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Marketing Ukraine’s Reconstruction to Fuel the War

By Laura Ruggeri | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 23, 2023

Immediately after the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, key players in the coalition supporting Ukraine, as well as transatlantic financial institutions and think tanks, were already discussing the governance and financing of Ukraine’s reconstruction. They invariably framed it as a historic opportunity for the country: like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Ukraine would become a beacon of freedom, democracy and rule-of-law, a testimonial for Build Back Better, a “green and digital economy” success story; the country would leapfrog several stages of economic and governmental development and its economic growth would replicate Germany’s post-war boom. Unsurprisingly, the more recent and far less inspiring examples of Western-led ‘reconstruction’ in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan didn’t earn mention.

The speed with which fantastical narratives of recovery and reconstruction were churned out shouldn’t surprise anyone because they had been concocted years earlier as part of several ‘reform plans’ for Ukraine. One could say they are hardwired into the overall strategy of this proxy war against Russia as they are aimed at securing political, military and financial support for Ukraine to prolong the war rather than an incentive to negotiate peace. All those who produce these narratives are directly or indirectly linked to governments that are involved both in the destruction of Ukraine and the Ukrainization of Europe, a process designed to fully control, militarize and loot the Old World.

Paying lip service to the idea of reconstruction is also the best way to distract attention from one’s investment in the business of war. For example, JPMorgan Investment Management owns more than $2.5 billion worth of Raytheon stocks and more than $1.3 billion worth of Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics securities, as of February 15. As long as Ukraine keeps consuming U.S. military products, the rising profits for arms companies – satisfies investment funds. And rich corruption in the U.S., EU and Ukraine. As long as Ukraine is of any interest in terms of consumption of U.S. military products, there will be no peace on its territory.

There is little doubt that Ukraine will need rebuilding once the war eventually ends, but ‘destruction’ and ‘reconstruction’ mean different things to different people.

For instance, there is strong disagreement as to what constitutes ‘destruction’, when the ‘destruction’ of Ukraine started and who should be blamed for it.

Those who have been following Ukrainian affairs without ideological prejudice, and with a modicum of intellectual honesty, know that at the time of the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine was an economic powerhouse, the third industrial power of the Soviet Union after Russia and Belarus, and its breadbasket. The Soviet republic had aerospace, automobile and machine tool industries, well-developed mining, metallurgical and agricultural sectors, nuclear, oil refining and petrochemical plants, tourism and commercial infrastructures and the largest shipbuilding center in the USSR.

Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine’s GDP has lagged behind the level it reached in Soviet times, industry declined, and the population decreased by about 14.5 million people in 30 years due to emigration and the lowest birth rate in Europe. Ukraine has also become the third largest IMF debtor and Europe’s poorest country. These negative records cannot be blamed solely on Ukraine’s systemic and staggering corruption: the corrupt networks bleeding Ukraine are truly transnational. If the best way to rob a bank is to own one, then the best way to plunder a country is to control its elites. Which is exactly what Western kleptocratic networks have been doing for decades with the help of their local facilitators and enablers.

Ukraine was targeted by two U.S.-funded color revolutions that led to regime change and civil war, was wrestled away from its largest economic partner, Russia; its history was erased and rewritten while an artificial identity was manufactured and imposed on its population; neoliberal prescriptions destroyed its economic and social fabric and led to a neocolonial form of governance.

Though Ukraine joined Europe’s nefarious Eastern Partnership in 2009 and has been teeming with Western NGOs, economic and political advisers since its independence, the country’s indentured servitude and captivity to Western interests was cemented after the last Ukrainian government to object to the IMF’s harsh conditions – including steep budget cuts and a 40-percent increase in natural-gas bills – was overthrown by a U.S.-sponsored coup in 2014.

