus capital. In North America,
the USA was completing its own colonisation of the West and South in imperial wars against the
Native Americans and Mexico. By the close of the century, however, all the 'available'
territories had been conquered. From then on in, argued Lenin, the capture of new colonies
could only be at the expense of another colonial power – ushering in a new, imperial,
phase of capitalism with an inbuilt drive towards world war.
We have now witnessed two episodes of this cycle of capitalist crisis mutating into world
war, the second much more successful in terms of the destruction of capital than the first.
Indeed it was so successful that it paved the way for a 'Golden Era' of capitalist prosperity
lasting almost three decades. But then, once again, the inevitable crisis tendencies began to
set in.
The colonial, imperialist nature of postwar capitalism has, to some extent, been disguised
by the formal political independence of most of the formerly colonised world. With an
unambiguous and unrivalled lead in technological capacity, the Western nations have not
required direct colonisation in order to guarantee essentially 'captive' markets for their
goods and capital. The former colonies have largely been dependent on products, finance and
technology from the imperial world without the need for formal political control – and
this dependence has been backed up with economic blackmail through international financial
institutions such as the IMF and World Bank where possible, and direct military force against
resistant nations where necessary.
Such dependence, however, has been decisively eroded since the beginning of the new
millenium. The rise of China, in particular, has completely destroyed the West's monopoly on
finance and market access for the global South: African, Asian and Latin American countries no
longer have to rely on US markets for their goods or on World Bank loans for their
infrastructure development. China is now an alternative provider of all these, and generally on
far
superior terms of trade than those offered by the West. In times of continued economic
stagnation, however, this loss of their (neo)colonies is entirely unacceptable to the Western
capitalist nations, and threatens the entire
carefully crafted system of global extortion on which their own prosperity is based.
Increasingly unable to rely on economic coercion alone to keep countries within its 'sphere
of influence', then, the West have been turning more and more to military force. Indeed, the
US, UK and France have been permanently at war since the eve of the new millennium –
starting with Yugoslavia, through Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Syria and Yemen (to say
nothing of proxy wars such as that in the Congo, or the 'drone wars' waged in Pakistan, Somalia
and elsewhere). In each case, the aim has been the same – to thwart the possibility of
independent development. It is entirely indicative of this new era of decreasing economic power
that several of these wars were waged against states whose leaders were once in the pocket of
the US (Iraq and Afghanistan) or who they had hoped to buy off (Libya and Syria).
Thus, where it was once, at least in part, the product of productive superiority, the
continued supremacy of the West in international affairs is increasingly reliant on military
force alone. And even this military superiority is diminishing daily.
Predictions of the length of time left before the Chinese economy overtakes the US economy
continue to shrink. In 2016, China's share of the world economy had grown to 15%, compared to
the USA's 25%. But with a growth rate currently three times that of the USA, the difference is
expected to decline rapidly; at this rate, the Chinese economy is on course to overtake that of
the US by 2026 . In fact, once adjustments are made for purchasing power parity and
differential prices, the Chinese economy is
already larger . Furthermore, Chinese manufacturing output has been higher than that of the
US for over a decade, and exports are one third higher, whilst China produces
double the number of graduates annually than the US.
Such developments, however, are not of economic significance only: for it is only a matter
of time before economic superiority is converted into military superiority. And this gives the
US and its hangers-on an ever-diminishing window of opportunity in which to actually USE their
military superiority in order to preserve their deteriorating global power.
Clearly the strategy hitherto has been to avoid direct war with China and its key ally
Russia, and instead to focus on 'taking out' its real or potential allies amongst states less
able to defend themselves. But Russia's role as a spoiler in the regime change operation in
Syria has demonstrated to the US that this may no longer be possible. This has led to a split
within the US ruling class on the issue of how to deal with Russia, with one side seeking to
purchase Russian acquiescence to wars against Iran and China (advocated by the faction
supporting Trump) and the other aiming to simply 'regime change' Russia itself (advocated by
the Hillary faction). At the heart of both is the attempt to break the alliance between Russia
and China, in the case of Hillary by pulling China away from Russia, and for Trump, pulling
Russia away from China.
The point is, however, that neither strategy is likely to work, as clearly the breaking of
the China-Russia axis is aimed at weakening both of them. Furthermore, even if Putin
were prepared to ditch Iran, or even China, for the right price (such as lifting
sanctions, or
recognising Russian sovereignty over Crimea ), there is no way Congress would allow Trump
to pay such a price. Trump would dearly love to offer to lift sanctions – but this is not
within his gift; instead he can merely offer sops such as withdrawal from Syria, or pre-warning
of missile attacks on Russia's allies – hardly enough to lure Russia into the suicidal
severing of alliances with its most important allies.
This conundrum puts the unthinkable squarely on the agenda: direct war with Russia. The last
month has shown clearly how, and how rapidly, this is developing. Britain's carefully
calibrated efforts to create a worldwide diplomatic break with Russia can now clearly be seen
as a prelude to what was almost certainly planned to be – and may yet become – an
all-out war with Iran on the Syrian battlefield. This scenario appears to have been averted for
now by Russia's refusal to countenance it, and the West's fear of launching such an operation
in the face of direct Russian threats, but such incidents are only likely to increase. It is
only a matter of time before Russia will be put to the test.
It is easy to see how the Syrian war could lead to a major escalation: indeed, it is
difficult to see how it could not. In Washington, there is much talk of the need to 'confront'
Iran in Syria, and recent
Israeli attacks on Iranian positions in Syria indicate that they are itching to get this
confrontation under way, with or without prior US approval. Once underway, however, an
Iranian-Israeli conflict could very easily draw in Russia and the US. Russia could hardly be
expected to stand back whilst Israel reversed all its hard fought gains of the past two and a
half years – whilst demonstrating the feebleness of Russian 'protection' – and
would likely retaliate, or at the very least (and more likely)
provide its allies with the means to do so . Indeed, Putin reportedly
warned Netanyahu last week that he can no longer expect to attack Syria with impunity. And
once Israelis start getting killed by Russian hardware, it is hard to see how the US could not
get involved.
This is just one possible scenario for the kind of escalation that would lead to war with
Russia. Economic war with China is already underway, and US warships are already readying
themselves to cut off China's supply lines in the South China Sea. Each specific provocation
and escalation may or may not lead to a direct showdown with one or both of these powers. What
is clear, however, is that this is the direction in which Western imperialism is clearly
headed. It has built up its unparalleled armoury for one reason only – to protect its
dominant world position. The time is soon coming when it will have to use it – and use it
against a power that can actually fight back – whilst it still has a chance of
winning.
An edited version of this article was originally published by Middle East Eye.
"... The topic of China is delicate here in Russia. If one considers the total and basically psychotic enmity from the West, offer of friendship from China is a godsend. ..."
"... If you read very carefully the articles written by high level advisors of Putin, you would see that they harbor no illusions. Russia itself contains a significant number of former apparatchiks whose "Russian soul" evolved through the 1990s to a point exactly resembling what you described about the Chinese. I am convinced that president Putin is a patriot, and when he meets this type of people, he recognized right away what they were, whether they were Russian or Chinese. ..."
Shame on Arabs and China! My personal experience with Chinese convinced me that the real God
for them is money. Beside collecting money by any means possible, these people have no other
issue to talk or discuss. They had shown zero interest in the geopolitics or the dire situation
of the planet, or suffering of humanity. They did not show any emotional or sentiment towards
what is happening in the World.
Majority of them express some kind of inferiority complex towards West. China Will soon or
later betray Russia, They do not think about any higher moral or human value, heroism,
solidarity, except for collecting money.
But the Number one betrayal came from Arabs, 22 Arab countries, and some 90% of them are
happy in their slave minded status. They are the biggest disgrace for humanity and Muslims.
Some of them are more aggressive then their masters in the West.
If not for the virus of Wahabism which infected the body of many Muslims, there could
emerge a true alliance of Orthodox Christians and True Muslims. Such an alliance would be
undefeatable, even without money worshiping China.
Antoni, you know obviously what you are talking about. Especially since I myself am Chinese,
and spent almost two decades coordinating the visit of Chinese officials and business folks
to US, on behalf of the US government. This was my previous career, before I abandoned it and
moved to Russia.
The topic of China is delicate here in Russia. If one considers the total and basically
psychotic enmity from the West, offer of friendship from China is a godsend. One would not
want to speak too undiplomatically about the Chinese mentality, and the current state of
Chinese National psyche.
If you read very carefully the articles written by high level
advisors of Putin, you would see that they harbor no illusions. Russia itself contains a
significant number of former apparatchiks whose "Russian soul" evolved through the 1990s to a
point exactly resembling what you described about the Chinese. I am convinced that president
Putin is a patriot, and when he meets this type of people, he recognized right away what they
were, whether they were Russian or Chinese.
The overseas Russian get very emotional at such trying times for their motherland. I more
than relate to that. But they show a natural tendency to idealize everything about Russia,
and gets instantly suspicious on hearing a different opinion. The same eagerness to believe
is now extended to the new great Asian ally of Russia. I wrote something a couple of days ago
to the same effect. The moderator even did not allow me to post. I hope now that this war
charade has temporarily abated, the moderator would regain a minimal level of calmness and
openness for dialogue.
"Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth." – Mahatma Gandhi
Hizbullah, Persia, Russia vs China
The real power and fearlessness is not about numbers. It is about soul and its vibrant
energetic radiation.
How can a small movement of people like Hizbullah be more vibrant and fearless and outspoken
against oppression and international criminals then the so called giant nation of China?
How could Bolivia a small nation can be so to the point then China?
How can Iran (Persia) with its 70 millions people and totally surrounded by Kosher Nostra
mafia can be so brave and standing tall against the international oppressors of humanity in
compare to China, which doing practically nothing?
It is not about numbers, it is about power of soul, about life philosophy, about way of life,
about believe in true and one God. So that is way Persians historically influenced humanity
more then anything China can dream of.
There is reason why King Cyrus, is mentioned several times in Bible. There is a reason why
Saadi poetry about humanity is written in the entrance of UN:
Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul.
If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.
If you've no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain!
"Saadi Persian poet"
But perhaps, the most significant solid power and force which has not only the soul of
justice, solidarity and humanity, but even instrument of physical power and ability to fight
back a total war is Mother Russia. Despite its shortcomings, Russia is a gift from God,
Russia is the historic Rom of our time, mentioned in Sura 30 of Quran (30:1-5 "To Whom Power
Belongs" Declares the truth of the universe).
Russia may be is the second period of Zul-Qarnain mentioned in the Sura 18 of Quran.
Russia is an exceptional Caucasian (White race, i personally do not believe in race ) people,
(if we exclude Persians as Caucasians) which does not participate in the oppression of
non-Europeans and blocking the total subjugation of planet by Western and its minions.
When you talk with Russians and Westerners, you will immediately recognize the difference.
Russians are not arrogant and it is exactly what Quran describing a kind of Christians, who
are not arrogant, but a people with love and affection. I have no illusions, but i talking in
general terms, i talking about sum of all vectors and direction of this common vector.
Numbers are not important, historically majority always were wrong. Truth is still truth even
you are a minority.
So, the conclusion is that, if I am right and if Russia is righteous and just and hold on
rope of God, no force of this plant can defeat Russia. Russia does not need China, China is
not a nation of ideology, faith or religion, they only believe in money, which is also the
god of Western world and its minions. China is not a natural ally of Mother Russia, natural
ally of Russia is nations with believe in God, justice, solidarity, soul and judgment
day.
My personal encounter with Chinese convinced me that they have a completely different mindset
and I was completely disappointed.
With love and respect to Russia and its heroic people
Yow Darius my man, you speak the truth. It is fire and light in one's soul, and nothing else.
And if one might add, a preparedness to die, a simplicity and gentleness of character. Labels
mean nothing.
Degeneration afflicted many nations, comes in many forms, it can be a well-mannered and
finely dressed German so proud of himself, it can be an oily and greedy petty Chinese
businessman, it can be a Mercedes driving Arab in front of some big hotel in Dubai.
Globalism is a satanic cult of our times. They are huge in numbers, but their souls are
small, enslaved, and twisted. We have no fear of them. Keep well brother.
I agree with everything you said. I will take a more wait and see approach with China. I
hope for the sake of the world they jump onboard. Ultimately the issue is materialism. The
Anglo zios want to deal with a world in which everyone has a price on their head, so they can
be easy to buyout and compromised. Since the Zionists are the one with the most capital,
anyone who wants a piece of the world, will have to go through them. So that materialistic
outlook the Chinese have, can be a huge opening for the zios to exploit.
The state of the Arab leaders are even more pitiful. A bunch of animals who are enslaved
to their lusts, and desires. I would tell them to enjoy it, because their end will not be
good. Most of them have sold out to the highest bidder(Zionists) a ling time ago.
Now the Wahhabi movement, what's left to say about this devious, malicious cult. If you're
interested check this article out. It talks about the founder of the Wahhabi movement,
Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, and how he was in cahoots with British spy's who were looking for
a way to bring down the ottoman empire. I have to do more research on this article, however
as someone who has studied wahhabisim, I'm fairly certain it was a movement that had
malicious intent from the beginning, regardless of the article I linked below. It's just
somewhat hard to explain to non Muslim's because some of it deals with matters of theology.
Anyways I enjoyed reading you're post. Peace my friend.
Saker says "But what could the Russians have done?" is the right question.
Ans: Provide advanced defensive weapons well-ahead of time so that the Syrians themselves can
impose a cost.
In addition what the Russians have already done, why is Russia not selling advanced
anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons to countries in the cross-hairs of the West? Often, they
talk about selling S-300 to Syria. Now imagine, Syria has Bastion, anti-sub weapons, and
S-300. There will be costs to the West in this case. I think, this possibility is something
Russia can do. Why wait, as it is obvious that promises by the West are basically lies.
(Despite, dismantling the CW, the same argument is used to justify the attack. The Skripal
case uses this method against Russia itself.)
What has the Russians got by withholding the sale of such weapons? What is the Russian
calculus?
The attack was pretty clearly highly coreographed and followed strict rules that were not
violated. The US provided a turkey shoot for the Syrian AD restricting the missile flight
path to lanes with no typical deviations to confuse the AD. I'm sure this is what the
Russians required in order to guarantee no response from them.
So there are a number of important questions here.
There was insistence that an attack must occur, despite Russian objections. The US and
Russian militaries worked out a way for this to occur as safely as possible. Good that they
pulled it off safely as it implies a high level of competence and discipline on both
sides.
It seems likely from public behavior that the Pentagon thought this a bad idea and was
fully aware of the dangers.
Where is Trump on this and was he forced to acquiesce?
It also seems clear that the pressure on Russia has not diminished and that the 'allies'
intend to try and force an agreement on Syria through Geneva process that partitions the
country and likely deposes Assad.
The Russian side said that the president of Russia had been insulted/disrespected and that
there would be consequences for this action.
There has not been much effective push back in Europe to this policy of direct
confrontation.
China is wearing a mask in public but is not pleased and has offered some diplomatic
support in public.
I rate the situation as highly dangerous, unpredictable, with a great deal going on behind
the scenes.
As an addendum b over at moa has pointed out in his summary that while the US Defense Dept is
claiming only 3 targets Russian and Syrian sources claim many more, specifically airports. I
also read that B1s, I believe, used laser guided bombs in the attack and I have no idea what
the targets were as all discussion has focused only on the cruise missiles. Perhaps more
sites were targeted than was agreed upon.
Also, regarding the Skripal poisoning, Russia has obtained the evidence of BZ use from the
Swiss OPCW lab, perhaps through back channels. I see this as hopeful – Russia does have
friends in Europe, although the remain afraid or without the power to assist openly.
Postings in various places suggest that the US deviated from the agreed on plan and that the
Russian jets that scrambled near the end of the attack put a stop to further deviations.
Perhaps a broken promise like this led to the specific assertions of disrespect.
Thanks to the Saker especially and all the commenters for this forum and the robust
discussion.
However, I think Russian behaviour is consistent with the long game strategy. Syria lost
three buildings and its citizens were celebrating in the streets. The US had the bulk of its
missiles shot down. This is quite simply posturing by the Empire. I don't think the last 48
hours add to the perception the US can whatever it wants whenever it wants. If anything its
the opposite.
I think the US will try again. Its attempt will be no more powerful or successful than
what just occurred. They will continue to do so for many years yet. They will continue the
delusional narrative delivered ad nauseam to its own people for another decade at least.
My point is that as each month goes by, it matters less.
The American hrandstanding is becoming white noise.
I am encouraged by the last 48 hours. I admire Russian restraint. I have for years now and
I expect to continue to do so for some time yet.
As former analyses of you spoke of, the russians Lack the number of planes etc the
Wallstreet-fascists have. This time they will use to speed up the stuff they need. The stuff
Putin spoke off in his march speech. The provocation as much to to with it I guess.
And time Saker is not at the Side of the US, as the petro dollar Will be replaced and
their debts Will reach astronimical figures. Remember China is a creditor of this fascist
regime. Simply stop funding this moron shit. Why did China buy worthless state-papers from
the US??
The americans didnt dare to kill Any russian a hoge difference to the event Pompeo was
bluffing about. So ..?
China bought the worthless state-papers from the US because it give it's leader's the good
life and the illusion of great wealth. If they sell off the Treasuries than that illusion
with evaporate in hyperinflation. The Russians are only waist deep into the Global Economy,
they probably can crawl out with some effort -- the Chinese are up to their eyeballs in it,
they cannot.
China was being pragmatic and keeping its major market afloat. Little point in being the
factory of the world if the world stops buying what you produce through lack of
liquidity.
I have faith in the Chinese leadership–they are ordinary people like everyone else but
their culture and mindset gives them a clever edge that the west has lost, long ago.
It is indeed not over, because in history there is seldom a clear beginning and an end.
However, the Saker is being too pessimistic. The FUKUS coalition avoided the Russian
positions (ie showed a wariness and respect), and Syria did stand tall in defending
herself.
For Russia to have taken the bait and reacted reflexively would have been
counterproductive. As things stand, no escalation occurred, and Russia comes out looking
cool-headed and mature. In effect the good guys.
The US is in sharp decline. It's current behaviour demonstrates that it is in the final
stages of Empire. Time is on Russia and China's side. To engage the US unless absolutely
necessary would work to favour the US and against the rising powers of China and Russia.
Kevin Barrett re-posted a Gordon Duff censored article re the SAA capturing a Takfiri
chemical weapons facility in East Ghouta with western weapon components and reporting the
capture of AZ personnel:
Some excerpts:
"The Syrian Arab Army and with the help of Russian captured a shipment of chemical weapons
destined for the Eastern Ghouta. These were British weapons produced at Porton Down in
Salisbury.
"American, British and Israeli military personnel captured in Syria have confirmed they were
ordered to stage chemical attacks in East Ghouta by their governments.
"The Americans are still being held along with Israeli's while British prisoners are being
negotiated for. Sources in Damascus told us that representatives of Oman in Damascus
approached the Russian Office of Reconciliation on behalf of Britain for the return of
British chemical warfare personnel.
"The shells are identified as VX gas from British stockpiles.
"Russian officials in Syria informed Britain through Oman that they would have to directly
deal with Syria for the return of their personnel. We have received no further information
since, Damascus has remained silent on how or if negotiations were proceeding.
"Last week, VT Damascus received evidence that Americans, US Army Special Forces along with
Israeli chemical weapons officers had been captured in East Ghouta. We were told that not
only was a command facility captured with modern weapons but a stockpile of British made 81mm
poison gas mortar shells, numbering in the hundreds, was seized as well.
"Videos were viewed by former MOD weapons specialists who identified the green stripe on the
shells seized in East Ghouta as VX gas from British stockpiles."
Just pencil in that article.
My comment:
Regarding Russian response, my feeling is Russia recived plenty of assurance the US was
unwilling to hit Russian facilities, and got special corridors for attacks. The Russians
could sit this out and watch and the US failed in a major way again militarily against only
Syrian defenses. I think it is a wise principle for Russia to avoid the temptation to reveal
the real power of its weapons prematurely until there is a real need for them at which time
they may be a rather significant surprise.
