Authored by Richard Cook via ScheerPost.com,
It’s possible that billions of individuals around the globe view the battle in Ukraine as a proxy warfare being waged by the U.S. towards Russia. US President Joe Biden has pledged to help Ukraine’s pursuit of victory “for so long as it takes,” with out defining what the tip state is perhaps. Russian President Vladimir Putin has interpreted U.S. intentions to imply a struggle “to the final Ukrainian.”
Anybody with a discernible pulse is conscious of the hazard that the battle may escalate right into a conflagration giant and harmful sufficient to morph into World Struggle III. The brink would possible be crossed as soon as nuclear weapons have been unleashed. The navy doctrines of all nuclear powers stipulate that such an assault would justify an in-kind response, although with out all the time ruling out the identical for lesser provocations of a probably existential nature.
President Biden has stated “the world faces the largest danger of nuclear Armageddon because the 1962 Cuban Missile Disaster.” The context of Biden’s assertion got here a month earlier on September 21, 2022, when Putin warned the West he was not bluffing when he stated he can be prepared to make use of nuclear weapons to defend Russia towards what he stated was “nuclear blackmail.” Earlier, in an April 21, 2021, speech, Putin stated:
We actually don’t need to burn bridges. But when somebody errors our good intentions for indifference or weak point and intends to burn and even blow up these bridges, they need to know that Russia’s response will likely be asymmetrical, swift, and hard. These behind provocations that threaten the core pursuits of our safety will remorse what they’ve finished in a method they haven’t regretted something for a very long time.
One other to talk of nuclear warfare has been former Russian president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy head of the Russian Safety Council and one among Putin’s high advisers. Commenting on Ukraine’s extremely touted however now failed 2023 “spring offensive,” Medvedev stated in July 2023 that if Ukraine succeeded in taking Russian sovereign territory—together with Crimea plus the 4 Donbass oblasts (areas) annexed by Russia final 12 months—Russia “must use nuclear weapons by advantage of the Russian Presidential Decree.” This decree said that any assault on Russian territory justified a nuclear response.
On Hiroshima Day, August 6, 2023, UN Secretary Common Antonio Guterres stated, “The drums of nuclear warfare are beating as soon as once more. Distrust and division are on the rise. The nuclear shadow that loomed over the Chilly Struggle has re-emerged.” One who has predicted world warfare has been UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace. On Could 19, 2023, he warned “that the UK may enter a direct battle with Russian and China within the subsequent seven years and has referred to as for a rise in navy spending to counter the potential risk.” Talking to London’s Monetary Occasions, Wallace stated “a battle is coming with a variety of adversaries around the globe.”
Extra lately, impartial commentator Tucker Carlson, who has stated the U.S. is deliberately in search of warfare with Russia, remarked in a September 2023 interview on The Adam Corolla Present that the Biden administration would try to remain in energy by beginning a “sizzling warfare” with Russia earlier than the 2024 election. Carlson argued that the U.S. was “already at warfare” with Russia in Ukraine. He added, “I don’t assume we’ll win it.”
In the meantime, Russia’s new technology of Sarmat ballistic missiles, able to carrying ten or extra nuclear warheads, have been deployed for fight obligation.
In fact we now should wait and see if current motion by Home Republicans to launch an impeachment inquiry towards Biden, alongside along with his worsening senility, put sufficient of a crimp in his model to power a postponement of any irretrievable choices.
However feeding into Carlson’s fears are statements by U.S. Appearing Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in a September video clip supporting Ukrainian strikes towards Russian territory. Nuland stated that one “axis” of U.S. technique is to “put a few of Russia’s most valuable property in danger.”
This comes because the U.S. is planning to ship long-range Military Tactical Missile Programs (ATACMS) to Ukraine, with Germany promising Jupiter missiles, and because the UK plans to ship RAF fighters to the Black Sea. Russian Protection Minister Sergey Shoigu stated in June 2023 that use of Western-supplied weapons to launch such assaults” would imply the total involvement of america and the UK within the battle.”
So was Biden right? Is nuclear Armageddon looming? Or is “brinkmanship” at this time merely “bluffmanship?”
75 YEARS OF CONFLICT
In fact, potential nuclear warfare between the U.S. and Russia, particularly in its earlier iteration because the Soviet Union, is nothing new. World Struggle II was scarcely over earlier than figures like Winston Churchill and U.S. banker Bernard Baruch started elevating alarms concerning the existence of an “Iron Curtain” throughout Europe and the beginning of a “Chilly Struggle.”