On 10 December, 2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych stated that the conditions set by the IMF for loan approval were unacceptable: “I had a conversation with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who told me that the issue of the IMF loan has almost been solved, but I told him that if the conditions remained we did not need such loans“. He then broke off negotiations with the IMF and turned to Russia for financial assistance. It was the sensible thing to do, but cost him dearly. You can’t break the shackles of IMF debt with impunity, this lender of last resort not only imposes its usual shock therapy of austerity, deregulation, and privatization so that the vultures can swoop in, it also furthers and protects U.S. interests.

If those who destroyed a country are allowed to be involved in its reconstruction, then reconstruction will inevitably be just a point on the continuum of conquest, occupation and looting, but with better optics. Destruction produces that blank slate that has always been colonialism’s seductive promise, on that slate you can write your own rules: “To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace”. Tacitus knew both the reality and the spin of Roman imperialism.

One can only wonder if those who talk about ‘reconstruction’, ‘recovery’, ‘reform’, ‘rules-based order’, ‘reset’ or whatever buzzword is fashionable at the moment are aware of the brutal reality or truly believe their own spin. In any case they promise a future utopia worth killing and dying for.

The capitalist, imperialist West has created its own eschatology, embedded in both the environmental and technological discourses. Thirty years ago, Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, had cautioned an audience in Prague, whose newborn democracy was teeming with promise and perils, about the difference between eschatology – understanding and belief in the “end,” i.e., eternal life – and utopia. Belief in the latter, which he defined simply as “the hope of a better world in the future,” had taken the place of eternal life across the West. Man’s hubris replaces eschatology with a self-made utopia which intends to fulfill man’s hopes. Constantly allured by newer technocratic abilities, the utopians end up sharing Tantalus’ fate, and are condemned to live in Hades, tormented with the sight of something desired but out of reach, teased by arousing expectations that are inevitably disappointed.

The more secular-minded may remember what Karl Marx wrote about the destructive (and self-destructive) tendencies inherent to capitalism. It’s by causing large-scale loss that it enables new wealth to be created. Wars and economic crises serve the purpose as they allow capitalism to start a new cycle of wealth creation for an ever-shrinking class of owners.

But the neoliberal capitalist system is fast running out of creative schemes to forestall its collapse and the old ones no longer deliver the desired results because they are predicated on rules and conditions set by the U.S., and the transnational institutions it controls. As U.S. power wanes, the global oligarchy that depends on it is faced with the choice of defending that power at any cost and against all odds, or seeking an arrangement with emerging powers, an option that would not only reduce its sway and outrageous profits, but also accelerate U.S. decline. Since World War II, U.S. influence over the global economy and military power have been intertwined and losing one would precipitate the loss of the other. The engine of world economic growth has moved to Asia, with China in a leading position, and the U.S. has chosen to tighten the grip on its vassals, double down on its hegemonic ambitions and indulge in grandiose, and dangerous, fantasies rather than accept the emergence of a multipolar reality. Since fantasies cannot deliver real growth, let alone prosperity, the Empire invests a considerable part of its resources in colonizing minds and policing narratives. The job of those who are simultaneously planning ‘destruction’ and ‘reconstruction’ is to reduce the cognitive dissonance between the present misery and picture-perfect manifestos of a bright future.

Selling a war requires all hands on deck, and that’s why think tanks and marketing specialists have been involved from the early stages. They churn out narratives that help shape the discursive space, engineer a perception of global support for Ukraine, provide talking points, and versions of the truth, to both politicians and the media. They have to motivate Ukrainians to keep fighting and European vassals to keep funding the war and arming Ukraine, no matter the cost to their economy.

If those who attended recovery conferences never talked about peace is also because the possibility of peace negotiations with Russia has been performatively and normatively excluded from the Western discourse. The last time Western leaders claimed they wanted peace in Ukraine, they were lying. As we now know, the Minsk Agreements were signed by Angela Merkel and François Holland only to win time for Kiev to prepare for war.

The EU was so committed to peace that in a truly Orwellian fashion, in 2021 established the European Peace Facility (EPF) to bankroll military operations, provide military equipment and training to unnamed “EU partners” – Ukraine couldn’t be openly mentioned yet. The fund, worth €5 billion, was financed outside the budget, for a period of seven years.