-Martin
I view Russia's position as unassailable. After the bombing of Friday night is it even
conceivable that the US could ever gain air superiority over the Russian homeland? Yes the
attack was made with second-tier missiles at third-rate targets without the element of
surprise and poorly coordinated, but it was still easily repelled by a combination of
Soviet-era junk and modern EW equipment and radars. Even those in the West who are apathetic,
if they are listening at all before they change the channel, must at some unconscious level
realize that the US could not have a "perfect" air strike with over a hundred missiles and
destroy only three unoccupied buildings.
A conventional WWIII of any length of time will destroy the Global Economy. The Russians
will win easily simply because they are tougher and more prepared. They may not desire that
outcome, but of all people they probably have the best chance to survive. Except if the nukes
end up being released by accident or through escalation. So the Russians, being just about
the only moral actors around, have a moral responsibility not to fight back until there is no
other choice.
NOTE: Not that all western nations or the people within them are immoral actors, the
greater population and smaller countries are just bystanders.
I am not convinced the US used second-tier missiles. These were launched from active duty
warships and I can only assume it is the standard cruise missile weapon employed. There is
way too much not yet known about the details of this operation.
If, and it is a big "if", the missiles moved along agreed corridors, it is not surprising so
many were shot down.
As I say, so much is not yet known.
I always figure that the best stuff is under wraps, although available in no great quantity.
BTW, I think a technology that isn't discussed much is passive detection systems, which
may have taken the element of surprise away from standoff weapons.
Here comes this important question of purely tactical nature which many flag-waving
uber-patriots miss completely, while, I am sure, Pentagon and not only, is puzzled with what
went wrong. The question is not about excellent performance of Syrian AD–what and how
about this performance are being unveiled with each passing hour. Russian EW? Absolutely, no
doubt it. Massive shooting down of Tomahawks and Scalpel TLAMs? Absolutely. But, but what
about JASSMs. It is conceivable that these were they Trump was bragging about in his idiotic
twits when spoke about those "Smart" missiles that "are coming". There are still no firm
numbers about the number of intercepted JASSMs, what is clear, however, is the fact that many
of them were intercepted. If JASSM passes today for "Smart", it kind of puts good ol'
Tomahawks, logically, into the category of "Dumb". Obviously, as latest Syria's experience
shows, Tomahawks are not an overwhelming threat, as they were positioned as for decades, for
truly (not in Saddam Hussein's, or, rather US media, way) highly integrated and EW capable
air-defense system.
But JASSMs, "stealthy" and supposedly "Smart", even by preliminary data pouring in didn't
fare much better than Tomahawks and this was against Syrian AD assets which are pretty damn
old. So, what about "stealth"? Ah, but in the modern signal processing, including well
developed now sensor-fusion (or data-fusion) techniques it really doesn't matter for advanced
adversary. But that is purely technological aspect, however influential for operational and
strategic levels. Truly global, geopolitical issue is this, as Apps concludes:
Therein lies one of the greatest challenges of this situation. In 1990, after Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the George H. W. Bush administration was
relieved to find that Russia – then still in the hands of Mikhail Gorbachev – was
inclined to avoid turning the conflict into a Cold War-style standoff. In the years that
followed, successive U.S. presidents became used to acting without such worries. Putin has
now successfully signaled that those days are entirely over.
No it ain't over. It has just begun. Call it the great tribulation or Jacob's troubles or
whatever you like but understand we have another half dozen years to go. In any event Daniel
says Damascus will have terror fall upon it at night and become a smoking ruin byvmorning. So
Damascus will fall to align reality with prophecy. The ultimate vanity.
The recent events are complete theatre but the first act is about setting up the second
act.
In the second act, America's tough actions force Iran Russia and Syria to the negotiating
table where a grand accord is hammered out.
In the third act, the Empire cuts its losses and gets the fuck out of the ME because it no
longer has interests there. Israel BTFO. KSA BTFO. They are really the worst allies ever.
In the epilogue Russia becomes the main broker in the ME and balances out the competing
interests while keeping the peace. France and England BTFO. Nobody wants these douche bags
around anymore. America goes back to squabbling in South America and Asia where it arguably
does have strategic interests.
The world Zio-Massonic movement has just shown that it can not dispense with provocations and
plots that can unleash bloody world wars.
The United Nations are a farce and should be dismantled!
Just remembering, it is always England and Judea that press for war as they did in
1938-1939 or release the great and relentless butcher – the only true holocaust –
1914-1918 !
There is another possibility: These "empty strikes" were strictly intended for domestic
consumption. Consider: The US openly telegraphed the coming strikes. Syria and Russia cleared
some areas for the West to hit that would result in no injuries to personnel and limited
damage to infrastructure. The West dutifully hit those evacuated areas and proclaimed
"Mission Accomplished". Syrians danced in the streets for "surviving" the missile strikes
while Russia threatened consequences. What form those consequences take will tell us if these
countries are merely dancing a rather peculiar dance together or whether they are about to
starting fighting in earnest. So far Russia has been playing it cool as a cucumber, but these
strikes – empty as they might have been – demand some sort of response or Russia
will risk looking weak. The fly in the ointment is Israel and their attack on an Iranian base
within Syria that reportedly killed 20 Iranian officers. Will that loss of life influence
Russia's response after the West made every effort to avoid drawing blood?
Saker, many commenters here give me the impression that they will go to any lengths to
reassure themselves that we are not teetering on the brink of all out nuclear war. All of
their theories and reasonings seem to avoid facing that grim reality. Is that also your
impression, or have I misjudged your position?
I think this blog may have misread China. I think I can read the Chinese mind and the
'Western' more subtly since I am ethnic Chinese but educated in the 'West'. But I follow Sun
Tzu and therefore will not expound anymore on China's strategy as far as the Yanks are
concern lest they are wised up.
Suffice to say that a catastrophic decline of the empire ala the Ottoman Empire which led
to WW1 and WW2 due to fighting over the spoils, is on nobody's interests, not even
Russia's.
The best case scenario is to ease the Yanks into a break-up ala the late great USSR.
China's economic, diplomatic and political strength will be critically needed to do this
and to rebuild the new independent states of Western North America, Eastern North America and
the Southern Confederation.
Anonymous. No Chinese empire. The Chinese don't want to occupy other countries. Too
troublesome ruling them. Philippines president Duterte recently suggested half-jokingly that
the Chinese should just make the Philippines a Chinese province. China don't want that. Just
to make the Philippines more prosperous and stable in order to trade with it – which is
far better. If China wanted make the Philippines as its own province, She would have done so
600 years ago when Admiral Zheng He sailed his then unmatchable in the South China Sea and
onwards to India, Persian Gulf, Africa and possibly beyond.
Which means never, unless you're talking about the individual organism, is it "over".
So get over it never being over.
What would you (we) do if it were "over"? Contemplate our navels??
Oh, you mean stress inducing bluster , bluff and brinksmanship of a dying entity. What
else has it got, except blowing itself and everybody else up?
Patience, perserverance. Look at the reaction in the US. Don't forget this terrain, even
if Trump's Unreality Show self destructs.
Is there progress? I think there is. None but the most cretinous deplorables are so stupid
as to cheer the Donald in the last week. Most are dismayed.
And even Alex Jones is allowing open talk of Israel's Empire role in putting DT on this
war mongering course that those who buy his supplements refuse to buy .:
Although Dr P is the one to explicitly state that Israel is a total liability.
So I wouldn't quibble too much about AJ and his mistakes and prejudices. Weaker on Israel
than you would like but as good on Russia as you can expect.
Stupid on China. But Dr P isn't. And anyone watching can see that and see that AJ panders
to his base's fears and prejudices.
But if they are wising up on Israel (as they have!) they can wise up on China and the
whole picture, as well.
Who would want that process of improving consciousness to end, to be "over"??
To relax go back to what??
Actually, I like Snow Leopard's comment the most. And I am contemplating a surgical
procedure on my navel, soon. It's just that Action is part of Being, and I see certain
actions other than handwringing and brow wiping being more productive right now. Especially
in terms of encouraging the process in the US where increasing numbers of people are
realizing they have to think and act to grease the skids for the out of touch geriatrics like
McCain, Feintsein, Pelosi, etc .or DT will go out with them, if he keeps acting just as
ridiculously untruthful as they are.
'ridiculously untruthful' -- - that and deceit is the sea that the Donald has swum in his
entire life, do you really believe that he could recognise reality if it smashed him in the
face like a two ton truck?
Precious little chance of that happening in this lifetime, I'd say. It is by now part of his
cell make-up and ineradicable.
The US has backed Russia into a DEEP, DEEP corner . Sooner or later Russia will have to
respond to the AmeriKKKan madness or surrender and become a vassal State like Europe,
Australia, Canada, Japan and South Korea .After Syria is Iran and China. If Russia goes so is
China. Now is the time to stand upp to AmeriKKKa (the empire of chaos)
Check out the work of Dr. Paul Craig Roberts.org and Professor William Engdahl
All I can say at this stage is that Sun Tzu said not to fight out of anger, fear or enemy's
provocation to a fight. Russia should stay cool. Pick carefully the battlefield (not
necessarily a battlefield like Borodino), pick her own fight (not necessarily in the
battlefield with guns and missiles but just as decisive) and pick the issues to fight for.
This way retain the initiative and not let the enemy drive and maneuver Russia. Drive and
maneuver the enemy instead.
The full-frontal 'love-in' with the Germans in WW2 is a no no type of war to be avoided.
If unavoidable, must be very well prepared. But both the West and the semi-West seem addicted
to the prospect of such an 'orgasmic' love-in. They seems locked into the paradigm of such
logic. But beneath the rationalisation is simply a love for war.
Here is an extract from Richard Lovelace on the English Civil War. He reflects accurately
on what, me as an Oriental, views as what drives the West's and the semi-West's mindset to
war:
1) Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
That from the Nunnery
Of thy chaste breast, and quiet mind,
To War and Arms I flee.
2) True, a new Mistress now I chase,
The first Foe in the Field;
And with a stronger Faith embrace
A Sword, a Horse, a Shield.
3) Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not War.
Some version replace the last line in stanza 3) with: "Loved I not Honour more". But you
get the drift. "war" and "Honour" (in or through war), are essentially the same.
Speaking of Borodino, we must not lose sight of the fact that the Russians not only repelled
Napoleon, but crushed him definitively in the end (thing somehow overlooked in 'histories' of
the 1812-14 war genre 'War and Peace') and reorganized Europe on their own terms. Of course,
it did not last too long (due to the usual British treachery), but the subsequent attempts to
destroy Russia ended in the same way. Now if Hitler has not learned anything from Napoleon,
how do you expect a Tramp like Donald, to learn anything from Hitler (and the Kaiser and
Napoleon, for that matter)?
I am in complete agreement with you Simon. All indications are that Mr Putin and team has a
firm grasp on reality also, whatever that may bring in the future. It may not be too pretty
for the western sphere but delusion and rank stupidity never has a pretty outcome.
Not over. Not even close. The reason this isn't over is that the causes and conditions
causing the root of the problem have not been dealt with. The cause of the problem can only
be dealt peacefully through diplomacy. In the Empire's current configuration diplomacy is
near impossible as there is no competent partner to negotiate with on this side. The Empire
will signal their openness to negotiation by removing Bolton aka Captain Crunch, Haley and
their ilk. This doesn't seem likely and I'm not sure who a competent replacement would be.
Russia needs to sell to Syria and to Iran ~30 nukes each plus delivery vehicles able to reach
New York (thus also Israel, Paris, London). Also S400 systems to protect nukes enough to
guarantee launch. Syria and Iran then declare next attack from any of the Gang of Four states
will mean a nuclear response to all.
You forgot to mention that without adults Mattis & Dunford, WW3 would have started the
last time they "bombed" Syria, now because of they talked the volatile, impulsive and
emotional Trump out of it, it landed on a compromise, on Moscow's terms.
The PRC is one of the only other 2countries that supported the Russian UN resolution, so it's
not clear to me what the Saker is referring to re "just standing by" ? Do you expect PRC to
send troops to Syria? has Syria or Russia made such a request or invitation? Do you know if
such a move by the PRC has wide support by the Chinese public? Please do not respond with
nonsense like public opinions don't matter in china. The Chinese government uses public
opinion polls frequently and widely. Fact is I believe majority of Chinese are also affected
by all the lies from the western msm, especially the well educated elites, most of whom
studied in the West. This explains why their Global Times pieces tend to be much more pro
Russia than their better educated elites
Diplomacy??? It degraded beyond recognition. We used to have the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Now we have geniuses like Samantha Powers and Nikki Haley. We also had a joke of an
ambassador to Saddam's Iraq that triggered 1-st Iraq war, although I tend to think (more and
more lately) that her blurb to Saddam was a deliberate in order to advance Bush's
understanding of his "new world order" idea.
Yes, but the previous UNSC meeting where Russia submitted a text requesting a full and
objective investigation of the chemical attack in Syria only Bolivia voted yes. China
abstained! So Russia looked isolated just prior to the attack
China abstained on the US-sponsored "poison pill" resolution which was set up to be vetoed,
and allowed the US to say they tried to resolve the chemical attack diplomatically but since
the resolution was vetoed the only avenue left is to retaliate by missile strikes. However,
China voted FOR the "clean" Russian-sponsored resolution to investigate but this seems to be
lost.
Yes you are right. So there we're a total 4 resolutions. 3 resolutions on chemical weapons
investigation and 1 on violation of international and UN charter.
For the chemical weapons: Russia submitted 2 resolutions and US 1. None of them passed.
China abstained on one, the US one, which Bolivia and Russia vetoed. Here are the links:
It is impossible to quickly overcome a ~30 years misguided attempt to impose physical
hegemony forever. No complex dynamical system deviates from stable trajectory for too long
and too far without breaking apart. And since nobody wants (or foolish enough not to be
afraid) of a WWIII (a.k.a. breaking the system apart), the US will be forced to change its
guiding principle of perpetuating its sole hegemony. Hopefully sooner than later and
peacefully.
Is Putin not putting himself at a huge disadvantage if he allows the carriers group now
crossing the Atlantic to get close to Syria and Russia. As this confrontation is obviously
not over should Russia not draw a red line at the straits of Gibraltar or somewhere?
I don't understand military issues but can see that the USA/UK/France cannot in the
slightest way, be trusted to do anything other than wait for what they perceive to be a
moment of advantage, then attack.
I understand he has a "Dagger" or six under his arm. Not only will that stop the Carrier
Group, it will place it where it belongs. At the bottom of the sea.
Another possible option would be to simply bring the Warsaw pact again new life.
The US in the past didnt dare to attack pact-members in the cold war. Now we have a
situation that the US considers other States as his toy for torture.
Syria, China Venezuela Belarus, and Donbass even North Korea should become members of
it.
Two days ago Vladimir Putin was handed the worst and most humilliating political (and
military) defeat of his entire life, something that in other, more normal times, would have
immediately forced a man in his stature to resign his post and go away (Chamberlain anyone ?)
yet his own adoring fans seem to be the only ones who haven`t noticed it, preferring instead
to keep living in that universe of denial they have been dwelling in for years already. What
shows best the extent of this attitude of denial is the fact that they were gloating about
the fact that Russia didnt even intervene–contrary to what the man himself had promised
he would do only a month ago if one of Russia`s allies was attacked. By now is evident that
his word is not worth the saliva that was wasted in saying it and that the US has absolutely
no respect for him or for Russia. There are just two things to notice to see the truth in
these words: a gloating, exulting Nimrata in the UNO, knowing well how cheap was for her and
her country, or rather her neocon masters, this victory was (Russia didnt do a thing, so no
WW3) and the headlines in the web "Russia furious". If there is still any doubt about this
conclusion, well, beware, the Gang Of Three now plans to present to the UNSC a proposition
celebrating the illegal attack on Syria of the 14th and they intend to invite ALL members of
it, including Russia, to accept it and take it as a fait accompli. But that will be only a
prelude for what is to come, which is of course the demand by the U.S. that the UNO accepts
her way of conducting business as the norm, as something they will be able to do in every
possible occasion they will wish to do it. Which means, more fake chemical attacks and more
bombing in Syria until Russia is thrown out of the country. So much for our master chess
player in the Kremlin. Only last year he was still insisting, against all caution and the
warning of people as knowledgeable as PCR, that his first priority in foreign policy was a
good relationship with Amerika, see how well he has done in this regard (Chamberlain anyone,
again ?) All in all, things wont become better but much worse after this devastating defeat
of the master chess player, they will only become worse until they get him and Russia
cornered and with only two possible options, which we all know well. This is not about Russia
being alone or being weaker than the US NATO gang, it is all about Putin`s deliberate policy
of putting above everything else his vain and useless attempts at being respected and even
liked by his worst enemies, the Western elites.
Regarding China. China it's a great and powerful nation with a vision and a strategy that
span far in the future. His policy has always been to go on with extreme caution and as low
as possibile exposure. First and foremost she takes care of his own interest, as any other,
however. His main opponent is, that for sure, the "western" empire. In this long term fight,
China finds herself in company of other nations who are fighting the same long term struggle.
Yes, China doesn't share the same cultural, historical, ethnical heritage with Russia, wich
in that regard is part of the Euro family, but shares a vital, long term surviving fight with
Russia (and Iran, Syria). This is a matter of fact that can not be underestimated. So, in
long term, and in spite of some annoying behavior, I'm quite sure that China will stand with
Russia. I read that Chinese warships were placed in front of Syria together with Russian
navy, maybe someone forgot that, this is a strong message to me.
I side with PCR. Only a public military humiliation can stop the Empire. Russia had a
golden opportunity to inflict such an humiliation yesterday and she missed that
opportunity.
Let's suppose that Russia downed as many attacking warplanes as possible, whatever their
location was, plus a few ships like the USS Donal Cook. What would happen next ? Would the
USA launch their strategic missiles on Russia ? I very much doubt it, since the US know as a
hard fact that they would be destroyed in retaliation. MAD has been restored. The would have
no military response at all and the whole world would see it. And this would have been the
end of the Empire, with many vassals leaving it.
Of course, such strikes will happen again. Let's hope that Russia will strike back
then.
The public is brainwashed because they are hooked to the mass media and they are the product
of our "educational" system. Americans are about sports and shopping. A good portrait is the
rabbits of Watership Down.
In 1958, I still believed that there was a significant intellectual difference between the
American bourgeosie and the cattle one sees peering between the slats of large trucks as they
contentedly munch hay on their way to the abattoir.–R. Oliver
Donald T' s inheritance was a loose canon. I'm sure he knew it when he ran, as a proved tower
– builder, against floating sands and the satanic Hillary-fan-club.
America is in psychiatric treatment since 2014 by the spirit of the north.
April 14 was a peace of the art of political wisdom, 'taking two to tango
above the triggers of the planet's doom
Saker, no it is not over by a long shot. Haley again today (it appears she is running US
foreign policy by herself) says empire gonna sanction Russia again via Treasury tomorrow. It
looks like empire trying to ride the false flag chem thing to build a coalition of the
"fools" against Russia or some kind of mass movement to give them cover for military action.
They are furiously trying to bring massive pressure on the Russian leadership so they will
back off and let them have Syria, admit US is almighty god and so they can then go after
Iran. It seems US and Brits so knocked off balance by Putin and his election victory and
weapons announcement that empire frantically trying to reassert that they and only they are
the "decider" of right and wrong and what is moral and immoral. This will go on all of April
and into May as Trump backs out of nuke deal with Iran. Then things will really get ugly and
fast. And that doesn't even factor in North Korea.
I notice that Russian MOD states that the "allies" were configured to launch 300 missiles
not the 110 that were sent. He indicates that they had poor planning and that no one was in
charge. But, it may be that they have decided to come back for another hit when the next
false flag chem attack is perpetrated probably soon. The chem thing is all they have that is
working for them and that isn't much. I finally got emails announcing anti-war protests by
ANSWER and I hope they will continue. I have been to some strong street actions with ANSWER
in the past although impacting these monsters is nearly impossible.
I agree with you that Russia should flood both Syria and Iran with anti missile systems
and they should do it now.
It looks like the Duma gonna finally sanction the US back with some pretty good things
including stuffing US "intellectual" property rights in the US ass by turning Russian
companies loose to use patents without paying license fees. They can also fuck up US space
program and rocket programs.
