The Trump administration’s declared scrapping of a crucial arms control treaty is putting the world on notice of a nuclear war, sooner or later.
Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation:
[source: http://theduran.com/americas-nuclear-death-wish-europe-must-rebel/]
Any such war is not winnable. It is mutually assured destruction.
Yet the arrogant American rulers – some of them at least – seem to be deluded in thinking they can win such a war.
What makes the American position even more execrable is that it is being pushed by people who have never fought a war. Indeed, by people like President Donald Trump and his hawkish national security advisor John Bolton who both dodged military service to their country during the Vietnam War
Pence, Trump and Bolton – all three are chicken hawks who never served and figure they will ride out WWIII deep-down in a “continuance-of-governance” bunker for VIPs with three years of stored food.
Reagan and Pence in 1988 at the White House
[JdN: Other draft dodgers were Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney and George Dubya Bush — who, actually, went AWOL even from a rich-boy, once-a-month air force reserve unit!]
***
How’s that for macabre mockery? The world is being pushed to war by a bunch of effete cowards who are clueless about war.
***
JdN: Jimmy Carter at least served, as a nuclear officer in the Navy. Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Ford also were former Navy officers. Military service and successful military experience should be a requirement to become president — and thus Commander-in-Chief!
***
Trump announced last this week that the US was finally pulling out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a move confirmed by Bolton on a follow-up trip to Moscow. That treaty was signed in 1987 by former President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
It was a landmark achievement of cooperation and trust between the nuclear superpowers. Both sides removed short and medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe.
With Trump intending to rip up the INF Treaty, as his predecessor GW Bush had done with the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, Europe is now facing the disastrous prospect of American missiles being reinstalled across its territory as they were in the 1980s.
However, a big distinction between then and now is that after years of expansion by NATO, European territory is at an even sharper interface with Russia’s heartland.
JdN: Russia is far less a potential threat now than then. The communist bloc called the Warsaw Pact counties had 450 million citizens; Russia today just 140 million — one third! And Russia today is a stable, democratic, capitalistic country with religious liberty and no ideology whatsoever of conquering the West!
When the INF Treaty was implemented three decades ago, the US and Russian nuclear arsenals were seriously dialed back to the strategic level of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) confined on respective landmasses separated by thousands of kilometers. As Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of Natsionalnaya Oborona, told Russia’s Vesti news channel, the ICBMs typically have a flight time of 30 minutes from launch. That time gap would give Russian defense systems time to respond effectively to an incoming strike from the US, and vice versa.
But, as Korotchenko noted, the impending installation of intermediate-range missiles by the Americans in European states will reduce the flight time of a possible US nuclear strike on Russia to a couple of minutes, even seconds. That would seriously challenge Russian anti-missile defenses, as well as greatly increasing the margin of error in detecting a strike, possibly leading to mistaken escalation. In other words, the strategic balance has been thrown into disarray by the US over the INF, just as it was again thrown into disarray back in 2002 when Bush trashed the ABM.
It also presents the Americans with the temptation to exercise their “first-strike doctrine”. In US military planning, it reserves the “right” to use a pre-emptive attack. By contrast, Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated again last week that Russia will never use a first-strike option, that it would only use nuclear weapons as a defensive action.
Recall that earlier this month, the US envoy to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, said that American forces would “take out” Russian missiles if they are deemed to be violating the INF.
It was an appalling expression of the pre-emptive prerogative that Washington grants itself, even though the information upon which it would base its action is highly questionable.
Putting the American logic together one can say that the US rulers have a death wish on the planet. With criminal recklessness, they are moving to loosen the international controls over deploying nuclear weapons and are creating a situation in Europe that puts nuclear war on a hair-trigger.
Moscow vowed last week that it will respond “militarily” if Washington goes ahead with scrapping the INF Treaty. Russia can be expected to counter by deploying shorter-range missiles that will put NATO-allied Europe in the firing line.
Surely, the European states must be asking themselves what kind of ally they supposedly have in the US. What kind of ally puts its supposed friends in the firing line, under the name of “protecting them”, while it remains at relatively safer distance?
The European Union has reacted to Trump’s announced withdrawal from the INF Treaty with horror. The EU is calling on the US to adhere to the treaty and to negotiate with Russia over purported complaints. French President Emmanuel Macron telephoned Trump, appealing that the treaty has been a vital element of Europe’s peace for the past 30 years.
Washington has been claiming for the past four years, since the Obama administration, that Russia is violating the INF by allegedly developing medium-range, ground-launched cruise missiles. Moscow has repeatedly denied the claims, pointing out that the Americans have not presented evidence to back up their accusations. Washington says its information is classified, and so can’t be publicly revealed. That’s hardly convincing given past American deceptions over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Iran and Syria.
In any case, it is the Americans who are making a big deal about the alleged Russian violations of the INF. If the Europeans were really concerned, why haven’t they kicked up a fuss? The fact that the Europeans are pleading with Washington to adhere to the INF suggests that they are not convinced by allegations of Russia posing a missile threat.
Moreover, if there are disputes and complaints from the American side, then let them iron these problems out through diplomacy and negotiation.
It is telling that the US wants to instead escalate the tensions and the risks of war in such a reckless manner.
***
JdN: Bellicose US Army generals like Philip Breedlove, in 2015 the NATO commander,
…..and General Mark Milley, US Army Chief-of-Staff, openly threaten Russia with destruction!
Ask the Mongols, Swedes, Napoleon and Hitler about attacking Russia!