When in October 2022 Volodymyr Zelensky signed a bizarre decree prohibiting talks with the current Russian leadership he simply formalized something that had already become a dogma among his allies. Six months earlier, in April, Boris Johnson went to Kiev to pressure Zelensky to cut off peace negotiations with Russia, because the two sides appeared to have made some tenuous progress during talks in Istanbul. In March Denis Kireev, a member of the Ukraine delegation who had taken part in the February peace talks in Belarus, was shot dead by his country’s security service. Israeli PM Naftali Bennet, who had also attempted to mediate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, revealed how the Anglo-Americans, with Boris Johnson in the role of chief bully again, blocked his efforts.

Peace advocates, including Roger Waters, Pink Floyd’s former frontman, were added to the infamous Myrotvorets online [assassination] database. Those who profit from war and want to see Russia weakened would stop at nothing to prevent peace talks. While Europeans are grappling with the ever growing cost of an American proxy war in their continent, they need a compensatory fantasy to support the absurd notion that a peace settlement in Ukraine would threaten their security and not be in their best interests. Narratives of reconstruction, seamlessly woven into delusions of Ukraine’s victory from the start, allow the transnational party of war to present itself as a force for good and a driver of future growth.

The reconstruction marketeers have aggressively tried to occupy the moral high ground by evicting the peacemakers and to do so they had to bolster the argument that war couldn’t be prevented nor stopped.

In March 2022, less than a month since Russian troops had crossed the Ukrainian border, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), one of the U.S. military-industrial-intelligence complex’s favorite think tanks, published a bizarre article titled “Rebuilding Ukraine after the War”. Its author compared the destruction of Ukraine’s infrastructure to a “natural” disaster such as the hurricane that destroyed Puerto Rico in 2017 and argued that reconstruction would provide an opportunity “to improve on the past”, paving the way for a radiant future, a techno-utopia as orderly, clean and green as an architectural rendition.

Framing war as a “natural disaster”, as opposed to a man-made one, would allow those who militarized Ukraine and sabotaged all peace agreements, to pre-empt any serious discussion about the causes of, and possible solutions to this conflict. If the war in Ukraine was as sudden and inevitable as a hurricane then it would be pointless to seek an explanation for it other than “Putin is mad/bloodthirsty/evil…” or “Russia is an imperialist country”.

The ensuing devastation was also framed as the result of Russian forces’ congenital appetite for wanton destruction – in the West Nazi tropes are back in fashion and Russian soldiers can be described as “barbaric Asiatic hordes” with total impunity. Western media ensured that their public would never hear about the role played in the destruction of residential districts by Ukrainian nationalists who set up firing positions, deploy armored vehicles, conceal artillery pieces and MLRS in densely populated areas and use civilians as human shields. Hardly natural. Even less natural was the outbreak of this war, unless you consider NATO’s expansion and U.S. geopolitical goals as part of a divine plan. Mind you, some do and call it “manifest destiny”.

CSIS put forward arguments and plans that would later be expanded at conferences about Ukraine reconstruction. “Thinking about recovery means envisioning a post-conflict future, and that links to the twin messages of hope and the necessity to keep fighting.” The twin messages, constantly amplified by Western-controlled media, are mainly addressed to those who need to be reassured that they stand to benefit from the escalation of this conflict, regardless of the huge losses they are currently incurring. And that includes a multitude of stakeholders, both in NATO countries and in Ukraine.

There have been several antecedents to recent conferences in which representatives of Western governments, financial institutions and corporations discussed ways to keep Ukraine fighting “to the last man” while baiting it with promises of reforms and reconstruction, but one stands out as a direct progenitor. It had all the hallmarks of a British influence operation.

On July 6, 2017 the UK Foreign Office headed by Boris Johnson organized and hosted the first Ukraine Reform Conference in London. Ukrainians, notorious “friends of UK/raine” such as Christya Freeland and other rabid Anglophile Russophobes, many hailing from the Baltics, would outnumber less invested participants, expose them to their extremist views in order to facilitate their radicalization and recruitment. The power of conformity, suggestibility and normative social influence would ensure that participants who had previously held moderate views would gravitate towards the extremist opinion of the majority.