Actually, Saker, I think what US empire is really up to is to create enough mass hysteria
globally that they think they can build some kind of "coalition of the truly stupid" to
attack Russia and take it. I honestly think they are that stupid and desperate. Because if
that is not it then at some point they are going to have to back off, admit defeat and be
seen as the losers they really are. They just don't have the basic decency to do that.
Yes you are right about the U.S. intention to create mass hysteria , and a " coalition of the
truly stupid."
The lead item on RNZ news at 5 a.m. this morning referred to the silly little girl who is
currently P.M. of N.Z. condoning the U.K. /France / U.S. strike; presumably she will also
support the Israel strike against Iranian assets in Syria.
Every day , the lies and propaganda start in NZ, and are halfway around the world before the
truth gets out of bed.
Count on it. Thank you Rupert.
And Rupert's whores are at it in Australia as well, reporting on the grovelling snot bag
Turnbull's obsequious offering of more Australian lives to lubricate the Anglo Zionist
machine. I say lets put his kids in the first jet to attack Syrian positions and see if he
still thinks it is worth the cost.
In 2001 Australians have marched in their thousands to protest the imminent strike on
Irak.
Today they blabbered non stop about the the 'tampered ball' and protesting the punishment of
the cheaters and hounding the pedophile clergy.
I appreciate your comments but do not share you perceptions. Reportedly, the USA informed
Russia before they dropped the bombs. Does that make sense? Reportedly, they bombed a factory
which has not been in use since 2013. Reportedly, either no one was killed or 4 unfortunate
civilians were killed. Reportedly, no Russian personnel or equipment was affected.
Reportedly, the 3 attacking countries dropped 103 bombs and 71 or 73 or whatever were
intercepted, yet the USA said the complete opposite. "We are confident ..". Amazingly, the
USA has developed a bomb, or a method of bombing, which, if it hits a factory producing
chemical weapons and therefore is full of lethal substances, will not, repeat not, dissipate
these into the air, thereby insuring that no one will be affected!!! (emphasis mine) I agree
that some people might think that the attack actually did something, but who are they? Nobody
I know. My perception is that people working in the our government are isolated and out of
touch and they are the ones who had to be satisfied(?). I also think that Mr. Trump is so
surrounded by liars that he can trust no one. He stated he wanted the US to leave Syria,
then, shortly after, the USA performed this inane bombing attack. Maybe this is Mr. Trump's
response to the immense pressure I think he gets from those around him. It was very confusing
but certainly did not make me feel that our country is great again – I am just
embarrassed. I feel very badly for the citizens of Syria who unfortunately live in a country
located in the center of the world, surrounded by all that gas and oil.
I have seen reports that said they did, and I have seen reports that Moscow was furious
because they were not given notice on the deconfliction channel.
"The western general public is so terminally zombified that false flag attacks can now be
announced 4 weeks in advance"
Even though you live in the US, you seem sadly out of touch with what Americans know and
believe. "America" is NOT your blog audience, any more than "America" is Donald Trump and the
US State Department.
I found out last Thursday that my own mother took seriously the idea that Assad gassed
people in Douma. So, yesterday I asked 4 of my coworkers what they thought about the US led
missile attack. I was actually more interested in finding out whether they believed Assad had
any culpability in Douma.
It turns out that everybody approved, including a guy that I knew for a fact was a Trump
supporter (who, as a candidate, would not have approved of meddling in Syria, or at least
pretended to be such). This particular guy explained by asking a question: "If you saw your
neighbor beating his wife to a pulp, would you jump in to stop him, or just stand around and
let it happen?"
The sense I got from everybody is that intervention was a moral act. Most zombies that I
have seen in movies are, at best, amoral (assuming they have no agency).
Consequently, you are misusing the term "zombified"!
The appropriate term is "brainwashed". They believe in a pseudo-reality.
That is why the absence of a 4th category in your graph is potentially tragic. You are
missing the category of communication/education, which would encompass benign (truthful)
propaganda and benign (truthful) psyops, targeting the American public directly (American
elites more indirectly). While this was better done as prevention, the resultiing
de-legitimization of the American War Party could be thought of as retaliation.
To a person looking at things in a detached manner, prevention (going forward) is better
than retaliation (looking backwards), but such considerations are secondary to solving the
problem of the ignorance and brainwashing of American citizens. Doing so would provide at
least fertile soil for the emergence of corrective political pressure from the bottom,
up.
Do you SERIOUSLY think your own efforts, plus Russian government efforts in the form of
rt.com and sputniknews.com, are sufficient to deprogram and educate Americans? (There is no
disrespect for you efforts intended by asking this question.)
Then please do the following: learn how to use the video feature on your smart phone, or
tablet; then do a walking video poll of passersby on some crowded street near you. (You
probably won't be allowed to do so in a shopping mall, but it might be worth a try.) I
suggest you use the same technique I used when doing a video poll of TPP awareness amongst
the public (which proved, to my satisfaction, that polls showing popular acceptance were a
complete fraud; most American HAD NEVER HEARD OF THE TPP, Pew notwithstanding). I asked
people "May I ask you 1 yes/no question?" About half the people won't give you the time of
day, even for that. Of those that do, maybe 1/3 will be interested in talking about it;
typically, they they will ask the same question of you.
Afterwards, tabulate the results, upload the video to youtube, and write it up here.
Better yet, do this and ask you audience to do the same. Then, include the links to their
youtube channels in your write-up.
You should try to get your results (which are almost sure to be similar to mine) to the
Russian government, because they act AS IF they had the same viewpoint as you.
Putin could reach millions of Americans by tweeting to @realDonaldTrump, but doesn't
bother. I have to wonder, why? If he assumed that the American public are all "zombies",
instead of containing moral but brainwashed citizens in their 10's if not 100's of millions,
then his lack of action would make more sense.
He'd be wrong, but at least his actions would logically follow from his mistaken
notions.
It is over. It was over in 2000 and the hammer came down in 2006. With the defeat of the
anglo/zionists in Lebanon by Hezbollah it marked the beginning of the end for the occultists.
Hezbollah was not actually fighting the iof but rather the combined forces of western zionist
imperialism. And they won.
Iraq, Libya and now Syria are a direct result of the ouster of the baby killers from Lebanon.
The chaos in the ME – the Arab bullshit spring – the propping up of the gulf
monarchy muppets is panic mode by the zionist oligarchy. There is no policy only blind
reactionary behaviour – this is evidenced even in the propaganda of the MSM which not
only makes no sense but speaks continuous transparent lies.
The west has been forced to use moderate and not so moderate head chopper orc mercs to fight
its battles. Proxy war by orc is a sign of desperation and with the collapse of the hegemon
on the horizon.
The Russians and the axis of resistance is simply trying to mitigate the damage that the
oligarchy can still do and keep the US and the western vassals from imploding.
I think the UK is exhibiting signs of genuine fear because it has dawned on the UK elite
after the miserable performance of their Three Amigo's missile strike that Russia has a
special present for instigators of ww3.
The great harlot is going to fall. A smoking ruin no man will ever wish to tread. England
has whored itself to the gallows.
N, it is not over, that much , we agree on. But the Chinese, I believe are not short sighted
nor are they stupid. The will probably not do much for Syria, but I think they will raise
their voice immediately if Russia is seriously threatened. China knows if Russia falls, she
is next. Iran knows this too. So I cant see other than these three will have to stand
together. But other may join India, possibly, Pakistan, possibly. And possibly further some
smaller countries.
But I am 100 % certain that in all these countries, the people, the knowledgeable of the
people, we know that if we end up, in a unipolar world, we will be slaves and remain slaves,
forever.
And those countries I just summed up are more than 3 Billion.
Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Who knows. But
Better die standing, than live crawling.
I think you underestimate how hated and despised the US is around the world. In most of
the non western world, the United States story of oppression and murder is very well known
and it is not forgotten. But fear keeps people in bondage, and the US has shown it will spare
no excesses to reach its goal, so when the battle comes it will be long bloody and
brutal.
And yes it will come.
From today's Global Times editorial, semi-official organ of the Chinese politburo:
"However, the stronger a country is, the greater the responsibility it has to maintain
world peace and order. The military actions of the US and its allies have breached the
framework of the United Nations and violated the foundation of modern international
relations. If the will of Washington and the West represents the will of all mankind and they
can punish whoever they want, why do we need the UN, or international law?
Without UN authorization, the US, UK and France behaved like rogues. No matter how
touching the excuses they find for themselves, they cannot change the fact that they were
lynching Syria without due evidence "
In a White House known for chaos, the process of developing the U.S. response to the Syrian government's alleged latest gas attack
was proceeding with uncharacteristic deliberation, including several national security briefings for President Trump.
But then Wednesday morning, Trump upended it all with a tweet -- warning Russia, the Syrian government's backer, to "get ready"
because American missiles "will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' "
White House advisers were surprised by the missive and found it "alarming" and "distracting," in the words of one senior official.
They quickly regrouped and, together with Pentagon brass, continued readying Syria options for Trump as if nothing had happened.
But the Twitter disruption was emblematic of a president operating on a tornado of impulses -- and with no clear strategy -- as
he faces some of the most consequential decisions of his presidency, including Syria, trade policy and the Russian interference probe
that threatens to overwhelm his administration.
"It's just like everybody wakes up every morning and does whatever is right in front of them," said one West Wing aide, speaking
on the condition of anonymity to share a candid opinion. "Oh, my God, Trump Tower is on fire. Oh, my God, they raided Michael Cohen's
office. Oh, my God, we're going to bomb Syria. Whatever is there is what people respond to, and there is no proactive strategic thinking."
The president has been particularly livid in the wake of Monday's FBI raids on the home, office and hotel room of Cohen, his longtime
personal attorney. In the days after, he has seriously contemplated a shake-up at the Justice Department in the hopes of curbing
the expanding probe by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, whose referral led to the Cohen raids. Trump is considering firing
Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who is overseeing the probe, several people familiar with Trump's private comments said.
By Trump's admission Wednesday on Twitter, Mueller's investigation into Russian election interference and possible obstruction
of justice has consumed "tremendous time and focus." And in denying allegations of wrongdoing, the president seemed to equivocate
in a parenthetical aside: "No Collusion or Obstruction (other than I fight back)," he wrote.
On trade, meanwhile, the president is grappling with the potential economic fallout of his threatened tariffs, especially within
the agriculture sector, which could harm some of the rural states that carried him to electoral victory -- all against the backdrop
of his ongoing effort to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement more favorably for the United States.
Trump also finds himself facing the surprise retirement of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), signaling more turmoil for the
fractious Republican Party heading into the midterm elections.
These and other pivotal developments come as many of the guardrails that previously helped stabilize the president -- from West
Wing aides to clear policy processes -- have been cast aside, with little evident organization or long-term strategy emanating from
the White House.
This portrait of Trump in the current moment comes from interviews with 21 administration officials, outsider advisers, lawmakers
and confidants, many of them speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details and conversations.
Save for his Wednesday morning tweet, the president's Syria deliberations have largely been the exception to the chaos engulfing
the White House, underscoring the high stakes of a decision, White House officials said.
President Trump, second from right, speaks in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Monday. (Susan Walsh/AP)
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday afternoon that Trump continues to review options for a military
strike in Syria and that his tweet should not be read as an announcement of planned action.
"We're maintaining that we have a number of options, and all of those options are still on the table," Sanders said. "Final decisions
haven't been made on that front."
The National Security Council met Wednesday afternoon at the White House, chaired by Vice President Pence, to finalize options
that could be presented to the president, Sanders said. She said Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, national security adviser John Bolton
and other senior officials have been in regular contact with their counterparts from Israel, Saudi Arabia, France, the United Kingdom
and other partners around the world as the administration weighs its military options for Syria.
Yet Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said Wednesday afternoon that he had yet to hear from Trump
or other administration officials about impending action in Syria.
"I have no idea. So far, it appears to me to be bluster," Corker said. "Then I saw a tweet come out about us working with Russia
right after we're getting ready to bomb them, so I mean, who knows? Unfortunately, there are a lot of things announced by the administration
that never come to pass or evolve."
The more general question of U.S. engagement in Syria has confounded and divided the administration. Officials at the White House
and Pentagon, for instance, were blindsided by Trump's pronouncement at a rally in Ohio in late March that U.S. troops would be leaving
Syria "very soon," and in the first hours after the speech, they scrambled to get a sense of what he meant.
Trump initially told aides that he wanted U.S. soldiers and Marines to leave in 48 hours -- an impossible timeline that alarmed
the Pentagon and sent officials racing to dissuade him, two U.S. officials said.
Eventually, Mattis and others persuaded Trump to give the military another six months to wipe out the remnants of the Islamic
State. The timeline was far from ideal but was viewed as a major victory compared with Trump's original timeline, officials said.
Senior U.S. officials describe a president who is operating largely on impulse, with little patience for the advice of his top
aides. "A decision or statement is made by the president, and then the principals -- Mattis or Pompeo or Kelly -- come in and tell
him we can't do it," said one senior administration official. "When that fails, we reverse-engineer a policy process to match whatever
the president said."
On a potential shake-up at the Justice Department, Trump has been receiving a range of advice and has sent mixed signals about
his intentions. Within the White House, advisers have largely counseled caution and urged him not to make changes. White House Chief
of Staff John F. Kelly and counsel Donald McGahn have tried to calm Trump several times, as has Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer handling
the Russia probe.
Yet others, including many in the president's orbit who don't work in the White House, have counseled a more aggressive approach,
saying the raid of Cohen's home and business crossed a line. This advice has left White House staff on edge, nervous about what the
president might do.
Trump, for instance, yelled about Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions for several hours Monday and has continued to
complain about them since. But some described his complaints as just "venting," with one outside adviser saying that while the president
is "steamed and unhappy," that doesn't necessarily mean he's prepared to take action.
"I heard or saw nothing that would suggest he was planning to make a change at the Department of Justice," said Alan Dershowitz,
a retired Harvard Law School professor who dined at the White House with Trump on Tuesday night. He said they mainly discussed the
Middle East and Russia.
Rosenstein, meanwhile, seems to have made peace with any eventuality, said one person who has had a conversation with him. He
understands he might be squarely in Trump's crosshairs, and "is ready for whatever comes and confident in his own behavior."
Trump has also devoted a portion of his days to trade policy. Over the past eight weeks, the president has initiated trade disputes
with several of the largest countries in the world, driving forward pronouncements without fully vetting most of them with key aides.
In some cases, he has backpedaled on his vow to impose steep tariffs on countries such as Germany, Canada and Mexico. But he has
also refused to waive tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Japan, a major U.S. security ally and trading partner.
Some Senate Republicans fear that Trump's loosely formed trade war with China could end up cratering the agriculture industry
at a time when many Midwestern farmers are preparing to plant crops. China has promised to impose tariffs on U.S. farm exports as
a way of retaliating against Trump's planned tariffs. The White House promised to backstop U.S. farm groups, but they have yet to
share what they would do or how they would do it.
"I don't know what kind of cockamamie scheme we could come up with that would be fair," Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said Tuesday.
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) was similarly frustrated by Trump's trade agenda. "I think the president has some ideas
about trade that are not generally shared by the Republican conference," he said.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told his frustrated ranks during a closed-door lunch this week to call Trump and air their
trade-related worries, according to a person familiar with the Kentucky Republican's remarks. Roberts and others planned to meet
with Trump on Thursday to discuss the matter.
I am not under the illusion that the US is the cause of all the world's ills, but if our government had at least some half-sane
foreign policy which involved cooperation with Russia and China--among other nations--on issues of mutual concern, the world would
be a far better place. Instead it's nothing but our-way-or-the-highway confrontation.
Our exceptionalism blinds us to any consideration that there are other people, places, and nations with valid interests. Working
through those interests with the goal of mutual benefit to all parties would truly make America great again, not this nonsense.
The world is not always a zero sum game.
Wouldn't want to be in Putin's seat right now - he's got some very tough calls to make, and none of the choices are good.
If Russia were really the US's enemy, it might be argued that Trump had done good to put him in that position. But why on earth
should Russia be regarded as an enemy of the US, except when the US chooses to make it one with actions like this proposed war
against its ally?
Col Lang, thanks for all you've done in service to the U.S and continue to do by getting this message out to the rest of the nation
through your network.
pat, i am going to go out on a limb and say i don't believe any attack will
happen soon.. if anything happens i think april 24th is close to the
time it will happen... and if that date passes, i think it is unlikely
to happen in the way it is being anticipated at present.. and - wait for it..... that is based off the astrology!
What I see as a major factor is that Russia probably can't afford a small tit-for-tat exchange. If Russia and the US knock down
a couple of each other's planes and then try to cool things off militarily, Russia will almost certainly face massive economic
consequences, probably involving the cancellation of the Nord Stream II at a minimum. This means that Russia needs to either do
nothing or respond with such force that the west cannot simply change tactics and critically escalate the economic pressure.
Please do not misunderstand me, I respect your struggle, Colonel, even if it is futile.
Do you remember Iraq's desperate attempts to avoid war in 2003?
All those efforts, all the massive protests in the West were to no avail, because the Empire had made up its mind that it wanted
war, and was perfectly willing to lie to get that war.
"Mobile WMD factories"
"Yellow cake"
"Aluminum tubes" ZOMG. Aluminum. Tubes.
In spite of crimes on a hitlerian scale, nobody in the United States or UK leadership paid any price at all, not on a personal
level, not on a professional level. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair and the others walk the streets freely, treated as Elder Statesmen
and Wise Leaders, in spite of the fact that they are directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, trillions of dollars
wasted, and not only that, but every doomsayer's prediction with regard to Iraq came to pass.
If the west had one tenth the respect for "the rule of law" that it professes, every last one of these Elder Statesmen and
more would hang. At the same time, if Saddam Hussein truly had nuclear weapons, the west would have to think twice, just as it
cannot force its will on North Korea.
The moral of this sad story? There is no reasoning with sociopaths. They can be dealt with only from a position of strength,
if you have rewards to give them that they cannot otherwise take, or punishments to had out that they cannot avoid.
Reward and punishment is what sociopaths understand.
lol seems like a lifetime ago. A sad development is that Rumsfeld's 'you to go war...' had entered the national psyche as a
saying to be paraphrased. Guilty.
So who were the sociopaths in the room when Hitler allowed the British to depart Dunkirk; when Hitler offered numerous peace offers
to Britain; when the German government offered more-than-generous terms to Poland to settle the Danzig question?
You wrote earlier, Sid Finster,
"Sociopaths care nothing for logic or morality of they stabs in the way of something they want. Like the Reichstag fire.
I don't understand why people refuse to see that we are run by sociopaths, or, at a minimum, by people indistinguishable from
sociopaths."
In a recent comment the failure of comparison of Syria to the Reichstag fire was explained.
Reductio ad Hitlerum is equally intellectually suspect.
How did so many people get to be sociopaths? I suggest that one element is that almost the entire nation has been systematically
misinformed about its own history, and trained like puppy-dogs to load all culpability on 'that guy,' thereby escaping accountability
and also insight, characteristics of -- a sociopath.
Before we start diagnosing sociopathology and offering "reward and punishment" treatment, we might do well to do precisely
what major decision makers in the current situation have failed to do: examine the situation from all sides, rationally, based
on sound evidence (movies & TV don't count).
Rep. Carol Maloney and seven other congressmen are sponsoring the "Never Again Education Act" to "teach American Students about
the Holocaust."
https://www.algemeiner.com/... This is an extremely dangerous measure that must be struck down before it takes hold. The Holocaust
is already taught in US public schools, and taught in a way that permits no critical analysis but only acquiescence. When a school
district in California assigned students to study the issue and prepare a critical analysis of it, the school district was severely
chastised, made to rescind and counteract the assignment, monitored for several years to ensure "Holocaust compliance." This is
not an intellectually sound study of history, this is dogmatic tyranny. It produces --- sociopaths.
On several occasions, I have encountered individuals who are psychologically incapable of constructing boundaries for their personal
conduct. Instead of determining what they should not do for themselves, they rely on their boss (or anyone else who's above them)
to knock them back when they go to far. And then they get to the top...
Interesting develops in Russia reported by John Helmer - a potential major shift in power from oligarchs to defense interests
and indications that the government to be formed by Putin will essentially be a war cabinet (and without Medvedev). All of this
seems driven by the unrelating and largely imaginary criticism of Russia by the US, UK, etc. and the lack of any willingness to
have honest assessments of the negative claims like the Syria "chemical attacks":
http://johnhelmer.org/?p=17...