However even earlier than World Struggle II started, the Roosevelt administration accepted the advice of research by the Council of Overseas Relations, financed by the Rockefeller Basis, that the U.S. ought to intention for postwar international navy domination. Notice that there was nothing within the U.S. Structure that even remotely helps such a aim. The closest the U.S. may need come was the parable of “Manifest Future” that when provided the ideology for coast-to-coast growth; i.e., “from sea to shining sea.”
On the finish of World Struggle II, with the British Empire crumbling and Europe in ruins, there have been two clear victors: the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The accepted logic of U.S. planners now dictated that the latter should go.
Stalin is claimed to have requested to affix the newly-formed NATO however was rebuffed. He responded by forming the Warsaw Pact. The post-war standoff had begun and, 75 years later, has not ended. With the Soviets being accused of fomenting leftist revolutions around the globe, the U.S. navy has been laying plans for a U.S.-Russian nuclear change ever since. Whereas the navy sought a bonus favorable to a nuclear first strike, the on a regular basis working goal towards the Soviets was “containment.” In the meantime, the U.S. started its personal lengthy historical past of producing coups pleasant to its pursuits with the CIA’s overthrow of governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.
In 1956, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles proclaimed a U.S. coverage of “brinkmanship.” Talking of the potential for nuclear warfare in a Life journal interview, he stated, “If you’re scared to go to the brink, you’re misplaced.” In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appeared to have stared down Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev over the deliberate set up of nuclear weapons in Cuba. Unknown publicly, JFK had already pulled U.S. nukes out of Turkey.
Nor are proxy wars something new. They started with the Korean Struggle. In fact, there have been U.S. “boots on the bottom,” however North and South Korea additionally fought towards one another with Russia/China and the U.S./UN having the backs of every respectively. The Vietnam Struggle was fought with U.S. troops and weapons aiding the South Vietnamese towards the Russian-backed Hanoi regime and its ally, South Vietnam’s Viet Cong. The Korean battle turned a stalemate; Vietnam, a debacle.
However change was within the wind. JFK moved to revolutionize the discourse along with his now-famous proposal for world peace delivered at American College on June 10, 1963. Within the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and proposed a brand new period of “Peaceable Coexistence” with the West. Within the early Nineteen Seventies, President Richard M. Nixon and his nationwide safety advisor Henry Kissinger sought détente with the Soviets together with their epochal opening to China.
Rapprochement with the Soviets was sabotaged by the Reagan navy build-up within the Eighties and the lies of Soviet supremacy promulgated by the Committee on the Current Hazard. The U.S. was additionally creating the Mujahedeen to assault the Soviet navy presence in Afghanistan. This was a part of Reagan’s engagement in his personal proxy wars—referred to as the “Reagan Doctrine”—towards leftist regimes in Asia, Africa, and Central America, with U.S.-supported “loss of life squads” in El Salvador and elsewhere.
It was beneath Reagan that the faction often known as the “Neocons” started their infiltration of the nationwide safety equipment. These included “Trotskyite” intellectuals from New York like Irving Kristol; alumni of Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s workers like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle; “Staff B” CIA analysts empowered by short-term Director George H.W. Bush, resulting in the long run prominence of Bob Gates; icons of the military-industrial complicated like “Father of the H-Bomb” Edward Teller; Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who’d been joined on the hip to one another and to President Gerald Ford; Reagan’s Director of Central Intelligence William Casey; and lots of future darkish personages like John Bolton.
It was Casey who famously stated at one among Reagan’s early workers conferences, “We are going to know our disinformation program is full when the whole lot the American folks believes is fake.” This assertion outlined completely the long run program of what we name at this time the “Deep State” and its mass media megaphone, particularly shops like The New York Occasions, the Washington Submit, and CNN.
One of many first main Neocon tasks—Iran-Contra—devolved into scandal, with Reagan and Vice-President Bush each claiming ignorance beneath the “believable deniability” fiction. One other was Reagan’s pet undertaking—the Strategic Protection Initiative—lampooned as “Star Wars.”
Purporting to be offended by the U.S.-Soviet nuclear standoff, whereby peace was assured solely by the logic of “Mutually-Assured Destruction,” Reagan proposed an armada of “defensive” weapons in house. The military-industrial complicated seized on Star Wars as a cornucopia of profitable analysis and improvement tasks that ended when house shuttle Challenger blew up. The house shuttle was being transformed to a testing platform for house weaponry, as I noticed personally at NASA after I labored there in 1985-1986. One of many warfare planners’ brilliant concepts was to ship the president to orbit within the house shuttle, from which he may safely direct navy operations.