The alleged purpose of this conference was to seek political and financial support for Ukraine’s 2020 Reform Plan, a neoliberal roadmap designed to create a more profitable and less unpredictable environment for Western corporate interests while priming the Ukrainian population and army for war. This medium-term Reform Plan defined the main objectives and areas of the Ukrainian Government activity for 2017-2020 and formed the basis for the strategic plans of ministries and other executive bodies. It was predicated on privatization of state-owned enterprises, deregulation, judicial reform, amendments to the labor law, land market reforms, decentralization, forced de-Russification, patriotic education, transformation of the armed forces into a “modern and effective army in line with NATO standards” by increasing its military spending to 6% of GDP, integration into the European political, economic and legal space. In short, this was a roadmap for the complete hijacking of Ukraine’s economic, political, and social institutions, the demolition of what stood in its way, and further militarization of the country.

The conference also served other purposes. The main proponents of Anglo-American eastward expansion, who are deeply invested in Ukraine, after the election of Donald Trump couldn’t fully rely on the U.S. government to further their agenda: Trump’s “America First” foreign policy had strained relations with NATO allies and frozen military aid to Ukraine – arms sales were ok, freebies not so much. London was more than eager to pick up the mantle and ensure Ukraine stayed the course and remained on top of the transatlantic agenda. By taking the lead in coordinating and strategizing support for Ukraine, the UK government also saw an opportunity to strengthen British influence especially at a time when Brexit negotiations had just started and London feared losing its leverage in Europe. British elites were determined to put their country “at the beginning of the line” in the looting of Ukraine’s assets while salivating at the prospect of looting Russian assets too.

The gambit seemed to pay off: the following years attendance at the annual conference grew, including a larger number of representatives from the United States, NATO, OECD, G7 and European countries, OSCE, Council of Europe, IMF, European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the World Bank.

After Russia’s intervention in 2022, the “Ukraine Reform Conference” (URC) was quickly renamed “Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC). The continuity is striking: acronym, logo and corporate image remained exactly the same when in July 2022, the conference was held in Lugano, Switzerland.

Unsurprisingly, the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano turned out to be little more than a PR stunt, featured a few squabbles among participants competing for their share in any future spoils of war, and provided an opportunity for Ukraine’s prime minister Denys Shmygal, supported by Liz Truss, to advocate the seizure of frozen Russian assets to fund his country’s reconstruction project. Shmygal’s call sent shivers down the spine of Swiss authorities, because not only would the confiscation of these assets violate and thus undermine international legal rules, it would also deal a mortal blow to Switzerland’s banking industry.

Brookings, the U.S. think tank that was deeply involved in the design and implementation of the original Marshall Plan for the post-war redevelopment of Western Europe, had to admit that the Lugano conference “was a missed opportunity because the donor countries did not come prepared with any agreement on coordination mechanisms, a division of labor, or necessary funding levels. In addition, the United States was not represented by officials with seniority commensurate to the European representation.”

A similar criticism was expressed by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, another U.S. think tank. GMF asserted that the European Commission has “neither the necessary political nor the financial heft” to lead reconstruction. And it advised against creating a new agency or centralized trust fund. Instead, it suggested that the G7 and Ukraine together appoint “an American of global stature” as recovery coordinator “because only the United States will be able to bring together the needed global coalition and forge consensus among Ukraine’s partners.”

The Anglo-Americans who need the EU to fund the war and masochistically support their geopolitical plans were disappointed that the richest EU countries would not cough up the amount of money they expected because in this scam Germany, France and Italy are the designated suckers. The con artists invest in the fraudulent scheme to give it an appearance of legitimacy and win the suckers’ confidence.

If Ukraine is the bait, Europe is the big fish and this crime syndicate would stop at nothing to achieve its goals: persuasion tactics can be escalated to involve some serious arm-twisting, as the Nord Stream sabotage clearly showed.