Last Russian Presidential elections were not about electing the President of Russian Federation, they were about electing a Supreme
Commander. Most Russians understand that, US national security apparatus and media do not. It is simply beyond their grasp and
experiences.
I am afraid this is a fait accompli. Thank you for trying. At least your honor is clean, which is much more than can be said for
too many in a position to influence. I weep for our nation.
As an aside, Trump won't be re-elected, but I don't think he cares at this point - he may not even complete his first term. PT
was wrong. The coup has not failed. It marches on. Trump's lack of character has revealed itself. He should make a stand now on
his principles. Engaging in war with Syria and Russia isn't going to save his presidency. They will overthrow him anyhow as an
example of what will happen to anyone else that The People elect as oppose to the deep state.
Eric:
I voted for Trump but he lost my support over a year ago.
Time to finally accept the fact that Trump has no principles.
Trump's statement last week about pulling troop's out of Syria was a half-assed attempt at cover for what came about a few days
later. Mulshine's try at running interference for Trump is a comical continuation of that cover. It's a dog and pony show. Don't
fall for it.
Now everyone will have a reason to get rid of Trump, then bankrupt his family to boot. Not to worry, Bombing Bolton will win
another war and we'll be greated as liberators from Damascus to Moscow. Evidence? Who cares if the evidence is even more fabricated
than the Fusion GPS crap. Would anyone in the intellegence community lie? On a bright note Little Rocket Man won't have to worry
about his future after Big Rocket Man proves his point.
Eric Newhill,
I fear you may be right. Trump is getting hammered from every side right now.
He may extricate himself, but the quicksand in the swamp is getting deeper.
The funny part is that russiagate conspiracy theorists will scream "Putin puppet!" even as the ICBMs are launched. The "Trump
is fighting the Deep State" conspiracy theorists will insist that this is eleven-dimensional chess or something equally stupid,
even as they go up in a mushroom cloud.
At least it would be funny, if it were not actually happening.
Then again, just when all appears lost a glimmer of hope is offered. Teresa May is hedging now. Maybe it wasn't gas. Maybe
Assad didn't do it - inspectors are needed on the ground at the site:
http://www.breitbart.com/lo...
This is my hometown guy. I was surprised by the number of people there (as well as other places) who are absolutely 100% convinced
about the fact that there was a chemical attack and Assad must be guilty because they saw the footage of the victims foaming from
their mouths on TV. Yikes.
Perhaps I should blame the networks. In all of the coverage that I saw, they simply streamed out the video as if it came from
one of their foreign correspondents. If the networks had any sense of professionalism they would have put up a caption,
'This footage is unverified, it was obtained by rebel activists'
thanks for stating all that pat.. i am happy to see your word is reaching some of the msm! can you get your press secretary to
run your ideas by the nyt, wapo and wsj too? that would be a switch for what they regularly offer!
your comment confirms the idea that alternative views are not being heard in the msm... the msm appears to be one big hall of
mirrors with generally the same message being sent out - one that conforms with the ziocons..
I may be dating myself here, but I can still remember 25 years ago, when Col. Lang was a regular guest on the old McNeill/Lehrer
News Hour on PBS. He always gave excellent, informed commentary. I was so glad a couple of years ago, when--quite by accident--I
found this blog on the internet. It's been a go-to source for me ever since. It's a pity that informed experts like Col. Lang
aren't often featured by our MSM anymore; but the again, that's why I now mostly avoid the MSM.
I think the real problem is not so much ideology but the fact that the current crop of journalists have little experience with
dust-ups in the "developing" world and therefore have to trust inside-the-Beltway "experts" who have no expertise.
House Speaker Paul Ryan to retire. "Paul Ryan is abandoning the ship before it
sinks - Chicago Tribune". No doubt to get his cut. But, I guess he never got the briefing
that if the USA goes to war with the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin has more
than enough nuclear weapons to spare one to target Janesville, WI. Will he have time to realize that it all was for nothing?
I believe this episode demonstrates the soundness of my observation a few months ago that the best course of action for the
United States is to cut and run from Syria as well as Afghanistan and a number of other such places.
US has demonstrated that she could be easily manipulated and her actions could lead to World War III.
The neocons seem to see WWIII as a feature and not a bug.
Witness the articles suggesting that we can "win" a nuclear war. I am reminded of the scene from Dr. Strangelove when General
Buck Turgidson suggested "not more than ten, twenty million dead, TOPS!"
"... At the moment if I had to guess, it will be a decapitation strike at Damascus along with wide ranging attacks on Syrian air force targets and possibly other regime targets as well. And my guess is that the Russians probably won't respond beyond shooting down some of the incoming missiles. So like Shayrat, but rather more murderous and widespread. ..."
"... It should be remembered though that even if there is no big Russian retaliation, that doesn't mean the White House nutters were "right", any more than a man who pulls the trigger once in a game of Russian Roulette and gets away with it was "right". ..."
Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia,
because they will be coming, nice and new and "smart!" You shouldn't be partners with a Gas
Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!
What does he mean "new" meaning new technology, and smarter? not like the ones he fired last
year? So Russians should think twice if they can intercept and fold their hand. What does he
think this is a poker game? what if they don't fold, does he think about that. Does anybody
in DC thinks what would be the consequence if Russian retaliate and fire at the missile
launchers, are we ready to fold or we will go to war with Russia? what the F*ing morons run
this country.
" What does he think this is a poker game? what if they don't fold, does he think about
that. Does anybody in DC thinks what would be the consequence if Russian retaliate and fire
at the missile launchers, are we ready to fold or we will go to war with Russia? "
Seems clear they think the Russians will fold, and if they don't they can be beaten in
theatre at an acceptable cost.
Presumably they see the risks of escalation to regional war, or all out war, or even
nuclear war as within acceptable bounds. Others might disagree with them (especially since
the pot contains nothing worth having to justify the risk for ordinary folk), but they are
the ones making the decisions.
Yes some like Netanyahu and Alan Darshwitz think it's a bluff worthy of risk to pay,
especially since Americans like me and you are the ones who will end up paying the price of
their hand. Do you think it's a worth while bluff? Colonel Lang with more experience than any
of decision makers, thinks not.
Still have my fingers crossed for a measured 'response' in the vein of the missiles that
missed the deserted target after the first false flag gas attack. He and Putin may be on the
same page.
Seems like a long shot to me, but your guess is as good as mine.
At the moment if I had to guess, it will be a decapitation strike at Damascus along with
wide ranging attacks on Syrian air force targets and possibly other regime targets as well.
And my guess is that the Russians probably won't respond beyond shooting down some of the
incoming missiles. So like Shayrat, but rather more murderous and widespread.
Where we are the following morning, who knows? If Assad is still alive and the strikes
aren't too extensive, nothing much is changed. Although of course if the anti-Syrian forces
can stage one false provocation and get US intervention, they can stage another. And another,
ad nauseam.
It should be remembered though that even if there is no big Russian retaliation, that
doesn't mean the White House nutters were "right", any more than a man who pulls the trigger
once in a game of Russian Roulette and gets away with it was "right".
You need to stop thinking Russia is a super power, it was once, but not anymore. Your
Navy rusts along side the dock while combat ships sink at anchor in your harbors. FYI,
your navy has a problem with fires on ships too... Who knows all the other "errors" your
weapons and planes will experience under hard sustained combat. You should also stop
worrying about European NATO because they are just a bunch of little girls and a low
threat. The USA however is "IN FACT" a super power stand alone, not some Russia-Chinese
wet dream army. If Russia, China, or Russia-China-Iran start a war with the US, there
will be no more rules that normally constrain the US military. You will see whole land
divisions and ocean fleets wiped out like so many Wagner Groups, and it will be a very
sad time for everyone...
Russia is still a superpower, just one with a different set of capabilities. The USA
is so clearly number one in it's Palpatine like ability to move massive amounts of force
into countries with limited size and means of defense. Russia is geared more toward
making people pay for a conflict with her and her forces are designed toward defense and
imposing costs. Russia's surface to air systems are second to none, plentiful and attack
with frightening velocity. Russia has large volumes of armour in reserve and most
ominous, Russia has been busy since 2006 deploying hundreds of new ICBM's which have
greater take off speeds and are capable of avoiding missile defenses. That's scary
because the greater firepower of which you so glibly brag about on the part of the USA
leads to the inevitable conclusion that Russia has to perform a massive first strike to
stave off state elimination. It's almost as if both sides in a conflict will be channeled
toward strategic first strike before the other does. So, crow on...
Do not under estimate 'little girls.' Also, It seems the US military has never
followed rules unless they suit their agenda. But you are correct in suggesting they
represent a global evil.
Yeah, go on... walk your trash talk and watch some supersonic Chinese anti-ship
missiles turn the U.S. navy into fish food, while your stone-age tomahawks and harpoon
missiles will be joke of the century.
"... You think in one dimensional. The warfare & alliance is moving very dynamic, Russia & China are working in all fronts together if you watch carefully. Military & energy are appetizer. Petrol Yuan & BRI are main course. Joint dev of C929 civil plane, space program, agri, .its Eurasia century. ..."
"... Skripal false flag & 2 dozen countries expelling diplomats is full display of bizarre brute force destroying entire international norms. You need to resist before more countries succumb to West pressure. ..."
"... If West can orchestrate diplomatic boycott of Russia, won't China be next? When you see smoke, there is fire. When neighbor house is burning, it will spread to yours. But here you are saying, not my problem let China save its own ass until fire spread to yours. ..."
Oh, we have a copypaste contest? Okay then, i'd copy here my reply at saker's blog
too.
No, i just wanna remind you again, Russia & China have to fight as a team, each with
their best strength, Russia-military, China-economic.
> China will be blackmailed into submission.
Wooop! Then it is not "existential threat" for China.
Clash for power, clash for sovereignty, clash of prosperity -- but not for survival.
If one energy supply is been fully controlled, you are doomed.
> Russia & China are working closely
Which does not mean China's role is making harsh dyplomatic statements in favor of
Russia. At least it was not so before today. So i think it is not today either.
It has very wide implication, West is able to pressure dozens of countries to bend on
false flag, it will spread further to Asia & elsewhere. China will be next. Nib the
bud.
Also remember that Chinese social mindset is build upon idea of "indebting with gifts
and aids" and then requesting payback when they need it.
Since when has the West & Russians, or anyone are more kind than Chinese, giving
without expectation of return of at least gratitude from a Russian like you?
Which means Russia should be very wary about accepting any help from China unless it
wishes to be seen by China as a deeply indebted beggar incapable of sustaining itself.
Yes Russia should, there is never free lunch. But would it be better for Russia to team up
with China to enjoy economic benefits at fair term with a safe South border, than getting
raped by the West again with another hostile South neighbor (China could join West to plunder
Russia, taking back outer Manchuria Siberia land).
And since diplomatic situation for Russia is not deadly critical I do not think Russia
needed that newspaper article. If Russia would request China's support of the kind -- it
would be in official diplomatic venues like UN.
No need to wait for UK US to close all Russia embassies with global sanction like what NK
get. See further my friend.
> Russia needs to save Syria for its own skin
> Iran needs to save its skin
But is it so for China? Is China in critical need of sovereign and friendly Syria? I
doubt it.
Sure Syria is not China concern, but for aftermath implications.
- Stop West eastward
aggression. - BRI node in ME - Uyghur terrorists - West control of all ME Energy supply
Was that article reaction to some new threat to Syria, to russia, or to China itself?
And i believe in the latter option. This article is not linked to any recent events around
Russia, it is caused by Sino-American relations shift.
You think in one dimensional. The warfare & alliance is moving very dynamic,
Russia & China are working in all fronts together if you watch carefully. Military &
energy are appetizer. Petrol Yuan & BRI are main course. Joint dev of C929 civil plane,
space program, agri, .its Eurasia century.
Skripal affair is much less than Olympics was. Even European states many did not jumped
Skripal wagon.
who care about Olympics beside some bruise Russkies pride, Skripal false flag & 2
dozen countries expelling diplomats is full display of bizarre brute force destroying entire
international norms. You need to resist before more countries succumb to West pressure.
Open your narrow vision.
-- but if Russia would soemhow gets politically isolated from the West, what bad is it
for China? Russia would become more dependent on China, like many of the trade with West
would had to go through Chinese "laundry". China gets more influence over Russia. Russia
gets much more limited in its options. Good (for China) develoment, why hurry to cancel it
before Russia even asked for ?
You have asked yourself a good qn, why not joint the West vultures to feast on Russia
bear? Sure, West aggression to Russia is godsend gift to China. But Chinese leaders think
further than greedy West capitalist. Better to have strong Russia as safe Northern backyard
than a Nato military threat encirclement (which Russia dream to join but too bad,
rejected)
> You are silly self center viewer
Frankly, it is exactly the opposite here.
It is you who claim Russia being behing that article in Global Time.
It is me who claims Russia has no any relation to the timing and wording of that
article.
I never claim Russia is solely behind that article. Its entire geopolitical dynamic
situation. If West can orchestrate diplomatic boycott of Russia, won't China be next?
When you see smoke, there is fire. When neighbor house is burning, it will spread to yours.
But here you are saying, not my problem let China save its own ass until fire spread to
yours.
> China special force is operating in Syria.
Maybe it is, but seems no one ever saw those operations.
Open secret. Like Russia, its to fight Chinese terrorists there instead of in China. Also
real war game training by Russia, too good deal to miss.
> Lot of weapons supply to SAA.
Maybe they are, but can you name those Chinese weapons and show me where SAA is
employing it?
It was reported in open news, Syria visited Beijing, then China announced it had old
weapon contracts to fulfil..who will pay? Likely those infantry weapons, ammunition,
artillery, TAW, uniform & gears, whatever construction materials while Russia take care
of high tech equip like S400.
> always throwing allies under bus whenever possible,
.because Putin is evil and just enjoys every opportunity to do bad thing. Always.
I wish i would hear somethign remotely creative from you.
> hence Russia deserve to be raped by West like 1990 is natural.
Oh, i see. Yet another russophobic preaching that "Russians should repent and repay,
repay, and repent", then frustrated when Russia shrugs this lecture off.
I'm Russophile & Putin's fan if you read my comments history. But fact is Russia did
that, which is foolish short sighted. If West has offered Russia G8 on equal term + Nato,
Russia won't hesitate to throw Syria, Iran, China immediately under bus. Then be ready for
another rape fantasy. The West just don't love Russians, no matter how much she plead &
give.
If all Russians think like you, now let China get all the blows since its their trade war,
so Russkies should rest & enjoy the firework, then another bigger 1990′s rape is
awaiting your country.
You have just shown Chinese what its like to be in alliance with Russia.
"... It doesn't matter that China has a larger economy. Their economy can be suffocated so long as they are denied a link to Europe through Eurasia. ..."
The point is not to block off China, the point is to block off China AND Russia from
Europe. Also trade from other Eurasian countries is going to be discouraged unless it goes
through the Straits that the West controlls, but obviously Russia and China are the big
players here.
Russia has a lot of gas and natural resources that the West and ME countries do not want
going to Europe.
And, as you said, the west has many ways of neutralizing China. So to the West, Russia is
the bigger threat since either country could act as a bridge to Europe but Russia has many
more paths of creating these links than China has.
Russia is being singled out, and is being targeted before China, because of Mackinder and
the need to control the "Heartland". Read up on Mackinder as he has a huge influence on the
west.
The empire sees Russia as the greater threat because only Russia and not China is a
threat to control the Heartland and thus the world. This is the real motivation behind
everything.
It doesn't matter that China has a larger economy. Their economy can be
suffocated so long as they are denied a link to Europe through Eurasia.
You're reading your own narrative rather than what's in front of you. Russia isn't going
to up and blow away no matter what. Their relationship with China is a matter of course as
well, though you vastly over-state the supposed synergy between the two.
My point is that a diminished Russia is obviously no threat to China and clearly in the
long term interests of China if they wish to be the chief architect and manager of the
Eurasian belt of which they have become enamored.
Taken in broader strokes, a world in which nuclear apocalypse isn't on the menu, due to
elites favoring their own survival, is one in which the West invariably declines into
obscurity due to their ruling class having no qualms about destroying their nations and
states in the name of near term personal benefits. In such a world the only question is who
will take the leading role of new geopolitical master.
China is already poised for this position, but having an assuredly weakened Russian gives
them the sort of leverage they need to siphon out more Eurasian trade profits for their own
geopolitical aims. Geopolitical top players don't simply seek a sufficient position from
which to bargain. They seek a position from which the results of said bargain are largely
foregone.
And this is entirely consistent with Chinese foreign policy toward the West and Russia.
The former is a dead man walking with no chance of rebelling against Beijing's economic
control. The latter is a future regional partner whom they would very much like to see as a
junior when the time comes for them to abandon the western financial system and asset their
peerless status.
Exactly. Very good points. China wants weaker Russia. However China can't allow Russia to
submit to the US that's why they will be propping Russia just enough so Russia does not fold
too soon. The US and China have one common objective: they do not want Russia to hook up with
EU and Germany. Russia+EU would be the only third power that could challenge both the US and
China. That's why China is happy with Zio-Amercian meddling in Central Europe by playing
Poland and Hungary against both Germany and Russia as the wedge between them.
China does not trust Russia because they know how avaricious, unpatriotic and devoid of
any deeper nationalist doctrine and thus how unreliable are Russian elites. They know it
because they know their own Chinese elites with respect to which they must use many tools to
discipline them, the tools that Russia lacks because there sis no supreme ideological
authority. There in Russia nobody really knows who suppose to discipline whom and why.
Saker as usual is naive and let his wishful thinking hijack his analytical abilities.
Russia & China are working closely to counter the West for existential threat, deeper
& broader than what your self centered mind can imagine. Russia needs to save Syria for
its own skin, and its last ME bastion of influence. When Syria down, Israel & Saudi gas
will pipe to EU & cut off Russia lucrative EU gas deal & influence. Iran will be next
to attack, hence complete ME oil & gas come under US UK Fr control, which can be utilized
to sabotage Russia oil export.
China will be then blackmailed into submission for oil supply. Iran will be surrounded by
US allied forces everywhere, fighting West moderate terrorists. Its existential war in Syria
against West hedgmon control for Russia, China & Iran, not just propping up Assad. Russia
has overwhelming sufficient military capability to fight US allies, backed by war hardened
powerful Iran, SAA army, Hezbollah & Iraq Shiah fighters unmatched ground force.
USM knows it can't win such war without nuke, so it has to find either face saving exit or
contented with current occupied oil rich land. It got nothing to do with Trumps stupidity to
overstretch its military as you imagine.
China has been backing up Russia with big cheque book for last few years, signing hundreds
of billions deals with upfront payments to prop Russia economy for prolong war.
Global times news mostly reflected the China think tank policy that they wish to propagate
to West English speaking world. China has sensed West is hysteria tightening noose around
Russia in EU foolish solitude movement with UK.
When Russia is down, China is next, vice versa. China special force has been operating in
Syria to fight terrorists. Lot of weapons ammunition supply to SAA. Lot of money pump in to
sustain Syria war & feed millions of Syrians. Who else do you think is paying these
bills, West controlled UN Red cross?
Now China is largest economy & market by PPP term, with 50% w/w mfg capacity, its
capable to inflict unacceptable damage to US economy in trade war. EU, Japan & Korea all
have huge parts export to China for assembly, so none wanted the disastrous trade war that
will suck down global trade.
So Trumpets is blowing hot air only to blackmail China, soon it will back down as WH
already delay any tariffs to after June, seeking dialogue eagerly with Beijing.
You are just silly self centered like those Russians always throwing allies under bus,
hence Russia will find it has no true ally and will forever licking its wounds alone until
slaughtered by West.
As if it needs saying, the current ruling junta in the US absolutely does not have the
interests of the American people or the nation at large in mind, they're answering to a
different set of masters at this point.
Until we can purge the fifth column that's infested the halls of power in this country and
obviously in the UK and much of Europe - at least the EU - we'll continue to fight wars for
Zionism and all that will be left of the US and Russia when this is over will be bombed-out
nuclear wastelands, which is exactly what the Zionists want to have happen.