However the Star Wars undertaking, which was not revived till the twenty first century, however witnessed huge planning of house battle stations, nifty theoretical house weaponry just like the X-ray laser and gadgets later referred to as “rods from God,” and cost-benefit research that included calculations of what number of tens of hundreds of thousands of Individuals may die in a space-based nuclear warfare towards the Soviets whereas nonetheless permitting the U.S. to assert victory.
In the meantime, it was after the horrendous exposures of CIA assassinations, media subversion, poisoning of topics with LSD, and different misdeeds arising from the Church Committee hearings in 1975, that the CIA started to retreat into the shadows. Underneath Reagan got here authorization of the Nationwide Endowment on Democracy, whose signature mission turned “shade revolutions” and later the “Arab Spring.” Amid the horrors, although, Reagan was but in a position to signal the Intermediate-Vary Nuclear Forces Treaty with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, rolling again the variety of nuclear weapons for the primary time.
However issues took a determined flip for the more severe beneath President George H.W. Bush with the 1992 Wolfowitz Doctrine that reformulated the previous CFR plans for international U.S. navy dominance and contained the ominous warning that Russia was the one nation on earth with the facility to destroy the U.S. By now, the U.S. had begun its subsequent part of world conquest with Bush’s warfare towards Iraq—Desert Storm. The aim was whole navy colonization of the Center East, with the “Better Israel” undertaking so close to and expensive to the hearts of the Neocons an apparent beneficiary. The Iran-Iraq Struggle of 1980-6, with the U.S. arming each side, likely had the identical underlying functions.
The oddity within the designation of Russia because the worst of enemies named within the Wolfowitz Doctrine was {that a} 12 months earlier, the Soviet Union had collapsed, ceasing to exist in 1991, with U.S. hawks declaring that the Chilly Struggle was over and that the U.S. had received. Their corollary was that the Reagan navy build-up had pressured the Soviet financial system into receivership as a result of they couldn’t sustain with U.S. navy spending.
However in a December 17, 2022, interview on the web information platform, The Duran, Jack F. Matlock, former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, stated that “the concept we spent them to defeat was completely flawed.” He stated the U.S. “didn’t win the Chilly Struggle.” He stated the Soviet Union broke up as a result of the Chilly Struggle was over by 1989 and that it was native nationalism that tore it aside. He added that the tip of the Chilly Struggle was “negotiated as equals.”
However right here was the rub: the Wolfowitz Doctrine proved that it wasn’t “communism” that the U.S. needed to defeat, as Russia was not a communist state. Matlock stated that Gorbachev had deserted communism in his UN speech of December 7, 1988. Nor was the U.S. actually pushing for “democracy.” In a single day Russia had turn out to be extra democratic than most of the authoritarian regimes the U.S. had been supporting around the globe for many years, corresponding to these in Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Reasonably it was Russia as a geopolitical enemy that the U.S. was focusing on; that means, in Russia’s eyes, its very existence as a territory, a state, and a civilization.
As a way to promote peace with the West, Gorbachev had agreed to the reunification of East and West Germany as one nation and a part of NATO, given U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s settlement that NATO wouldn’t advance “one inch eastward” from the German border. This pledge was violated by the subsequent three presidents—Clinton, Bush II, and Obama. Veteran U.S. statesman George Kennan opposed the growth of NATO, whereas Ambassador Matlock referred to as it “a fantastic tragedy.”
In the meantime, 9/11, the Neocons’ “new Pearl Harbor,” produced the “Struggle on Terror,” the Patriot Act, the Division of Homeland Safety, the navy doctrine of Full-Spectrum Dominance, and the assaults on Afghanistan, Iraq, and later Libya. The ideological focus was demonization of all issues Islam. The rationale? “They hate our freedoms.”
However the 9/11 Fact Motion started to poke holes within the official conspiracy concept of terrorists with field cutters that over time turned gaping abysses. The anti-Islam narrative started to put on skinny when stacked up towards U.S. navy overkill, the CIA’s torture chambers, the ineffective expenditure of trillions of {dollars} taking pictures at goat herders, the absence of any proof of WMDs in Iraq or co-conspirators wherever, and Israel’s infinite strife with the Palestinians.
Now Russia itself had begun to make a stand. On the 2007 Munich Safety Convention, Putin challenged the try by the U.S. to attain hegemony by means of creation of a “unipolar” world “in which there’s one grasp, one sovereign.” He stated, “on the finish of the day that is pernicious.”