For all their pledges to help Ukraine “recover”, those who took part in “Recovery and Reconstruction” conferences seemed bound by an oath to never advocate for peace negotiations with Russia. Wouldn’t peace be a necessary condition for recovery? Well, it depends on what we mean by recovery. The main purpose of these conferences is to raise funds for Ukraine’s war chest, build a larger consensus on the seizure of Russian frozen assets, and instill enough hopes of a better future to convince Ukrainians and their partners that they should keep fighting regardless of the devastating human and economic losses they are incurring.

The London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) clearly spelled out this strategy in its Macroeconomics Policies for Wartime Ukraine, which outlined policies to “put the Ukrainian economy on a sustainable trajectory for the duration of the war”. The same policy became a dogma in Davos, where the WEF evil wizards agreed and emphasized the need to start reconstruction while the destruction is still ongoing, as that would drive Ukrainian refugees back home, that is to a place described as the “hell of war” in the same paragraph. “We have a moral obligation to nurture hope for these people and to help them stay strong as they go through the hell of war. Doing so will also encourage Ukrainian refugees to return to their homeland.” The cherry on the cake is the cynical reference to “inclusivity”, because no disability should exempt Ukrainians from contributing to war efforts, they too are called upon to fill positions vacated by the dead and those at the front. “Inclusivity is particularly important. Thousands of Ukrainians have already received long-lasting injuries (…) many of them will need to continue their life and work with disabilities.”

People, military and financial aid are all needed to ensure Ukraine retains enough strength not to collapse while it performs its designated role of proxy. That said, broadcasting donors’ pledges and the promise of foreign investments also serve a strategic purpose: it sends a message that Western countries form a compact bloc that will stick together no matter the cost, and to other nations that there are benefits to alignment with this bloc. All wishful thinking, of course.

With Ukrainian GDP expected to fall by more than 45%, budget expenditures doubling due to increased military spending as well as business and humanitarian support, budget deficit projected to reach more than USD 45 billion by the end of 2022 why would international investors be interested in what is de facto a failed state that is still at war?

Disaster capitalism feeds on shock, and war is the ultimate shock treatment. The privatization of profit and socialization of losses is its mantra and a heavily indebted country on its knees can’t prevent the outright sale of its assets. Rebuilding is never the primary purpose, it’s about reshaping everything. If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask a deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. After all, war-ravaged countries are in a state of limited sovereignty and any aid money that might pour in is often put in a trust fund, managed by foreign entities. The promise of Ukraine’s reconstruction by a parallel government made up of a familiar cast of for-profit consulting firms, engineering companies, mega-NGOs, foreign governments, international aid agencies and financial institutions would certainly make the prospect of Private-Public Partnership (PPP) attractive. But all this is predicated on Ukraine winning the war and remaining under Western control.

Betting on Ukraine’s victory is a high-odds bet, a very risky bet even for the regular gamblers of the vast casino known as the Western financial system. Yes, debt can be repackaged by lenders into creative securities backed by some pie-in-the sky and sold to global investors, a scam that would make the subprime mortgage crisis pale in comparison. Problem is, there isn’t as much liquidity around in Borrel’s European garden, nor in Biden’s land of the free for that matter. Prices and the cost of money have risen sharply, the market sentiment has slumped, recession is looming in Western countries whose financial system is broken beyond repair, but Western leaders, financiers and business moguls delude themselves they can simply talk up the global economy and resort to their old tricks. Their “everything is fine” message, as witnessed in Davos, is nothing more than one of those “confidence-boosting” exercises their minions practice in front of the mirror.

Attracting foreign investments is far from easy, as the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance has candidly admitted, though he believes that a PPP with BlackRock “can help raise capital even against the background of a bad investment reputation in the past (…) Obviously, private investors in the West will show much more trust in projects or a fund in which a world-renowned company plays some role. Even if it is consulting support. (…) Since investors often have a herd instinct, the option of creating a BlackRock investment fund to accumulate funds from private investors and finance Ukrainian projects is considered optimal”.