They did it to Germany and Russia in WWII, and they're going to do it to the US, Russia, and
possibly China in WWIII, which is spooling up as we dissect the latest maniacal machinations of
the war cabal.
Looks like neocons represent a trap in which the US society got and out of which there is not easy end. That trap
which can be fatal.
Notable quotes:
"... American power elites, the majority of whom have never served a day in uniform nor ever attended serious military academic institutions and whose expertise on serious military-technological and geopolitical issues is limited to a couple of seminars on nuclear weapons and, in the best case scenario, the efforts of the Congressional Research Service are simply not qualified to grasp the complexity, the nature, and application of military force. They simply have no reference points ..."
"... In the " Empire of Illusions ," facts simply don't matter at all. In fact, I predict that the now self-evidently useless ABM program will proceed as if nothing had happened. ..."
"... The zombified US general public won't be told what is going on, those who will understand will be marginalized and powerless to make any changes, as for the corrupt parasites who have been making millions and billions from this total waste of taxpayer money, they have way too much at stake to throw in the towel ..."
"... In fact, since the US is now run by Neocons, we can very easily predict what they will do. They will do what Neocons always do: double down. So, after it has become public knowledge that the entire US ABM deployment is useless and outdated, expect a further injection in cash into it by "patriotic" "Congresspersons" (my attempt at being politically correct!), surrounded by flags who will explain to the lobotomized public that they are "taking a firm stance" against "the Russian dictator" and that the proud US of A shall not cave in to the "Russian nuclear blackmail". These colors don't run! United we stand! Etc. etc. etc. ..."
Bringing a sense of reality to a deeply delusional Empire
The leaders of the Empire, along with their brainwashed ideological
drones , live in a world completely detached from reality. This is why Martyanov writes
that the US " still continues to reside in her bubble which insulates her from any outside
voices of reason and peace " and that Putin's speech aimed at " coercing America's
elites into, if not peace, at least into some form of sanity, given that they are currently
completely detached from the geopolitical, military and economic realities of a newly emerging
world ". Martyanov explains that:
American power elites, the majority of whom have never served a day in uniform nor ever
attended serious military academic institutions and whose expertise on serious
military-technological and geopolitical issues is limited to a couple of seminars on nuclear
weapons and, in the best case scenario, the efforts of the Congressional Research Service are
simply not qualified to grasp the complexity, the nature, and application of military force.
They simply have no reference points. Yet, being a product of the American pop-military
culture, also known as military porn and propaganda, these people -- this collection of
lawyers, political "scientists", sociologists and journalists who dominate the American
strategic kitchen which cooks non-stop delusional geopolitical and military doctrines, can
understand one thing for sure, and that is when their poor dears get a bulls-eye on their
backs or foreheads.
The fact that in the real world these elites have had a bulls-eye on their backs for decades
doesn't change the fact that they also managed to convince themselves that they could remove
that bulls-eye by means of withdrawing from the ABM treaty and by surrounding Russia with
anti-missile launchers. The fact that some (many? most?) US politicians realized, at least in
the back of their minds, that their ABM systems would never truly protect the US from a Russian
counter-strike did not really matter because there were some uniquely American psychological
factors which made the notion of an ABM system irresistibly attractive:
1) An ABM system promised the US impunity : impunity is, along with military superiority,
one of the great American myths (as discussed here ). From Reagan
with this "weapons which kill weapons" to the current crisis in Korea, Americans have always
strived for impunity for their actions abroad: let all countries drown in an ocean of fire,
murder and mayhem as long as our "homeland" remains the untouchable sacrosanct citadel. Since
WWII Americans have killed many millions of people abroad, but when 9/11 came (nevermind that
it was obviously a false flag) the country went into something like clinical shock from the
loss of about 3'000 innocent civilians. Soviet, and then later, Russian nuclear weapons
promised to deliver many tens of millions of deaths if the USSR/Russia was attacked and that is
why spinning the fairy tale about an ABM "shield" was so appealing even if it was
technologically speaking either a pipe-dream (Reagan's "Star Wars") or an extremely limited
system capable of stopping maybe a few missiles at most (the current ABM system in Europe).
Again, facts don't matter at all, at least not in American politics or in the US collective
psyche.
2) An ABM system promised a huge financial bonanza for the fantastically corrupt US
Military-Industrial Complex for which millions of Americans work and which made many of them
fantastically rich. Frankly, I suspect that many (most?) folks involved in the ABM programs
fully realized that this was a waste of time, but as long as they were getting their bank
accounts filled with money, they simply did not care: hey, they pay me – I will take
it!
3) The US military culture never had much of an emphasis on personal courage or
self-sacrifice (for obvious reasons). The various variations of the ABM fairy tale make it
possible for Americans to believe that the next war would be mostly fought by pressing buttons
and relying on computers. And if real bombs start falling, let them fall somewhere else,
preferably on some remote brown people who, well, ain't quite as precious to God and humanity
as us, the White "indispensable nation".
Add to this a quasi-religious belief (a dogma, really) in the myth of American technological
superiority and you understand that the Russian leaders began to realize that their US
counterparts were gradually forgetting that they did have a bulls-eye painted on their backs.
So what Putin did is simply paint a few more, different ones, just to make sure that US leaders
come back to reality.
The goal of Putin's speech was also to prove both Obama ("the Russian economy is in
tatters") and McCain ("Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country") wrong. The Russian
message to the US ruling elites was simple: no, not only are we not lagging behind you
technologically, in many ways we are decades ahead of you, in spite of sanctions, your attempts
to isolate us, the dramatic drop in energy prices or your attempts at limiting our access to
world markets (the successful development of this new generation of weapons systems is a clear
indicator of the real state of fundamental research in Russia in such spheres are advanced
alloys, nanotechnology, super-computing, etc.).
To the warmongers at the Pentagon, the message was equally clear and tough: we spend less
than 10% of what you can spend on global aggression; we will match your quantitative advantage
with our qualitative superiority. Simply put, you fight with dollars, we will fight with
brains. US propagandists, who love to speak about how Russia always uses huge numbers of
unskilled soldiers and dumb but brutal weapons now have to deal with a paradigm which they are
completely unfamiliar with: a Russian soldier is much better trained, much better equipped,
much better commanded and their morale and willpower is almost infinitely higher than one of
the typical US serviceman. For a military culture used to mantrically repeat that everything
about it is "the best in the world" or even "the best in history" this kind of new reality will
come as a very painful shock and most will respond to it by going into deep denial. To those
who believed in the (historically completely false) narrative about the US and Reagan
bankrupting the USSR by means of a successful arms race, it must feel very strange to have sort
of "traded places" with the bad old USSR and being in the situation of having to face
military-spending induced bankruptcy.
Nothing will change in the Empire of Illusions (at least for the foreseeable
future)
Speaking of bankruptcy. The recent revelations have confirmed what the Russians have been
warning about for years: all the immense sums of money spent by the US in ABM defenses have
been completely wasted. Russia did find and deploy an asymmetrical response which makes the
entire US ABM program completely useless and obsolete. Furthermore, as Martyanov also points
out, the current force structure of the US surface fleet has also been made basically obsolete
and useless, at least against Russia (but you can be sure that China is following close
behind). Potentially, this state of affairs should have immense, tectonic repercussions:
immense amounts US taxpayer money has been completely wasted, the US nuclear and naval
strategies have been completely misguided, intelligence has failed (either on the acquisition
or the analytical level), US politicians have made disastrous decisions and this is all a total
"cluster-bleep" which should trigger God knows how many investigations, resignations, and
numerous sanctions, administrative or even criminal ones. But, of course, absolutely nothing of
this, nothing at all, will happen. Not a single head will roll
In the " Empire of
Illusions ," facts simply don't matter at all. In fact, I predict that the now
self-evidently useless ABM program will proceed as if nothing had happened. And, in a way, that
is true.
The zombified US general public won't be told what is going on, those who will
understand will be marginalized and powerless to make any changes, as for the corrupt parasites
who have been making millions and billions from this total waste of taxpayer money, they have
way too much at stake to throw in the towel.
In fact, since the US is now run by Neocons, we
can very easily predict what they will do. They will do what Neocons always do: double down.
So, after it has become public knowledge that the entire US ABM deployment is useless and
outdated, expect a further injection in cash into it by "patriotic" "Congresspersons" (my
attempt at being politically correct!), surrounded by flags who will explain to the lobotomized
public that they are "taking a firm stance" against "the Russian dictator" and that the proud
US of A shall not cave in to the "Russian nuclear blackmail". These colors don't run! United we
stand! Etc. etc. etc.
McMaster is a danger tot he USA and the world as a whole. Trump disingaged from forign policy and now generals are
running it.
Notable quotes:
"... I stopped listening to McMaster at one point. Quite early really. I wish there was a transcript around. But on first sight there isn't. But yes, 'revisionist' surfaced. ..."
"... Senator Lindsey Graham wants to attack North Korea. China promises to defend North Korea if attacked by the USA. If nuclear weapons are used by anyone; destroying Seoul, Pyongyang, Kyoto, Tokyo or Guam, the war will explode. China has 65 hardened ICBMs that can survive a first attack and destroy every major American city. Russia cannot sit out a world war blowing up directly South of Siberia. ..."
"... Simply put, Washington DC has become unhinged. The military is free to do whatever it wants. The western economic system is in slow-motion collapse. There is too much debt. Either the people will force the oligarchs to write down the debt and end the wars; or, fighting over the remains, the corrupt elite will kill off mankind. ..."
"... He has given the quartet too much leeway and they for some naïve reason are far too willing to listen to the Israelis always whispering in their ears. GC Marshall was right when he warned Truman against a future dominated by the existence of Israel. pl ..."
I have been reflecting about Reagan too in recent contributions here. Not least since Trump
seemed to try to emulate the GOP's greatest hero.
From the original Strategic Statement, casting Russia and China as 'rivals and
competitors', the subsequent Defense Posture Statement elevated the latter from mere rivals,
to 'revisionist powers'
I stopped listening to McMaster at one point. Quite early really. I wish there was a
transcript around. But on first sight there isn't. But yes, 'revisionist' surfaced. As
curiously enough this did: "rogue regimes (ME north East Asia) are developing the most
destructive weapons on earth."
Maybe I listen to him now. Relevant parts start at 1:45.
******
That said, what I still have huge troubles seemingly is to wrap my head around is the huge
applause Trump got on SST, while it left me more then a little irritated, when delivering his
foreign policy speech in April 2016. That was before Russia-Gate made news.
"These US generals have shown themselves to be shallow-minded believers in a doctrine of US
invincibility and universal dominance that is no longer applicable to the world we live in."
General Ali, if I remember correctly you reside in Canada, those who are brought up in and
under US system, majority think of their country in this way, it's part of the mentality that
the system educates and trains it's constituency, to think they are exceptional, invincible
and above all others. From what I have learned, this is not unique to just these four
generals, this is how even the regular police thinks regardless of state or community they
serve. This is how every child has been thought early on.
This week NBC News described the White House as "unglued". The owner of Comcast that owns
NBC, Brian L. Roberts (Barrack Obama's friend), and the five other media moguls want Donald
Trump gone. All that has stopped them so far are four Generals. This is highly unstable. The
USA has already killed Russians in Syria. Turkey is heading towards attacking American troops
in Manbij. U.S. trainers are in the trenches with Ukraine troops in the Donbass. Anyone who
is against this madness is labeled as a Russian collaborator.
Senator Lindsey Graham wants to attack North Korea. China promises to defend North
Korea if attacked by the USA. If nuclear weapons are used by anyone; destroying Seoul,
Pyongyang, Kyoto, Tokyo or Guam, the war will explode. China has 65 hardened ICBMs that can
survive a first attack and destroy every major American city. Russia cannot sit out a world
war blowing up directly South of Siberia.
Simply put, Washington DC has become unhinged. The military is free to do whatever it
wants. The western economic system is in slow-motion collapse. There is too much debt. Either
the people will force the oligarchs to write down the debt and end the wars; or, fighting
over the remains, the corrupt elite will kill off mankind.
If somehow, the use of nuclear weapons is avoided; at best, South Korea, the heart of the
Asian Economy, will be destroyed. The drumbeats for war with North Korea, Iran and/or Russia
is crazy.
I agree that the "Four of Hearts" among the generals now running US foreign policy are a
great danger. These men seem incapable of rising above the Russophobia that grew in the
atmosphere of the Cold War. They yearn for world hegemony for the US and to see Russia and to
a lesser extent China and Iran as obstacles to that dominion for the "city on a hill."
Trump is as yet indifferent to such matters and is in pursuit of his mercantilist view of
economics. He has given the quartet too much leeway and they for some naïve reason
are far too willing to listen to the Israelis always whispering in their ears. GC Marshall
was right when he warned Truman against a future dominated by the existence of Israel.
pl
"... The world had a great opportunity in March of 1953 to reverse course rather than this insane military spending that was beginning. On March 5th, 1953, Stalin died. The Soviet leaders reached out to the United States. They offered the Americans an olive branch. They talked about changing the direction of our relations. They talked about, basically, ending the Cold War. We could've ended the Cold War as early as March 5, 1953, taken a different route. Eisenhower and the others in his administration debate what to do, how to respond. Churchill, who was now re-elected and back in office in England, begged the United States to hold a summit with the Soviet leaders and move toward peace, rather than belligerence and hostility. Eisenhower doesn't say anything publicly in response for six weeks. Then he makes a speech. It's a visionary speech. It's the kind of vision that Eisenhower represented at his best, and he says there ..."
"... PRESIDENT EISENHOWER: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ..."
"... two days later, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, makes a speech reversing the whole thing. Instead of an olive branch, he gives the Soviets a middle finger and he accuses the Soviet Union of trying to overthrow every Democratic government in the world. The exact wrong message. ..."
"... Did Eisenhower speak for it or did Dulles speak for it? Was Eisenhower the militarist or was Dulles the militarist? In many ways, the '50s was a very, very dangerous time. And there were so many harebrained schemes that were going on. ..."
"... The great independent journalist I.F. Stone mentioned that the word for lunar, for moon, in Latin is Luna. And he said, we should have a new department in the cabinet and call it the Department of Lunacy because of the crazy ideas that were being promulgated at the time. ..."
"... Well, the Cuban Missile Crisis is very important because now we're going through the Korean Missile Crisis, and if Trump has his way, we'll also go through the Iranian Missile Crisis. And the last time we were this close to nuclear war was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What happens there is that Khrushchev, in order to try to accomplish two things, or three things, really. ..."
"... And so, we were planning, we had the plans in place to overthrow the Cuban government, number one. Number two, Khrushchev wanted a credible deterrent. The Americans learned, Kennedy says, "Let's find out what the reality of the Missile Gap is." And he has McNamara do the study. We find out that there is a Missile Gap. By October of '61, we find out that there is a Missile Gap, and it's in our favor. The United States is ahead between 10 to 1 and 100 to 1 over the Soviet Union in every important category. ..."
"... He said, "We would've definitely destroyed Cuba and probably wiped out the Soviet Union as well." So, that's how close we came at this time. Which is again, as Robert Gates, another hawk, warns, "The United States should not invade Syria," he said. "Or should not bomb Syria because haven't we learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, that whenever these things happen, you never know what the consequences are going to be. It's always the unintended consequences that are going to get you." ..."
"... It takes two to tango. The idea that the US is solely to blame for the continuation of the Cold War, or that the US is solely to blame for a revival is Soviet/Russian propaganda. Great powers are aggressive, and rarely circumspect. ..."
"... And given Churchill's anathema toward Communism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, and given that he was the architect of the Cold War from the West I find the idea of him being a peacenik to be bizarre. ..."
"... They do not appreciate that there are different manifestations of both economic models. (Neoliberalism is eating us alive.) They do not appreciate that communism was probably the salvation of both post-war Russia and China. They conflate socialism with communism, view high taxes as communistic, and ignore that the countries with the highest standard of living are quite socialist. ..."
"... Ike was so right about the Military-Industrial complex, and yet we have only enabled it to grow to the point that it dominates every political decision – every law – every regulation in ways that ensure weapons are expended so more can take their place; and more weapons need to be developed because the boogeyman out there (pick a regime) probably, maybe, could be building an even nastier weapon. Make no mistake, Sputnik was viewed as evidence that the Russians already had better weapons and that they would take over "outer space" and we would thus be at their mercy. Back in the 60s the US did worry that communism was working better than capitalism, and that fear enabled a lot of foreign policy (gunboat diplomacy). ..."
"... Capitalism has fatal flaws, but we should all thank Communism died the way it did. ..."
"... not like capitalism didn't murder a few proletarians if murder is the standard, both are condemned ..."
"... the vast bulk of provocations and exacerbations in that now-reprised Cold War were a pas de deluxe, not mostly driven by our own insane US leaders, like the ones discussed in small detail in the post. Conveniently ignoring the whole escalation process of the Exceptional Empire doing the "policies" of the Dulleses and their clan, the craziness of stuff like the John Birchers and the McCarthy thing, and the madness of MAD (which I believe was a notion coined by that nest of vipers called RAND, that "we have to be understood to be insane enough to commit suicide, to kill the whole planet, for the 'deterrent effect' of Massive Retaliation (forget that the US policy and military structure very seriously intended a first strike on the Evil Soviets for quite a long time, and are now building "small nukes" for 'battlespace use' as if there are no knock-on consequences.) ..."
"... Russia suffered 20 million dead in WW II, pretty much won that war against fascism, and the leaders there get dang little decrepit for being (so far) so much more the "grownups in the room" in the Great Game Of RISK! ™ that our idiot rulers are playing. Go look up how many times, however, beyond that vast set of slapstick plays that led to the "Cuban Missile Crisis", the human part of the world skated up, by combinations of accident and error, to getting its death wish. And the main impetus for the nuclear "standoff" has been the US and the "policies" forwarded by "our" insane rulers and militarists. ..."
"... Guys, I generally treasure the NC comments section, and I am not singling anyone out, but some of the rhetoric here is starting to remind me of ZeroHedge doomp&rn. Let's please recover some perspective. ..."
"... Every year of human history since the expulsion from Eden will let us cherry pick overwhelming evidence that the lunatics were running the asylum. Or that every generation of our forebears gleefully built our civilization atop heaps of skulls of [insert oppressed groups here]. ..."
"... Such faith we have in ourselves, and such little evidence other than maybe a couple of world wars and long histories of the loonies playing stupid with whole populations, that we don't need to worry about the concentrated efforts of the sociopathic lunatics to rise to positions of great power and do stupid stuff. ..."
"... "It's the kind of vision that Eisenhower represented at his best, and he says there" Was he subsequently co-opted, or BSing? ..."
"... But that doesn't help the millions who would die on the peninsula. Further, whats known as a Nuclear Famine could still occur, which would be pretty damn devastating for civilization, even if mankind itself manages to survive. ..."
"... Science is about doubt and skepticism. That's what the scientific process is. Doubt a nuclear winter: Ok, I'll bite. We have examples – Large Volcanic eruptions, and we have the year without a summer sometime in the 1830s I believe – that is in recorded History. The we searched to archeological record for more evidence, and found large die-offs following a layer of volcanic dust. Again and again, I believe. Quoting scientists who "doubt nuclear winter" requires more examination: ..."
"... Humanity might survive as a species but not as an idea. Am about halfway through the Ellsberg book and, yes, it does make Dr. Strangelove look like a documentary. Current thinking does not seem much changed. ..."
"... Something missing from the sequence of events here is that the main reason that the Kremlin put nuclear missiles in Cuba was the fact that more than 100 Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles were deployed in Italy and Turkey in 1961 by the US, thus cutting down any reaction time by Moscow to minutes in case of a US attack. ..."
"... The main – unacknowledged – part of the climb down from the Cuba missile crisis was that as Russia pulled its nuclear missiles out of Cuba, the US would do the same in Europe. It cooled things down again until Reagan was electe ..."
"... I had forgotten that the 50s had just as many crazies as present times – the Dulles brothers, Curtis LeMay, Edward Teller, J. Edgar Hoover – really scary people and probably founding members of the deep state. ..."