There was by no means any indication that Putin, in making his Munich declaration or afterwards, had any intention of restoring the Soviet “empire.” However he was completely decided to protect Russia’s sovereignty and safety regardless of the declared intention of factions within the West to interrupt up Russia’s territory and acquire management of its assets. He had additionally lamented the truth that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, 25 million ethnic Russians had been omitted of what was now a unified and strengthening nation-state, mixing a multiplicity of races, languages, and religions.
The “Struggle on Terror” ended up being a tragic failure. So now the Western mainstream media jumped at their subsequent massive probability by depicting Putin because the dangerous man du jour, much more “authoritarian,” and “evil” than both Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. However they’d have finished the identical had Donald Duck been president of Russia—a nasty, duck-billed, feathered tyrant who was attacking democracy, freedom, human rights, and, sure, the “New American Century” the Neocons had dreamt up.
UKRAINE — THE CROSSROADS
Now the U.S., with the Neocons firmly entrenched within the State Division and elsewhere, surrounded Russia with navy bases and attacked its perimeter with color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, following on the dismemberment of Yugoslavia within the late Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s. President Barack Obama then located the Aegis Missile Protection System in Poland and Romania with the potential to activate missiles that might attain Moscow with nuclear warheads in six minutes. Speak was present of a attainable “decapitation” strike towards the Russian management.
Lastly, in 2014, with “cookies” Victoria Nuland and Vice President Joe “Burisma” Biden in cost, the U.S. fomented a coup in Ukraine with the help of paid snipers to drive out a president pleasant towards Russia and his substitute with a NeoNazi junta that put Ukraine on a warfare footing. In response, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, the place Sevastopol is the house of its Black Sea fleet, with 85 p.c standard approval, whereas the jap Ukrainian Donbass provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, ethnically-Russian, declared independence.
Lastly, after eight years of Ukrainian provocations, the loss of life from Ukrainian shelling of greater than 10,000 Donbass civilians, and the treachery of Germany and France in failing to uphold the Minsk agreements they’d assured, Russia entered Ukraine with its navy forces in February 2022. The battle was on, a battle that Russia is profitable. U.S.-led sanctions towards Russia didn’t deliver down its financial system or power regime change towards Putin. However every Ukrainian setback on the battlefield has been adopted by extra weapons and cash provided to the Volodymyr Zelensky regime by the U.S., UK, Germany, France, and different NATO members.
However who was calling the pictures? In March 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators reached settlement on a tentative settlement at conferences in Istanbul. UK prime minister Boris Johnson then rushed to Kiev to induce Zelensky to tear up the settlement and proceed the warfare. Western escalation has included billions of {dollars} value of heavy tanks and different weapons to Ukraine, together with cluster munitions and depleted uranium projectiles. There have been drone assaults on Russia itself and on Crimea. However the Ukrainian counteroffensive has collapsed, with hypothesis rising of a significant Russian counterattack, probably even reducing Ukraine off from the Black Sea.
Now we have now come full circle. Warnings from Washington proceed that Putin had higher not go nuclear, which might be learn as inviting him to take action. That is clearly a brand new part of brinkmanship that might give the U.S. a pretext for themselves shifting to nuclear warfare. In the meantime, the U.S. understands that it may on no account problem Russia in a standard warfare even with the complete NATO alliance being activated. Even then, divisiveness inside NATO and the absence of enough navy power wherever in Europe make this not possible at current. Veteran navy analyst Scott Ritter writes in Sputnik Information on September 21, 2023, that even have been the U.S. to activate its complete navy power stationed in Europe towards Russia, it could be defeated inside one to 2 weeks of intensive fight. The one various would then be to activate a big airlift of extra forces into Europe with U.S. cargo planes sitting geese for destruction en route. Inconceivable.
There are actually indicators that the U.S. could also be pressuring Ukraine to conform to a cease-fire, with a “freeze” alongside the traces of the decades-old Korean settlement. However all this is able to do can be to “kick the can down the street”—probably till after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, prone to be preceded by elections in Ukraine in March. There are not any indicators that the U.S. is able to concede a Russian victory involving the redrawing of the European safety equipment with Russia a revered social gathering. The Ukrainian authorities speaks of a “long-term” battle lasting a long time. So there isn’t any method to aver that the warfare in Ukraine is ending or to take a position concerning the subsequent part.
So, is a nuclear World Struggle III a chance?
Subsequent: Half II Are the Navy-Industrial Complicated and Deep State Driving Us to Struggle?
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