Officially, BlackRock’s cooperation with the Ukrainian government was formalized in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which was signed in November 2022. Since then other Wall Street banksters have jumped on the bandwagon. This February, JP Morgan, the U.S.’s largest bank, also signed a MoU with Volodymyr Zelensky with the eye on attracting private capital for a new investment fund seeded with $20 billion to $30 billion in private capital. Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s CEO, called the consequences of the conflict in Ukraine “an inflection point for the Western world for a hundred years.”

Well, the decline of U.S. hegemony and the financial, corporate elites that feed on it (the “inflection point”, as Dimon called it) started well before February 2022. The end of U.S.-European domination of world capitalism is upon us as the center of gravity of the global economy shifts to China and the world is moving toward political multipolarity. Western elites are aware that the fraudulent, unequal system they owe their power to is cracking up, and the West’s mother-of-all financial bubbles is about to explode. All their hare-brained schemes are designed to increase debt, and therefore the enslavement of an ever-greater portion of humanity and have increased instability in the system. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Green New Deal were supposed to pave the way for “resetting and reshaping” the world, through the application of new digital technologies for a more regimented, technocratic and authoritarian control over the global population. But it has not gone as anticipated. Instead, the pandemic accelerated all the contradictions and crisis tendencies of financial capitalism. Ukraine, the greatest rock’n’roll swindle of all times might prove to be one hare-brained scheme too far.

For years the Fed, the Bank of England, and the European Central Bank have been printing money, but unbacked fiat currency is a Ponzi Scheme built on treachery and lies: its expansion is financed by the transfer of wealth from everyone for the supposed benefit of everyone… till it all ends in tears for most. Those who have made their fortunes by placing bets on the future, buying or selling options and all sorts of other recondite financial inventions might be lured by the promise of high returns, but many investors will join the pyramid scheme simply because their assets are managed by BlackRock, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs etc. When the scheme finally collapses, they will be ruined, just like Ukraine.

February 24, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Biden team has ‘deeply rooted hatred for Russia’ – US congressman

RT February 24, 2023

Senior officials at the US State Department are attempting to get the country “involved in another world war” with Russia, Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar tweeted on Friday. Gosar, Twitter CEO Elon Musk, and former president Donald Trump, have all named Victoria Nuland as the most dangerous among this group in recent days.

Responding to an RT article on Musk accusing Nuland of “pushing this war” in Ukraine, Gosar declared that the billionaire “is correct.”

“Both Nuland and Blinken have a deeply rooted irrational hatred of Russia, and they seek to get the US involved in another world war,” he continued. “These are dangerous fools who can get us all killed.”

In a follow-up tweet, Gosar wrote that “as a non-soldier, Nuland is quite willing to endorse violence and war.” The Republican lawmaker then quoted the article, which stated that Nuland had “endorsed regime change in Russia, celebrated the US’ destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and called for the indefinite flow of arms into Ukraine.”

As assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs in 2014, Nuland was largely responsible for orchestrating the pro-Western coup that unseated democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovich. Nuland traveled to Kiev and promised military aid to the rioters, and was recorded plotting to install a successor to Yanukovich.

As Biden’s secretary of state, Blinken has promised to keep weapons flowing into Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” and advised Kiev in December not to seek the kind of negotiated settlement that would liken to a “phony peace.”

Gosar has been a persistent critic of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy since Russia’s military operation began a year ago on Friday. However, although the Republican Party now controls the House of Representatives, there is little the Arizona congressman can do to change the administration’s course. A significant bipartisan majority supports continued military aid to Ukraine, with only 11 Republicans, Gosar included, sponsoring legislation that would cut funding for Kiev.

These Republicans are all allies of former president Donald Trump. In a campaign video released on Tuesday, Trump blamed the situation in Ukraine on Nuland and “others like her” in the Biden administration. Nuland, he said, was “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO,” adding that the conflict would have “never happened if I was your president.”