"... The Jupiter missile agreement was a secret at the time. Kennedy wanted to minimize the appearance of a quid-pro-quo. The subsequent presence of Pershings and Tomahawks in Europe (but not Turkey) was a reaction to the mobile IRBMs deployed by the Soviet Union. Which they still have. France and Britain have their own independent deterrents. Which is just as well, since the Pershings and Tomahawks were traded away as part of START/SALT. ..."
"... The more recent escalation of NATO into E Europe, the Baltics and the Ukraine are a definite violation of the spirit of the Cuban Missile Crisis agreement, and are pure aggression against a Russia that was seen as too weak to do anything about it until they did do something about it in 2014. ..."
"... An aggressive NATO is something I view with horror. One does not poke the bear. But Kissinger (the German) and Berzhinski (the Pole) are fanatically anti-Russian. They made up for the passing of Churchill. ..."
"... LeMay had suggested that we should perhaps wipe out the Soviet Union before they had the chance to catch up to us in nukes. It was an era ruled by fear of nuclear war–a fear that was unleashed by the use of the bomb in Japan. Truman and Byrnes (the latter in a meeting in his hometown–my hometown) rejected calls by some of the Los Alamos scientists to share the nuclear secrets with the Russians and forestall this arms race or so they hoped. ..."
"... This isn't accurate. Stalin tried repeatedly and even towards the end, desperately, to sign a treaty with the Britain and France. They rebuffed him because [he was a] Commie. He signed up with Hitler only after those efforts had clearly failed. It was a self-preservation move. It probably did buy him less time than he thought. But let's not kid ourselves: Hitler's first move otherwise would have been to the East. What were later the Allies would have been delighted to see him take over the USSR. This was why British aristos were so keen on Hitler, that he was seen as an answer to Communism and therefore "our kind of man". ..."
"... General LeMay was responsible for the death of a fifth (some say a third) of the North Korean population by saturation bombing with napalm, was he not? A third? Isn't that one in three? ..."
"... Additional books that shed light on both leaving the new deal behind and the Cuban missile crisis are (1) "The Devil's Chessboard" by Talbot and (2) "JFK and The Unspeakable" by Douglass. The first is mostly about Allen Dulles but has interesting chapters on McCarthy, Eisenhower, Nixon, etc. It is reasonably well foot-noted. The second is about the assassination and has loads of detail about the missile crisis and its power players. It is meticulously foot-noted. ..."
Jerri-Lynn here: Lest anyone be deluded into thinking that the current lunacy of Trump foreign policy is unprededented and ahistoric,
part eight of
an excellent
Real News Network series on Undoing the New Deal reminds us this simply isn't so.
That series more generally discuses who helped unravel the New Deal and why. That was no accident, either. In this installment,
historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to
end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the
world of the eve of destruction.
Three things I've seen recently made me think readers might appreciate this interview. First, I recently finished reading
Stephen Kinzer's The Brothers
, about the baleful consequences of the control over US foreign policy by Dulles brothers– John Foster and Alan. These continue to
reverberate to today. Well worth your time.
Over the hols, I watched Dr. Strangelove again. And I wondered, and this not for the first time: why has the world managed to
survive to this day? Seems to me just matter of time before something spirals out of control– and then, that's a wrap.
Queued up on my beside table is Daniel Ellsberg's
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of
a Nuclear War Planner . Haven't cracked the spine of that yet, so I'll eschew further commentary, except to say that I understand
Ellsberg's provides vivid detail about just how close we've already come to annihilation.
PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network, I'm Paul Jay. We're continuing our series of discussions on the Undoing of the New
deal, and we're joined again by Professor Peter Kuznick, who joins us from Washington. Peter is a Professor of History, and Director
of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. Thanks for joining us again Peter.
PETER KUZNICK: My pleasure, Paul.
PAUL JAY: So, before we move on to Kennedy, and then we're going to get to Johnson, you wanted to make a comment about Eisenhower,
who made a couple of great sounding speeches about reducing military expenditure but I'm not sure how much that actually ever got
implemented. But talk about this speech in, I guess, it's 1953, is it?
PETER KUZNICK: Yes. The world had a great opportunity in March of 1953 to reverse course rather than this insane military
spending that was beginning. On March 5th, 1953, Stalin died. The Soviet leaders reached out to the United States. They offered the
Americans an olive branch. They talked about changing the direction of our relations. They talked about, basically, ending the Cold
War. We could've ended the Cold War as early as March 5, 1953, taken a different route. Eisenhower and the others in his administration
debate what to do, how to respond. Churchill, who was now re-elected and back in office in England, begged the United States to hold
a summit with the Soviet leaders and move toward peace, rather than belligerence and hostility. Eisenhower doesn't say anything publicly
in response for six weeks. Then he makes a speech. It's a visionary speech. It's the kind of vision that Eisenhower represented at
his best, and he says there
PRESIDENT EISENHOWER: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a
theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber
is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half
million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I
repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.
Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
PETER KUZNICK: This is not a way of life at all. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.�
What a great speech and the Soviets were thrilled. They republished this. They reprinted it. They broadcast it over and over, and
then two days later, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, makes a speech reversing the whole thing. Instead of an olive branch,
he gives the Soviets a middle finger and he accuses the Soviet Union of trying to overthrow every Democratic government in the world.
The exact wrong message.
And so, it's sort of like Trump, where Tillerson says something sane and then Trump will undermine it two days later when it comes
to North Korea. The same thing happened in 1953 with Eisenhower and Dulles. We're really much more on the same page, but if you look
at the third world response, you've got the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955, and the third world leaders are all saying,
"We have to be independent. We have to be neutral." They say, "It is insane to spend all these dollars and all these rubles on the
military when we need money for development."
PAUL JAY: So, what went on with Eisenhower, making that kind of speech? He's not known for any big increase in social spending
domestically. He helps build, as you said, the military industrial complex, especially the nuclear side of it. So, what was that
speech about, and then how does he allow Dulles to contradict him two days later?
PETER KUZNICK: That's one of the mysteries. That's why writing books on the debate, what was going on in that administration.
Did Eisenhower speak for it or did Dulles speak for it? Was Eisenhower the militarist or was Dulles the militarist? In many ways,
the '50s was a very, very dangerous time. And there were so many harebrained schemes that were going on.
We talked a little bit about Sputnik but one of the proposals after that was to blast a hydrogen bomb on the surface of the moon
to show the world that we really are the strongest. And they talked about putting missile bases on the moon, and then the idea was
to have the Soviets respond by putting their own missile bases on the moon. We could put ours on distant planets, so that we could
then hit the Soviet bases on the moon. The great independent journalist I.F. Stone mentioned that the word for lunar, for moon,
in Latin is Luna. And he said, we should have a new department in the cabinet and call it the Department of Lunacy because of the
crazy ideas that were being promulgated at the time.
This comes across, really, with the nuclear policies. So, when McGeorge Bundy asks Dan Ellsberg in 1961 to find out from the Joint
Chiefs what would be, how many people would die as a result of America's nuclear launch in the event of a war with the Soviet Union,
the Pentagon comes back with the idea that between 600 and 650 million people would die from America's weapons alone in our first
PSYOP. And that doesn't even account for nuclear winter, which would have killed us all, or the numbers who would be killed by the
Soviet weapons. That includes at least 100 million of our own allies in Western Europe.
We are talking about a period the lunacy and insanity was captured best by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove in 1964. That policy
was so close to what was actually occurring at the time. Did Eisenhower speak for this? When Eisenhower wanted to, one of his visions
was for planetary excavation using hydrogen bombs. People should study the lunacy of Project Plowshare.
PAUL JAY: They used to have tourism to go look at nuclear tests outside of Las Vegas and people would sit just a few miles away
with sunglasses on.
PETER KUZNICK: And we sent American soldiers into the blast area, knowing that they were going to be irradiated. Yeah, the irrationality
in these times. People are going to look back at the Trump administration and if we're here later, maybe they'll laugh at us. If
we survive this period, they'll laugh. They'll look back and say, "Look at the craziness of this period." Well, if you look at the
history of the '50s and early '60s, you see a lot of that same kind of craziness in terms of the policies that were actually implemented
at the time, and the ones, for example, one of the ideas was to melt the polar ice caps using hydrogen bombs. We wanted to increase
polar melting. We wanted to increase the temperature on the planet by exploding nuclear bombs.
PAUL JAY: And this was to do, to what end?
PETER KUZNICK: For what end? I'm not sure. I mean, one-
PAUL JAY: Well, they may get their way, the way things are heading right now. They may get that.
PETER KUZNICK: And one of the things from Trump's National Security speech was to not talk about, or to say that global warming
is not a National Security concern as Obama and others had believed it was. But they wanted to actually redirect hurricanes by setting
off hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere in the path of the hurricane, so they could redirect hurricanes. They wanted to build new harbors
by setting off hydrogen bombs. They wanted to have a new canal across the, instead of the Panama canal, with hydrogen bombs and reroute
rivers in the United States.
I mean, crazy, crazy ideas that was considered American policy. And actually, it was the Soviets who saved us because Eisenhower
wanted to begin to do these programs, but the Soviets would not allow, would not give the United States the right to do that because
there was a temporary test ban in the late 1950s. And Eisenhower would have had to abrogate that in order to begin these projects.
PAUL JAY: Okay. Let's catch up. So, we had just, the last part dealt with some of Kennedy. We get into the 1960s. Kennedy is as
preoccupied with the Cold War, the beginning of the Vietnam War, Cuba, the Missile Crisis. And we had left off right at the moment
of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Give us a really quick recap because I think on this issue of militarization and former policy, we kind
of have to do a whole nother series that focuses more on that. We're trying to get more into this issue of the New Deal and what
happened to domestic social reforms in the context of this massive military expenditure. But talk a bit about that moment of the
Cuban Missile Crisis.
PETER KUZNICK: Well, the Cuban Missile Crisis is very important because now we're going through the Korean Missile Crisis,
and if Trump has his way, we'll also go through the Iranian Missile Crisis. And the last time we were this close to nuclear war was
during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What happens there is that Khrushchev, in order to try to accomplish two things, or three things,
really.
One is to, he knows the United States is planning an invasion of Cuba. The United States had been carrying out war games, massive
war games, 40,000 people participating in these war games. Like now, we're carrying out war games off the Korean coast. And the war
game that was planned for October of '62 was called Operation Ortsac. Anybody who doesn't get it? Certainly the Soviets did. Ortsac
is Castro spelled backwards.
And so, we were planning, we had the plans in place to overthrow the Cuban government, number one. Number two, Khrushchev
wanted a credible deterrent. The Americans learned, Kennedy says, "Let's find out what the reality of the Missile Gap is." And he
has McNamara do the study. We find out that there is a Missile Gap. By October of '61, we find out that there is a Missile Gap, and
it's in our favor. The United States is ahead between 10 to 1 and 100 to 1 over the Soviet Union in every important category.
Still, the pressure was to increase America's missiles and so, the Strategic Air Command in the Air Force wanted to increase
our missiles by 3,000. McNamara figures that the least number he can get away with is to increase our intercontinental ballistic
missiles by 1,000 even though we're ahead 10 to 1 already at that point. The Kremlin interpreted that, and said, "Why is the US increasing
its missiles when it's so far ahead of us?" They said, "Obviously, the United States is preparing for a first strike against the
Soviet Union." That was the Kremlin interpretation. It needed a credible deterrent.
They knew that, initially they thought, "Well, the fact that we can take out Berlin will be a credible enough deterrent. The Americans
will never attack." Then they realized that that wouldn't be a sufficient deterrent to some of the hawks in the American military,
the Curtis LeMays, who had a lot of influence at the time. Or before that, the Lemnitzers. And so, they decide, "Well, we've got
to put missiles in Cuba, which is a more credible deterrent."
And the third is that Khrushchev wanted to appease his hawks. Khrushchev's strategy was to build up Soviet consumer economy. He
said, "The Soviet people want washing machines. They want cars. They want houses. That's what we need." And so, he wanted to decrease
defense spending and one of the cheap ways to do that was to put the missiles in Cuba. So, they do that foolishly. It's a crazy policy
because they don't announce it. It's very much like the movie Strangelove, where Khrushchev was planning to announce that the missiles
were in Cuba on the anniversary of the Soviet Revolution. That was coming up in a couple-
PAUL JAY: You mean Dr. Strangelove, meaning what's the point of a doomsday machine if you don't tell people you've got it?
PETER KUZNICK: As Strangelove says, "Well what's the point of the doomsday machine if you don't announce that you have it?" And
then, the Americans didn't, the Soviets didn't announce that they had the, if they had announced that the missiles were there, then
the United States could not have invaded Cuba the way the military wanted. They could not have bombed Cuba. It would've been an effective
deterrent, especially if they announced that also, that the missiles were there, that the warheads were there and that they also
had put 100 battlefield nuclear weapons inside Cuba.
That would have meant that there was no possibility of the United States invading and that the deterrent would've actually worked.
But they didn't announce it. And so, the United States plans for an invasion and we got very close to doing so. But again, the intelligence
was abysmal. We knew where 33 of the 42 missiles were. We didn't find the other missiles. We didn't know that the battlefield nuclear
weapons were there. We didn't know that the missiles were ready to be armed.
And so, the United States was operating blind. We thought that there were 10,000 armed Soviets in Cuba. Turns out, there were
42,000 armed Soviets. We thought that there were 100,000 armed Cubans. Turns out, there were 270,000 armed Cubans. Based on the initial
intelligence, McNamara said, "If we had invaded, we figured we'd suffer 18,000 casualties, 4,500 dead." When he later finds out how
many troops there actually were there, he says, "Well, that would've been 25,000 Americans dead." When he finds out that there were
100 battlefield nuclear weapons as well, he doesn't find that out until 30 years later, and then he turns white, and he says, "Well
that would've meant we would've lost 100,000 American Troops." Twice as many, almost, as we lost in Vietnam.
He said, "We would've definitely destroyed Cuba and probably wiped out the Soviet Union as well." So, that's how close we
came at this time. Which is again, as Robert Gates, another hawk, warns, "The United States should not invade Syria," he said. "Or
should not bomb Syria because haven't we learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, that whenever these things happen,
you never know what the consequences are going to be. It's always the unintended consequences that are going to get you."
Which we learned in Cuba. We learned in Iraq and Afghanistan or we should've learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously, Trump
hasn't learned it and we had better learn before we do something crazy now in Korea.
PAUL JAY: All right, thanks, Peter. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
It takes two to tango. The idea that the US is solely to blame for the continuation of the Cold War, or that the US is
solely to blame for a revival is Soviet/Russian propaganda. Great powers are aggressive, and rarely circumspect. The existence
of nuclear weapons, was what prevented either the US or the Soviet Union/Russia from attacking each other. Otherwise the sport
of kings would have continued as usual.
And given Churchill's anathema toward Communism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, and given that he was the
architect of the Cold War from the West I find the idea of him being a peacenik to be bizarre.
It's always that word, "communism", isn't it? As long as that word is used, everything is justifiable. If you look at it closely,
it would seem that the Russians have discovered that communism is every bit as susceptible to corruption as capitalism. Communism
has been, in fact, MORE discredited than capitalism (for now.) With Russia on the other side of the planet, what would be the
harm in letting whatever failed ideologies they have fail like Kansas failed? As Jesus might say, "Ah Ye of little faith."
The vast majority of Americans today have no idea what communism is. Most cannot even thing about communism in terms of it
being just another economic system different from capitalism. (No, it is slavery!) They do not appreciate that there are different
manifestations of both economic models. (Neoliberalism is eating us alive.) They do not appreciate that communism was probably
the salvation of both post-war Russia and China. They conflate socialism with communism, view high taxes as communistic, and ignore
that the countries with the highest standard of living are quite socialist.
In many cases, Americans vote against their own interests just because some pol labels a new social program as communist so
he can give his new bill and edge.
Ike was so right about the Military-Industrial complex, and yet we have only enabled it to grow to the point that it dominates
every political decision – every law – every regulation in ways that ensure weapons are expended so more can take their place;
and more weapons need to be developed because the boogeyman out there (pick a regime) probably, maybe, could be building an even
nastier weapon. Make no mistake, Sputnik was viewed as evidence that the Russians already had better weapons and that they would
take over "outer space" and we would thus be at their mercy. Back in the 60s the US did worry that communism was working better
than capitalism, and that fear enabled a lot of foreign policy (gunboat diplomacy).
Trump is anything if he is not politically and strategically a dim wit. Thus he probably buys into the communist boogeyman
scenario common in our culture. He is likely attracted to the economic stimulus that more guns and less butter offer in the short
run. Our problems seems to hinge on leaders who limit their action to the short run, and the long run (ensuring survival of the
human species?), well, they never get around to that.
I would not be so loving over the "communistic ideals". My great grandparents were murdered for the fact that one was a postal
office manager, another was a sock factory owner. Believe what you want, but communism is far from just an economic theory.
Communism, once you force the politics into the economic theory, is this: equality of all men, regardless of abilities, and
damn if you started off well because everything will be taken from you. Your life is not your own, your family is not your own,
your work is not your own: it belongs to the state.
Capitalism has fatal flaws, but we should all thank Communism died the way it did.
Yaas, it's just Putin friendly propaganda, that's all. Let us persuade ourselves that the vast bulk of provocations and
exacerbations in that now-reprised Cold War were a pas de deluxe, not mostly driven by our own insane US leaders, like the ones
discussed in small detail in the post. Conveniently ignoring the whole escalation process of the Exceptional Empire doing the
"policies" of the Dulleses and their clan, the craziness of stuff like the John Birchers and the McCarthy thing, and the madness
of MAD (which I believe was a notion coined by that nest of vipers called RAND, that "we have to be understood to be insane enough
to commit suicide, to kill the whole planet, for the 'deterrent effect' of Massive Retaliation (forget that the US policy and
military structure very seriously intended a first strike on the Evil Soviets for quite a long time, and are now building "small
nukes" for 'battlespace use' as if there are no knock-on consequences.)
How does one break the cycle of ever-increasing vulnerability and eventual destruction, that includes the extraction and combustion
and all the other decimations of a livable planet? how to do that when the Imperial Rulers are insane, by any sensible definition
of insanity? And the Russians sure seem to be wiser and more restrained (barring some provocation that trips one of their own
Doomsday Devices that they have instituted to try to counter the ridiculous insane provocations and adventures of the Empire?
Maybe revert to "Duck and cover?" Or that Civil Defense posture by one of the Reaganauts, one T.K. Jones, who wanted Congress
to appropriate $252 million (1980 dollars) for Civil Defense, mostly for SHOVELS: in the firmly held belief that "we can fight
and win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union:"
Three times Mr. Jones – or someone speaking in his name – agreed to testify. Three times he failed to appear. The Pentagon
finally sent a pinch-hitter, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle. But the Senate wants Mr. Jones. It wants an authoritative
explanation of his plan to spend $252 million on civil defense. Evidently, most of that money will go for shovels.
For this is how the alleged Mr. Jones describes the alleged civil defense strategy: "Dig a hole, cover it with a couple
of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It's the dirt that does it."
Mr. Jones seems to believe that the United States could recover fully, in two to four years, from an all-out nuclear
attack. As he was quoted in The Los Angeles Times: "Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around."
Dig on, Senator Pressler. We're all curious.
Russia suffered 20 million dead in WW II, pretty much won that war against fascism, and the leaders there get dang little
decrepit for being (so far) so much more the "grownups in the room" in the Great Game Of RISK! ™ that our idiot rulers are playing.
Go look up how many times, however, beyond that vast set of slapstick plays that led to the "Cuban Missile Crisis", the human
part of the world skated up, by combinations of accident and error, to getting its death wish. And the main impetus for the nuclear
"standoff" has been the US and the "policies" forwarded by "our" insane rulers and militarists.
"Tu Quoque" is an especially weak and inapposite and insupportable argument in this context.
SPOT ON! IF Robby Mook and the gang can stir up a Russian frenzy from hell based on nothing more than sour grapes, and IF what
we know about the deep state is only the tip of the iceberg, and IF the media is largely under the control of the 'Gov, THEN a
logical human must at least be open to the possibility that there is also such a thing as American propaganda, must (s)he not?
Yes. Nobody invaded Argentina when Juan Peron et al took over. Hitler and Mussolini could have died as dictators decades later
if they had simply kept their armies home.