***
That betrays its real agenda of seeking to militarize problems, rather than exploring political solutions. The difference it seems comes down to the US not actually having a valid political argument, so it must exercise its power through militarism as a way to conceal its lack of rational validity.
The root problem of INF Treaty tensions and alleged violations stems from the US-led configuration of military forces encroaching ever-closer on Russian territory. If the US were genuinely interested in ensuring security and peace in Europe then it would listen to Russia’s concern over the provocative expansion of US-led NATO forces towards its Western border. When Reagan signed the INF with Gorbachev it was on the understanding and commitment from the US side not to advance its military towards Russia “by one inch”.
In 30 years, US forces have pushed all the way from Germany to the Baltic and Black Seas on Russia’s doorstep. Washington is trying to enlist Ukraine and Georgia into the NATO alliance, indeed is carrying out war drills with these two former Soviet Union states which share borders with Russia.
If the US now re-installs medium-range nuclear missiles with flight times to Moscow down to a matter of seconds then we can lament that the abandonment of the INF is a grave watershed move towards nuclear war.
The way out of this heinous dilemma is not only maintaining the INF Treaty. Furthermore, there should a wholesale scaling back of NATO forces in Europe on Russia’s Western, Northern and Southern flanks. Just this month, NATO is holding its biggest-ever war maneuvers since the Cold War in the Arctic region on Russia’s border with 50,000 troops, accompanied by a flurry of surveillance flights over Russia’s coast.
The insanity of America’s death wish for nuclear war has to stop. The American ruling class won’t stop it because their death wish mentality is so suffused with blind arrogance and ignorance and it is so integral with the “normal” functioning of their capitalist military-industrial complex.
Russia is holding the line with its undoubted military capability and its principled diplomatic prudence.
But it is time for the Europeans to step up to the plate and to exert some sense on the Americans.
For a start, the EU states should tell Trump that any plan to re-install medium-range nuclear weapons on their soil is impermissible.
Secondly, the Europeans need to scale back the NATO expansion towards Russian territory.
Thirdly, they need to tell Washington that Russia is a partner, not a pariah to be abused for the benefit of American militarism and hegemonic ambitions.
Will the Europeans do that? Their leaders may not have the backbone, but the citizens of Europe will have to, if they want to prevent their American “ally” inciting a nuclear cataclysm. American arrogance is fomenting a European rebellion against its death-wish criminal leaders.
.
…..Russia discusses reopening its huge military base in Lourdes, Cuba!
https://www.rt.com/news/442726-russia-cuba-bases-inf/
.
……US-China war looming? Russia bracing for conflict? Week of warmongering predictions by top officials
https://www.rt.com/news/442686-looming-war-predictions-officials/
US Marine Corps Abrams tanks on the Polish coast near Russian Kaliningrad
.
.
……See also
.
.
…..The 1917 Nicholas Van Rensburg prophecy of three world wars marches toward its fulfillment, ending with the Reich Germans re-emerging from bases under the Antarctic and the Andes mountain chain to rule a world in ashes. NVR foresaw Britain betraying America, Turkey betraying Russia, Russia invading NATO Europe (as the weaker party) “to get in the first blow” — and then “the horror bombs” go off.
https://johndenugent.com/english/simon-roche-south-africa-the-coming-all-out-race-war-certain-germans-to-the-rescue-trump-wwiii-and-the-visions-of-the-prophet-nicholas-van-rensburg-100-years-ago
According to the 1917 prophecy of the militant Boer Nicholas van Rensburg,
after a black becomes president of South Africa ( = Mandela) and later a black likewise becomes the president of the United States ( = Obama), and recall that back in 1917 such notions seemed absurd and even unimaginable), with the black US president described as “a black boy,” THEN a male, white, older conservative will take over the reins of the state. He will have “hair like a wig,” constantly frown, and he will end up (against his will?) waging a catastrophic war against Russia.
Russia will be destroyed, and some European countries as well, especially England, which will break its alliance with the United States and therefore will be abandoned by them. Not one Englishman will survive, van Rensburg predicts.
Germans and Boers in South Africa will be the only major white survivors of this useless war that will destroy the entire northern hemisphere of our planet.
They will build together a new white empire in Africa, which will have remained unscathed from the Third World War, and these two very tough, smart, warlike white peoples with no racial illusions will crush without mercy any black people who oppose them.
As far as the Germans are concerned, as I have explained many times on my website, Adolf Hitler ordered, after the great defeat at Stalingrad, the evacuation of elite German scientists and military to Antarctica. They have huge under-ice military bases there, and also in the Andes mountain range, in a kind of existence like a badger, protected in their lairs, but not daring to wage war on the United States or Russia (on neither Soviet Russia nor that of Putin).
What are his prophecies about the Tribe, who are certainly our worst enemy?
He did not mention them. He was a fervent Calvinist Christian, thus a typical Boer, and not anti-Semitic. Like all Boers, he hated especially the English (who had killed two of his daughters in Lord Kitchener’s horrible concentration camps), and he loved and admired the Germans. He prophesied that the Germans would lose two world wars but win, that is, survive — alone — the third one.
Hitler himself said “Das letzte Battalion wird ein deutsches sein.” (“The last battalion will be German.”) This becomes understandable only if one accepts the reality of the military “Absetzbewegung” of 1943-45, the “disengagement movement”.
See also:
https://johndenugent.com/hitlers-prophetic-words-in-1945-on-america-match-what-the-boer-farmer-van-rensburg-said/
Leave a Reply