Guys, I generally treasure the NC comments section, and I am not singling anyone out, but some of the rhetoric here is
starting to remind me of ZeroHedge doomp&rn. Let's please recover some perspective.
Every year of human history since the expulsion from Eden will let us cherry pick overwhelming evidence that the lunatics
were running the asylum. Or that every generation of our forebears gleefully built our civilization atop heaps of skulls of [insert
oppressed groups here].
Yet during the Cold War, there were plenty of prominent people calling out the McCarthys and Lemays of the world as loons (and
behind the Curtain, even Stalin was removed from key posts before his death). Guess what, sane generally wins out over the mad
king. The arc of history indeed bends toward justice, though never without sacrifice and diligent truthseeking. The ones to worry
about are the snake oil merchants, who pee on our shoes and tell us it's raining.
g.
Such faith we have in ourselves, and such little evidence other than maybe a couple of world wars and long histories of
the loonies playing stupid with whole populations, that we don't need to worry about the concentrated efforts of the sociopathic
lunatics to rise to positions of great power and do stupid stuff.
Yes, this is what the world gets when technological advancement is combined with a socio-economic system that rewards sociopathic
tendencies. A system advanced by propaganda (disguised as entertainment and education) backed up with the barrell of a gun and
cameras everywhere.
This article is not scary enough. Find out that in 1983 there was almost a nuclear war. Both sides have a first strike strategy
and a Russian general thought that actions of Reagan were getting ready for the first strike and he was going to strike first.
And during the Cuban missile crisis, Russian subs had nuclear weapons on them and we dropped low level depth charges on them and
we didn't know that they were armed.
This is a very long interview of Daniel Ellsberg in Seattle on Jan 9, 2018.
Now that everyone, except many in the USA, knows that when the USA changes a government that the country is ruined, this may
have forced North and South Korea to get together.
Ellsberg says that any nukes used in the Korean Peninsula would result in at least 1 million dead and while 60 million in WWII
were killed during the course of the war, with nukes that many cold be killed in a week. And then, nuclear winter would finish
off the rest of us.
To be fair, there are now doubts among scientists that Nuclear Winter as classically described would even be a thing.
But that doesn't help the millions who would die on the peninsula. Further, whats known as a Nuclear Famine could still
occur, which would be pretty damn devastating for civilization, even if mankind itself manages to survive.
Science is about doubt and skepticism. That's what the scientific process is. Doubt a nuclear winter: Ok, I'll bite. We
have examples – Large Volcanic eruptions, and we have the year without a summer sometime in the 1830s I believe – that is in recorded
History. The we searched to archeological record for more evidence, and found large die-offs following a layer of volcanic dust.
Again and again, I believe. Quoting scientists who "doubt nuclear winter" requires more examination:
List them, together with their credentials and "donor$."
You can google nuclear winter early enough. And yes, there are scientists who are skeptical for various reasons. The only group
that has written a paper on it in recent years is composed of some of the same scientists who originally proposed it and they
think it is real.
Reasons for skepticism include doubt about the amount of smoke that would be produced. And the volcano and asteroid comparisons
are imperfect because the details are different. People used to talk about volcanic dust, and now it is mostly sulfuric acid droplets.
With asteroids the initial thought was the KT boundary layer represented trillions of tons of submicron size dust and then Melosh
proposed ejects blasted around the world heated the upper atmosphere and ignited global fires and created soot and then his grad
student Tamara Goldin wrote her dissertation saying the heat might not be quite enough to do that and then people suggested it
was ( I won't go into why) and others suggested the bolide hit sulfur layers .
The point is that there is not a consensus about the detailed atmospheric effects of either large asteroid impacts or of super
volcanoes like Toba and yet we do have some evidence because these things happened. We don't have an example to study in tge geologic
record where hundreds of cities were hit simultaneously with nuclear weapons.
I could go on, but I don't want to give the impression I have a strong opinion either way, because I don't. But I think the
case for global warming is overwhelming because vastly more people are working on it and it is happening in front of us. It is
not just computer models.
Forget possible nuclear winter, the economic effects alone would be worth 10 Lehman brothers (2008 meltdowns). And then the
knock on effects would cause other knock on effects like other wars. Even without a nuclear winter, civilization would probably
collapse within 18 months anyway.
All this, while true, only change the details not the results. The Chicxulub impact almost certainly exterminated the
majority of then living species, and the Toba Supervolcano probably almost caused our extinction. That suggest throwing massive
amounts of anything into the atmosphere is not good.
As a student I would like to know the details, but in practice, it's like arguing whether a snow storm or a blizzard killed
someone. Humanity as a species would probably survive a nuclear war okay, but many(most?) individuals as well as our planetary
civilization would be just as dead. The numbers dying would be slightly different is all.
Humanity might survive as a species but not as an idea. Am about halfway through the Ellsberg book and, yes, it does make
Dr. Strangelove look like a documentary. Current
thinking does not seem much changed.
Something missing from the sequence of events here is that the main reason that the Kremlin put nuclear missiles in Cuba
was the fact that more than 100 Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles were deployed in Italy and Turkey in 1961
by the US, thus cutting down any reaction time by Moscow to minutes in case of a US attack.
The main – unacknowledged – part of the climb down from the Cuba missile crisis was that as Russia pulled its nuclear missiles
out of Cuba, the US would do the same in Europe. It cooled things down again until Reagan was elected.
I had forgotten that the 50s had just as many crazies as present times – the Dulles brothers, Curtis LeMay, Edward Teller,
J. Edgar Hoover – really scary people and probably founding members of the deep state.
The Jupiter missile agreement was a secret at the time. Kennedy wanted to minimize the appearance of a quid-pro-quo. The
subsequent presence of Pershings and Tomahawks in Europe (but not Turkey) was a reaction to the mobile IRBMs deployed by the Soviet
Union. Which they still have. France and Britain have their own independent deterrents. Which is just as well, since the Pershings
and Tomahawks were traded away as part of START/SALT.
The more recent escalation of NATO into E Europe, the Baltics and the Ukraine are a definite violation of the spirit of
the Cuban Missile Crisis agreement, and are pure aggression against a Russia that was seen as too weak to do anything about it
until they did do something about it in 2014.
An aggressive NATO is something I view with horror. One does not poke the bear. But Kissinger (the German) and Berzhinski
(the Pole) are fanatically anti-Russian. They made up for the passing of Churchill.
Just recently Russia deployed more nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to the Kaliningrad enclave between Poland and Lithuania.
Maybe something to do with all those special forces NATO keeps stationing on the Russian border?
And all the a -- -oles who Command and Rule, and most of the commentariat and punditry, all treat these affairs as if they
are playing some Brobdingnagian Game of Risk ™, where as with Monopoly (which was originally intended to teach a very different
lesson) the object of the game is all about TAKING OVER THE WHOLE WORLD, WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA an idiotic froth on top of an ever more
dangerous brew of exponentially increasing,and largely ignored, mutual if often asymmetric, deadly vulnerability.
Stupid effing humans and their vast stupid monkey tricks
LeMay had suggested that we should perhaps wipe out the Soviet Union before they had the chance to catch up to us in nukes.
It was an era ruled by fear of nuclear war–a fear that was unleashed by the use of the bomb in Japan. Truman and Byrnes (the latter
in a meeting in his hometown–my hometown) rejected calls by some of the Los Alamos scientists to share the nuclear secrets with
the Russians and forestall this arms race or so they hoped.
So no the crazy didn't start with Trump and Trump had even advocated we make nice with the Russians until the Dems, their remnants
at State and Defense and the press forced him to change course (on threat of impeachment). The elites who have gained more or
less permanent power over the direction of this country are a threat to us all.
Anyhow, thanks for the above post. Those who forget history ..
Different world. The first generation of nuclear weapons had yields (around 20-30Kt) that were comprehensible in terms of conventional
bombing, which of course would have required many more aircraft but was also much more efficient per tonne of explosives. For
the formative years after 1945, therefore, people thought of nuclear weapons as weapons in the classic sense and, at that time,
nobody really knew that much about the effects of radiation and fallout. This all changed with the advent of the hydrogen bomb,
but even then it took a long time for the likely catastrophic effects of the use of such weapons in large numbers to sink in.
Nuclear technology, and both delivery and guidance systems, evolved far more quickly than rationales for their use could be found.
Indeed, you can say that the Cold War was a period when nuclear powers found themselves acquiring weapons with technologies that
couldn't actually be used, but couldn't be un-invented either. Enormous intellectual effort went into trying to provide post-hoc
rationales for having these weapons, some of it very ingenious, most of it wasted.
Don't forget the role of paranoia either. NSC-68, the report that formalized US strategy during the Cold War, reads today like
the ravings of a group of lunatics, seeing, almost literally, Reds under the beds. And if Stalin was dead, the Soviet leadership
had just gone through a war which had cost them almost 30 million dead, and any, literally any, sacrifice was worth it to make
sure that they prevented another war, or at least won it quickly.
US military casualties in WW2: 407,300
US civilian casualties in WW2: 12,100
USSR military casualties in WW2: estimated by various sources [see the footnotes] between 8,668,000 to 11,400,000.
USSR civilian casualties in WW2: 10,000,000 [plus another 6-7 million deaths from famine, a line in the table that is completely
blank for the US]
Simply put, for every American that died, somewhere between a thousand to two thousand of their Russian counterparts were killed.
And somehow people in the US were convinced and worried that Russia wanted to start yet another war when they still hadn't finished
burying the dead from the last one.
1. Stalin made his pact with the devil that gave Hitler free rein to invade Poland and France. Hitler then invaded Russia from
Poland as the jumping off point. Stalin miscalculated big-time.
2. Invaded countries always have many more civilian countries than un-invaded ones.
3. Germany started WW II only 20 years after the end of WW I that also slaughtered 2 million German soldiers. Past losses generally
does not appear to impact the decision-making of dictators regarding new wars. So it would have been irrational for the West to
think that the USSR had no intent to expand its borders. That was the blunder that France and Britain made in 1938-39. However,
the paranoia did get extreme in the Cold War.
This isn't accurate. Stalin tried repeatedly and even towards the end, desperately, to sign a treaty with the Britain and
France. They rebuffed him because [he was a] Commie. He signed up with Hitler only after those efforts had clearly failed. It
was a self-preservation move. It probably did buy him less time than he thought. But let's not kid ourselves: Hitler's first move
otherwise would have been to the East. What were later the Allies would have been delighted to see him take over the USSR. This
was why British aristos were so keen on Hitler, that he was seen as an answer to Communism and therefore "our kind of man".
The Poles have been the Germans and Russians chewtoy ever since it was completely partitioned. All the countries immediately
around Russia have been horribly abused by Russia. Putin is doing his country no favors by reminding everyone of that. He can
cow them into submission, but like the American government is finding, just because they are doesn't mean they cannot cause trouble.
Heck, the current Great Game could be said to have started with the Soviet-Afghanistan War.
Going into the war every country was unprepared and unwilling to fight and had difficulty choices. The German military
itself was not prepared. It was Hitler's choice to start when and where and by 1938 everyone knew it. Hitler was surprised that
France and Great Britain honored their guarantee to Poland.
As evil as Stalin's regime was, and his invasion of Poland was just as bad as Hitler's at first, I don't think most people
really understood just how evil the Nazis were and what they were planning on doing for Germany's living space. It was worse than
anything that Stalin did and between the Ukrainian famine, the Great Purges, the takeover of the Baltic States, the invasion of
Finland, etc he did serious evil.
General LeMay was responsible for the death of a fifth (some say a third) of the North Korean population by saturation
bombing with napalm, was he not? A third? Isn't that one in three?
Additional books that shed light on both leaving the new deal behind and the Cuban missile crisis are (1) "The Devil's
Chessboard" by Talbot and (2) "JFK and The Unspeakable" by Douglass. The first is mostly about Allen Dulles but has interesting
chapters on McCarthy, Eisenhower, Nixon, etc. It is reasonably well foot-noted. The second is about the assassination and has
loads of detail about the missile crisis and its power players. It is meticulously foot-noted.
I was going to post the text of the short review, but all I got at the moment is this blankety iPhone and its limits with cut
and paste.
Not many read books anyway these days, and what sufficient moiety of them will form the groundswell that tips over the Juggernaut
we are all pushing and pulling and riding toward the cliff?
I read this stuff mostly to sense which hand holds the knife and not to go down asking "What happened? What did it all mean?"
Trump has been bellicose re NK and Iran, but I see him as resisting the Syrian adventure, while cia plus military hawks pushing
forward.
Dems today are real hawks, itching to confront Russia in both Syria and Ukraine the latter another place trump may be resisting
hawks, the area has been quiet since the election, I.e. since dems were in charge.
It's an odd thought that in some theaters trump may be the sane one
Yaas, nothing is happening in Ukraine, all is quiet on the Eastern Front of NATO:
http://ukraine.csis.org/ Nuland has gone on to other conquests, and all
that. The CIA and War Department have lost interest in that Conflict Zone. Nothing is happening. You are getting sleepy. Sleepy.
Yeah, the title of this post would lead one to believe that their is something uniquely horrible about Trump's foreign policy.
From anything I can detect, her bellicose statement about a no-fly zone in Syria and her abject destruction of Libya, HRC's FP
would have been even worse.
If she had been elected, we might already be in a ground war with the Russians in Syria. The only hopeful sign is that while
Trump spends his day watching TeeVee, State, DOD, and CIA are all working at cross purposes and getting in each other's way.
Foreign policy? We have a foreign policy? If anybody finds it, will they please explain it to me?
I almost never comment, although I rely on NC for most of my news and blood pressure control. You are a treasure.
May I recommend another book – "All Honorable Men" – by James Stewart Martin. Published in 1950 and shortly thereafter all
bookstore copies were hoovered-up and burned by the CIA. It might have been referenced in one of the RNN segments, but I haven't
slogged through all of them yet.
You can get a hardback at Amazon for a mere $298. An i-book is cheaper.
After reading "The Brothers," and "The Devil's Chessboard," I considered starting a non-profit using GPS technology – Piss-on-their-Graves.org.
The Forbidden Bookshelf series by Open Media
is fantastic. Sadly for dinosaurs like me, it is mostly ebooks, but they do the occasional hard copy reprints, and since much
in the series would be out of print without Open Media, even the ebooks are great to have.
And it is interesting to see how many bothersome books just go away even without any "censorship" even with the First Amendment
being the one right courts have consistently, and strongly, enforced.
This article reminded me of an interesting/disturbing thing I saw on tv last night – a local news show had a bit on what to
do in case of nuclear attack!
Boomers & older probably remember the drill: go to the basement or innermost room of the house, have 72 hours of food & water
stashed & don't go outside for at least 3 days, etc. (yeah, that's the ticket).
Thought I was having a flashback to the 60's
Of course the best advice I ever heard on the subject was "Squat down, put your head between your knees & kiss your sweet [rear
end] goodbye."
Well, as I recall they were trying to give us the illusion of control so that we would not go all nihilistic or into a drunken
fatalistic stupor. I don't know if telling people, like little JBird, that the bombs might start dropping anytime in which case
you're just f@@@@d would have done any good.
One interpretation of the Cold War, that I found revealing, was that the two "opposing" militaries colluded to magnify the
threat so as to pump up their respective budgets. So both were essentially conning their own governments – and putting the whole
world at risk in the process.
Of course, another big factor, equally obvious at the time, was (and is) that world "leaders," elected or not, can't resist
the temptation to play chess with live pieces. They don't seem to care that people wind up dead, or that occasionally they put
the whole world in danger.
It's SIOP, not PSYOP. SIOP stands for Single Integrated Operating Plan, which was what the first nuclear war plan was called.
PSYOPS are Psychological Operations.
Having served in the first Cold War, it simply is beyond my comprehension that the Democrats restarted it all over again. Even
weirder are the neo-con proponents of a First Strike. If the USA wins, at least one or two major cities (if not all) will be destroyed.
New Zealand becomes the sequel to "On the Beach". We are in the same position as Germany in the 1930s except we know that the
world war will destroy us. Tell me, how in the hell, did a few thousand U.S. soldiers and contractors ended up in the middle of
Eastern Syria surrounded by Russians, the Syrian Arab Army and Shiite militias at risk of attack by Turkey?
Tell me, how in the hell, did a few thousand U.S. soldiers and contractors ended up in the middle of Eastern Syria surrounded
by Russians, the Syrian Arab Army and Shiite militias at risk of attack by Turkey?
Why they are needed to fight the evil-doers of course! Anything to protect our Freedom and the American Way. Now, ifyou keep
asking these inconvenient questions, then "they" might start asking if you support the terrorists.
It's like when my half blind aged mother, and her possibly weaponized cane, is scrutinized as a possible al-Qaeda terrorist
with a super hidden weapon, and I ask why it's 9/11 and the very bad people might hurt us.
Nuclear winter. How quaint. Soot and dust. Rapid cooling. Crop failures. Starvation. Billions -perhaps- dead.
But life, certainly, will find a way!
Not in my world. All-out thermonuclear war means 250 nuclear reactors melt down simultaneously and several hundred thousand
tons of loosely stored nuclear waste becomes aerosoled.
The resulting radiation blast burns the atmosphere off and the earth becomes a dead planet.
We can never look the thing straight in the eye. Take North Korea. We have been told, repeatedly, endlessly, that they have
20,000 artillery pieces trained on Seoul!
Again, how quaint. How SCARY! What we should be reading about, are the priority targets, the game changers:
"People should study the lunacy of Project Plowshare."
__
Yeah. In 1992 my wife was serving as the QA Mgr for the Nevada Test Site (NTS) nuke remediation project contractor. In 1993
a successful FOIA filing unearthed the Alaskan "Project Chariot." One of the brilliant Project Plowshare ideas was the potential
utility of nuke detonations to carve out deep water harbors (they now deny it), so they took a bunch of irradiated soil from NTS
and and spread it around on the tundra 130 miles N of the Arctic circle on the coast of the Chukchi Sea to "study potential environmental
impacts."
The nuke "dredging" idea went nowhere, so they just plowed the irradiated crap under the surface, where it remained secret
until the FOIA revelation decades later. DOE told my wife's company "go clean this shit up" (Eskimo tribes were freaking after
finding out), so off goes my wife and her crew to spend the summer and fall living in tents guarded by armed polar bear guards
(they had to first plow out a dirt & gravel runway, and flew everyone and all supplies in on STOL aircraft). They dug the test
bed area all up (near Cape Thompson), assayed samples in an onsite radlab, put some 30 tons of "contaminated" Arctic soil in large
sealed containers, barged it all down to Seattle, loaded it on trucks and drove it all back down to be buried at NTS.
Your tax dollars.
She looked so cute with her clipboard, and her orange vest, steel toed boots and hardhat.
As a teenager I read in a newspaper a proposal to use nuclear blasts to form a canal that would bring the sea to the middle
of Australia and form an inland sea from which water could be drawn. We already had nuclear weapon being tested here (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_tests_in_Australia
) so there was no appetite for ideas like this.
"... With many of the asset purchases by China based corporations there is absolutely no intention of selling them or otherwise letting go of them ever again. As I learned this is per se no bad thing, but it could be if say, too much of a nation was owned by foreigners who will never relinquish those properties. ..."
"... Most Chinese certainly China's leaders have no intention of changing their outlook one iota, but that doesn't mean they want non-Chinese to alter and adopt their values. If Xi Jinping bothered to consider that he would most likely decide he preferred Trump and the rest of the Americans to remain exactly as they are because the adulation of material gain, arrogance and inability to lie straight in bed makes people's behaviour very predictable. ..."
"... I disagree with those who think that China has been duped - there's simply no evidence that China is that gullible. One century of humiliation was enough to learn how the western world works. ..."
"... As Debsisdead points out, "Whatever China eventually does to counter these deceits may not be actioned for decades, but when it is implemented it will be apposite, well considered and impregnable." ..."
"... We keep talking about hybrid warfare, and noting the west with its color revolutions and its increasingly visible lies, but have we learned yet how to detect asymmetrical responses from the multi-polar world? Especially since it's at least possible that they will occur almost invisibly? ..."
"... No. China does not believe anything the US says in public or even in private to them. 80% of Earth ppl know the US can't be trusted, it does not do deals, even private individuals who shake hands and the like, ever (they back out, my country orders..) ..."
"... All is calculation on where it might be advantageous to seem to 'submit' or 'shut up' or conversely 'complain' and make a fuss (to the UN, WTO, the US itself ) China and Russia don't want to take on the US militarily for now (except in low level proxy wars with a positive calculated outcome, see Syria), so all this stuff is just par for the course, it is expected, it is tit for tat shadow play that on the part of the weaker groups is thought out cynically. ..."
"... Trump maybe doesn't quite know what he is doing, in the sense of measuring, anticipating the results, as he is being manipulated. That is one view. Others can be put forward. ..."
"... Backdoors created for NSA/CIA can be exploited by others too, which makes all Outlaw US military electronic systems vulnerable. I recall a video presentation by Nasrallah showing the video Hezbollah intercepted from Zionist drones scouting the ground for its assassination of Hariri--evidence for Hezbollah's defense in the affair that nobody thought they'd be capable of obtaining that demolished the Zionist/Outlaw US Empire framing of Hezbollah for that murder. ..."
"... My bet is that the Generals have taken complete charge. ..."
"... An Asymmetric war will not do for the overlords (or generals?). The "Cyber" and other parts are to control dissidents in the EU and US. Both Russai and China will be aware of this as it is not the first time that either of them has been targeted by the US-UK. ..."
"... Adopting the NATO sanctions against NK must have fit the Chinese game plan. Chinese are not that stupid. ..."
"... There is no naive China, Russia or whatever, all Nations understand that the US regime is not reliable nor trustworthy, the game most of the Nations continue to play is the game to buy time, any war with the US regime can be hard at the moment, but not in few years time. China knows is and will play the patience game til the end, Russia does the same, expect for few "no go" like Syria and the south China sea islands. ..."
"... After Iran's experience with US "lifting of sanctions", should anyone ever trust USA at all? ..."
I'm with everyone who has already noted that amerika got where it is today by being a fork
tongued double dealer whose words aren't worth the paper I wipe my arse with.
There isn't a single agreement reached between US authorities and any other entity since the
days of treaties with the indigenous owners of the land amerika continues to purloin that
amerika hasn't breached in either the letter or the spirit, usually both.
On the other hand China isn't Iran, not only are they well aware of amerikan perfidy they
are in a position to counter it.
The fact they haven't done so yet merely indicates their preference for a square up which
doesn't cost China or any of its citizens. This is a culture which always plays the long game
no matter how long - witness their bemusement at amerikan commercial interests bitching about
listed Chinese corporations not meeting Wall St imposed quarterly 'targets'.
When I lived in Northern Australia I had a landlord for several years who never increased my
rent - this in a market where property prices were shooting up thanks to the usual worthless
asset appreciation that too many consider a wealth generator. When I asked my landlord who
was a third generation Australian the great grandson of gold miners who arrived from Shanghai
towards the end of the 19th century he said "You are paying me $25 a week correct?" I replied
yes, to which he responded "Well your week's rent is considerably more than my grandfather
paid for it, $25 was a fair price when we shook hands and so that is what the rent will
remain at unless you move out - a deal is a deal. I'm happy if you are"
That is what happened after I did move out the building which was little more than a big
corrugated iron shed was pushed over and my former landlord put an office block in its stead.
On the fringes of Darwin's CBD when I moved in by the time I left the property was most def
'down town'. The family will never sell it because for them it will always be a part of the
family morphology. The original settler would never have been able much less permitted to buy
land in 1880's China but he innately knew exactly how it related to his family once he bought
land somewhere else.
This is something that few if any of the media or business outside China fully comprehend,
an assumption has been made that Chinese, just as likely they imagine of all non-western
peoples, are morphing into western commercial mindsets.
We see this all the time when those nations who have a bureaucratic mechanism for
scrutinizing foreign asset purchases decide at least in part on the basis that the property
will eventually change hands again.
With many of the asset purchases by China based corporations there is absolutely no
intention of selling them or otherwise letting go of them ever again. As I learned this is
per se
no bad thing, but it could be if say, too much of a nation was owned by
foreigners who will never relinquish those properties.
I was initially positive about Chinese investors outbidding engander, Oz, amerikan and
european buyers for big chunks of Aotearoa but now I am less positive because denying locals
the opportunity to buy in their own country seems to me to be a recipe for eventual
conflict.
Trump may 'get away' with his deceit, but America will not. Whatever China eventually does
to counter these deceits may not be auctioned for decades, but when it is implemented it will
be apposite, well considered and impregnable.
Most Chinese certainly China's leaders have no intention of changing their outlook one
iota, but that doesn't mean they want non-Chinese to alter and adopt their values. If Xi
Jinping bothered to consider that he would most likely decide he preferred Trump and the rest
of the Americans to remain exactly as they are because the adulation of material gain,
arrogance and inability to lie straight in bed makes people's behaviour very
predictable.
DoubleThink concept was coined by UK BBC propagandist.
I had a dispute with allegedly UK citizen, who at THE SAME time demanded me to agree
that
1) there was no NATO promise to avoid expanding East, as there is no signed paper document
today on it, and personal speaks are merely speaks.
2) there is no threat to Russia from, and hence Russia acts unreasonably demanding
legally-binding documents to, those "anti-Iranian" missile stations in Europe, because
"everyone told you so".
And he did pursue both lanes in the SAME argument.
-----------
Now, while i admit that US and UK are different states for long, some habits seem to die
hard
-----------
They also say, Iran was promised US do not care about their invasion in Kuwait, and they
also say in 19114 German kanzler was promised UK King would not do a thing about
European(read: Continental) war.
Gorbachev did not care about any written statement as he assumed the cold war to be over
and envisioned a common European-Russian zone from "Wladivostock to Lisbon".
"The West" assumed the same but interpreted it as taking over Russia (integrating it in
the Western system) as Russia "had lost the cold war".
The West then lost the peace by their best and brightest causing a severe economic and
humanitarian crisis in Russia which led to the rise of Putin and Russia realizing that they
had to defend themselves.
Steinmeier just held a speech in Estonia accusing Russia of "thinking in terms of zones of
influence" and geopolitics whilst disrespecting the free will of people. The speech was very
coded but ended with Germany never again fighting against Russia in "blind enemity" whilst
saying before that Germany would never again do something like the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
Usually what you say in the end sticks in people's mind.
The way Victoria Nuland operated (and the EU/Steinmeier followed) showed Russia is not
alone in geopolitical thinking never mind the free will of people and their elected
representatives.
Same party as Steinmeier, Martin Schulz now campaigns with the withdrawal of US nuclear
weapons from Germany.
I agree with the voices here saying that China understands exactly what is going on.
Especially thanks to Debsisdead @ 38 for the wonderful cultural insights.
I disagree with those who think that China has been duped - there's simply no evidence
that China is that gullible. One century of humiliation was enough to learn how the western
world works.
@41 lysias -
"The McCain apparently experienced a mysterious steering failure before
the collision."
I too wonder if the US Navy is experiencing asymmetrical responses from either Russia or
China or both. I greatly want to know more about all this. Joaquin Flores had a speculative
piece at Fort Russ the other day, making the point that the Navy's call to halt all
operations worldwide seems completely disproportionate to the apparent causes. Pun intended,
what's really going on below the waterline?
As Debsisdead points out, "Whatever China eventually does to counter these deceits may
not be actioned for decades, but when it is implemented it will be apposite, well considered
and impregnable."
We keep talking about hybrid warfare, and noting the west with its color revolutions
and its increasingly visible lies, but have we learned yet how to detect asymmetrical
responses from the multi-polar world? Especially since it's at least possible that they will
occur almost invisibly?
China deserved what they got since they were dumb enough to believe ANYHING the US. ..
New Yorker at 10.
1)
No. China does not believe anything the US says in public or even in private to
them. 80% of Earth ppl know the US can't be trusted, it does not do deals, even private
individuals who shake hands and the like, ever (they back out, my country orders..)
Are the Chinese, Gvmt., industry, military, to be considered out of that loop?
2)
All is calculation on where it might be advantageous to seem to 'submit' or 'shut
up' or conversely 'complain' and make a fuss (to the UN, WTO, the US itself ) China and
Russia don't want to take on the US militarily for now (except in low level proxy wars with a
positive calculated outcome, see Syria), so all this stuff is just par for the course, it is
expected, it is tit for tat shadow play that on the part of the weaker groups is thought out
cynically.
3)
Trump maybe doesn't quite know what he is doing, in the sense of measuring,
anticipating the results, as he is being manipulated. That is one view. Others can be put
forward.
If fly-by-wire control systems can be hacked and captured on airplanes, then the same can
happen to any such system regardless of what it's guiding; and there've been hints at this
being done by the Multipolar Alliance. Recall Iran's capturing one of the Outlaw US Empires
most sophisticated drones several years ago then reverse engineering its own version.
Lots of evidence cruise missiles went awry thanks to EW. Then there were several reports
of Outlaw US Navy vessels having their systems completely shutdown via Russian EW. I imagine
PavewayIV has a good recap of these incidents.
Backdoors created for NSA/CIA can be exploited by others too, which makes all Outlaw
US military electronic systems vulnerable. I recall a video presentation by Nasrallah showing
the video Hezbollah intercepted from Zionist drones scouting the ground for its assassination
of Hariri--evidence for Hezbollah's defense in the affair that nobody thought they'd be
capable of obtaining that demolished the Zionist/Outlaw US Empire framing of Hezbollah for
that murder.
Detecting asymmetrical responses will be difficult since the Multipolar Alliance will be
reluctant to announce such an action, while the Unipolar Hegemon will also be reluctant since
it won't want the other side to learn how effective its actions are. Imagine if North Korea
has the capability to redirect B-1 and B-2 bombers by taking control of their fly-by-wire
systems; would you expect North Korea to announce such capability or reserve it for use?
US want China to exit production economy and become Debt consumer Economy. US can play
that stock market/futures with print money out of thin air. If Rothschilds want China to
become US debt model,...it probably happens,
Or....Chinese get RIP of Rothschilds
thanks for your personal insights debs.. it is interesting to me as i have lived in the
vancouver area for most of my life.. the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th generation chinese seem so
different then the new arrivals from hong kong..
I would like to agree with your view, but this new generation primarily from hong kong,
seem to have a very different mind set.. either way - thanks for sharing..
If you're ever confronted by any more British apologists on the issue of NATO missile
systems in Poland and Romania, mention the United States could only have set up the systems
by unilaterally withdrawing American signatures from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in
2002, a decade BEFORE the European Union and Ukraine 'started talks' on framing, signing, and
ratifying the EU Association Agreement (violating Article Six of the Russian-Ukrainian
Friendship Treaty of 1997, which required Russian foreknowledge and participation in any
frameworks or any agreements Ukraine had with 'a third party') that partitioned public
opinion in Ukraine and precipitated the civil war.
@44
While transcripts of the NATO-Soviet peace talks throughout 1990 haven't been released,
the U.S. Secretary of State and the West German Foreign Minister literally layed out a
post-war framework (the Nine Assurances in May; the London Declaration in July) publicly (it
was reported in mainstream German and American media) at the end of these respective
conferences BEFORE the Two Plus Four Agreement was reached.
It envisioned the 'reform' of NATO in the framework of the CSCE (now OSCE) or the
replacement of NATO by the CSCE, the ratifying of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty
(building on other 'arms reduction measures by treaty' needed to permanently demilitarize
Europe), and the invitation of the original nine Soviet Republics to NATO Summits to accept
NATO Membership BEFORE post-Soviet Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus were
invited to accept membership.
The framework ('collective security') was explicitly what the Soviet Politburo had been
trying to achieve since the Soviet Foreign Ministry requested the British Foreign Ministry
(through public conferences) and the Polish Foreign Ministry (through secret telegrams) to
sign mutual security treaties in early and mid August of 1939 (which was rejected
consistently by Britain and Poland).
The Soviet Politburo was quick to end the war because it seemed the 'long strategy' had
worked, not because of Soviet indifference to formality. I think it was widely understood by
any European (worker or statesmen) the United States would never substantially compromise to
the discipline of formality, however, the Soviet Union preferred the risk and not diplomatic
stagnation.
Side note:
While I personally dislike involving a notorious personality in a social or political
history, I think it's interesting to speculate what would've happened if it was Chernenko who
lived and Gorbachev who died in 1985. He was a militarist, but never seemed committed to
decentralizing the Soviet economy and compromising so easily to the United States.
Part of b's headline; "Trump cheats...." may be wrong. Does Trump control anything at all any
more?
Not only the NK sanctions, but a corresponding increase in troop levels in Afghanistan,
(including "unknown helicopters" ferrying militants in Mazar-i-Sharif, from the Afghan base
of the 209 Afgh Nat Army corps in NATO controlled airspace, for a massacre of Hazara Shias in
Sar-e-Pol province), the increase of US servicemen training Ukrainian snipers on the Donbass
frontline and a reported blocking of a (small) Russian Bank from the SWIFT network, - all
suggest that the military have totally taken over command in the US.
That they have decided to push everyone around as far as possible. This change in policy
is since Trump "lost" his powers to Congress by massive one sided voting, and the
introduction of the "new" all encompassing anti-Russian and Chinese sanctions.
I may be wrong about WHO is in control (add your own here...), but it seems fairly clear
that the "Americans" (people) have been reduced to potential cannon-fodder.
My bet is that the Generals have taken complete charge.
-----
Unfortunately this is not a uniquely US phenomena. Examples in France go back to 1875 with
the "Anarchists" (actually FOR worker's rights at the beginning), The "commune de Paris, (US
CHicago riots) where other normal people didn't want the "status-quo" of overlord-underling
to continue. Usually the movement was treated as a proto-terrorist threat, all the MSM of the
time condemning the leaders - and the whole thing finishing in a blood-bath with troops
firing on dissenters -- WWI was another "overlord organised restucturation" by the
military).
Not really OT - but I am just trying to show that the new situation has antecedents
throughout history, and if I am correct the next stage will be to cross several frontiers (by
NATO or US) "accidentally" to provoke a reaction. ie NK is another.
An Asymmetric war will not do for the overlords (or generals?). The "Cyber" and other
parts are to control dissidents in the EU and US. Both Russai and China will be aware of this
as it is not the first time that either of them has been targeted by the US-UK.
Adopting the NATO sanctions against NK must have fit the Chinese game plan. Chinese are
not that stupid.
It should be considered that official sanctions naturally encourage, promote and serve the
black markets - the Mafia, Cartels, etc. The underground economy will surely not obey
sanctions. It should also be noted that certain official bodies will turn a blind eye and
allow certain other bodies to engage in trade, etc.
Note how the CyA brings in drugs to Mena Arkansas, for one example. And the cya plane
crash in Central America - loaded to the gills.
There is no naive China, Russia or whatever, all Nations understand that the US regime is
not reliable nor trustworthy, the game most of the Nations continue to play is the game to
buy time, any war with the US regime can be hard at the moment, but not in few years time.
China knows is and will play the patience game til the end, Russia does the same, expect for
few "no go" like Syria and the south China sea islands.
Nice to see you commenting here! Agreed that China and Russia understand but still seek
dialog since that's the essence of "the patience game." But I wonder about those running
Brazil; we don't discuss that much at SyrPers. Then there's India's Modi and the cadre of
Hindu Neoliberals who seem to want to have their own game instead of teaming with China and
Russia for a Win/Win partnership rather than the dying Zero-Sumism of the Neoliberalcons. And
thanks again for all the effort you devote to SyrPers; it's quite remarkable!
"... "confronted with the Pivot to Asia and the construction of new US naval and air bases to ensure Washington's control of the South China Sea, now defined as an area of American National Interests." ..."
"... "for the crisis that Washington has created in Ukraine and for its use as anti-Russian propaganda." ..."
"... "How America Was Lost" ..."
"... "aggression and blatant propaganda have convinced Russia and China that Washington intends war, and this realization has drawn the two countries into a strategic alliance." ..."
"... "vassalage status accepted by the UK, Germany, France and the rest of Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia." ..."
"... "price of world peace is the world's acceptance of Washington's hegemony." ..."
"... "On the foreign policy front, the hubris and arrogance of America's self-image as the 'exceptional, indispensable' country with hegemonic rights over other countries means that the world is primed for war," ..."
"... "unless the dollar and with it US power collapses or Europe finds the courage to break with Washington and to pursue an independent foreign policy, saying good-bye to NATO, nuclear war is our likely future." ..."
"... "historical turning point," ..."
"... "the Chinese were there in their place," ..."
"... "Russian casualties compared to the combined casualties of the US, UK, and France make it completely clear that it was Russia that defeated Hitler," ..."
"... "in the Orwellian West, the latest rewriting of history leaves out of the story the Red Army's destruction of the Wehrmacht." ..."
"... "expressed gratitude to 'the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States of America for their contribution to the victory.'" ..."
"... "do not hear when Russia says 'don't push us this hard, we are not your enemy. We want to be your partners.'" ..."
"... "finally realized that their choice is vassalage or war," ..."
"... "made the mistake that could be fateful for humanity," ..."
The White House is determined to block the rise of the key nuclear-armed nations, Russia and China, neither of whom will join the
"world's acceptance of Washington's hegemony," says head of the Institute for Political Economy, Paul Craig Roberts.
The former
US assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy, Dr Paul Craig Roberts, has written on his
blog
that Beijing is currently "confronted with the Pivot to Asia and the construction of new US naval and air bases to ensure Washington's
control of the South China Sea, now defined as an area of American National Interests."
Roberts writes that Washington's commitment to contain Russia is the reason "for the crisis that Washington has created in
Ukraine and for its use as anti-Russian propaganda."
The author of several books, "How America Was Lost" among the latest titles, says that US "aggression and blatant
propaganda have convinced Russia and China that Washington intends war, and this realization has drawn the two countries into a strategic
alliance."
Dr Roberts believes that neither Russia, nor China will meanwhile accept the so-called "vassalage status accepted by the UK,
Germany, France and the rest of Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia." According to the political analyst, the "price of
world peace is the world's acceptance of Washington's hegemony."
"On the foreign policy front, the hubris and arrogance of America's self-image as the 'exceptional, indispensable' country
with hegemonic rights over other countries means that the world is primed for war," Roberts writes.
He gives a gloomy political forecast in his column saying that "unless the dollar and with it US power collapses or Europe
finds the courage to break with Washington and to pursue an independent foreign policy, saying good-bye to NATO, nuclear war is our
likely future."
Russia's far-reaching May 9 Victory Day celebration was meanwhile a "historical turning point," according to Roberts
who says that while Western politicians chose to boycott the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, "the Chinese were
there in their place," China's president sitting next to President Putin during the military parade on Red Square in Moscow.
A recent poll targeting over 3,000 people in France, Germany and the UK has recently revealed that as little as 13 percent of
Europeans think the Soviet Army played the leading role in liberating Europe from Nazism during WW2. The majority of respondents
– 43 percent – said the US Army played the main role in liberating Europe.
"Russian casualties compared to the combined casualties of the US, UK, and France make it completely clear that it was Russia
that defeated Hitler," Roberts points out, adding that "in the Orwellian West, the latest rewriting of history leaves out
of the story the Red Army's destruction of the Wehrmacht."
The head of the presidential administration, Sergey Ivanov, told RT earlier this month that attempts to diminish the role played
by Russia in defeating Nazi Germany through rewriting history by some Western countries are part of the ongoing campaign to isolate
and alienate Russia.
Dr Roberts has also stated in his column that while the US president only mentioned US forces in his remarks on the 70th anniversary
of the victory, President Putin in contrast "expressed gratitude to 'the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States
of America for their contribution to the victory.'"
The political analyst notes that America along with its allies "do not hear when Russia says 'don't push us this hard, we
are not your enemy. We want to be your partners.'"
While Moscow and Beijing have "finally realized that their choice is vassalage or war," Washington "made the mistake
that could be fateful for humanity," according to Dr Roberts.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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US troops during nuclear tests in Nevada. April 1952 © Intercontinentale / AFP 3050 12 Plans for a nuclear war devised by the US Army in the 1960s considered decimating the Soviet Union and China by destroying their industrial potential and wiping out the bulk of their populations, newly declassified documents show.
Despite US denial, nuclear posture review revolves around Russia
President Trump, second from right, speaks in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Monday. (Susan Walsh/AP)