February 24, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Time for US Pull-Out: GOP Congressman Warns About Risk of Kinetic Conflict With Russia in Syria

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 23.02.2023

GOP Representative Matt Gaetz has introduced a resolution seeking to direct President Joe Biden to remove all US troops from Syria. The House must vote on Gaetz’s proposal within 18 days of its introduction due to the bill’s war powers status.

“[T]he purpose of my legislation is to force members of Congress to vote on record regarding whether they think we ought to continue Obama’s war in Syria. President Obama kicked off our involvement (…) and now we still find ourselves in the middle of a Syrian civil war with Russia and Turkey and Iran, all present in a very confined neighborhood,” Congressman Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., told the US press earlier this week.

Gaetz, a House Armed Services Committee member, filed the War Powers Resolution on February 22 after he learned that four US military servicemen and a working dog were wounded in a US and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) helicopter raid in northeastern Syria.

Speaking to the US press, Gaetz shared his concerns with regard to the US president’s ability to handle Syrian matters. The congressman quoted Biden’s August 2021 interview in which the president claimed that the US “[doesn’t] have military in Syria to make sure that we’re going to be protected.” However, according to the American media at the time of Biden’s comment, there were at least 900 troops in Syria who were helping their SDF proxies on the ground.

Gaetz has also drawn attention to reports alleging that Russian and US personnel get into very close proximity with one another. “[T]he risk of an accident or miscalculation or just misuse of authority could lead to direct kinetic conflict between the United States and Russia in Syria,” the lawmaker insisted.

In addition, Congress has never authorized the use of military force in Syria, the congressman argued. “America First means actually putting the people of our country first — not the interests of the military industrial complex,” he said.

Gaetz’s resolution has been filed under the War Powers Act of 1973, which was designed to limit the president’s authority to wage war and reasserted Congress’ authority over foreign wars. Notably, at the time of the 1973 bill’s introduction, then President Richard Nixon tried to veto it. However, Congress overrode his veto, and the resolution became law following the US pullout from Vietnam in early 1973.

If Gaetz’s legislative initiative passes, US military personnel must be removed from the Syrian Arab Republic within 15 days.

Meanwhile, the lawmaker lamented the fact that Democratic progressives who used to be anti-war activists have become “cheerleaders” for the US’s overseas conflicts. “‘The Squad’ used to be anti-war. Now, they’re waving their pom poms for NATO,” he said.

The representative believes that the upcoming vote on his resolution will show who the real patriot of America is and who continues to stick to Middle Eastern adventurism.

Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, was the first who sought to pull US troops out of Syria. Nonetheless, he later insisted that some of the contingent should stay in place to “protect” the Syrian oil fields occupied by the US-backed Kurdish-dominated SDF. Trump was also misled about the actual number of US servicemen in Syria. US Syria envoy Ambassador Jim Jeffrey admitted in November 2020 he was “always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there.”

February 24, 2023 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Biden & Nuland Are Leading US Into Nuclear Armageddon, Former FBI Agent Says

Sputnik – 22.02.2023

WASHINGTON – US President Joe Biden and senior White House and State Department officials are leading the United States and the world into nuclear annihilation, former FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley told Sputnik.

Russian President Vladimir Putin officially announced Moscow was pulling out of its long-running talks with the United States for a new START treaty during his Tuesday address to the Federal Assembly. He also accused the United States of developing new types of nuclear weapons and considering new nuclear weapons tests.

“The neocons’ hell-bent plans for ‘full spectrum dominance’ have been a long time in the making, having even been publicly announced decades ago, but now… we’ve truly reached the eve of destruction,” Rowley, a Time magazine Whistleblower of the Year, said.

In addition to Biden, senior State Department official Victoria Nuland, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and White House security aide Jake Sullivan, are leading oblivious Americans right into “nuclear Armageddon,” Rowley added.

The United States was far closer to catastrophic global war than the American people realized, Rowley said.
“The situation is just so 11th hour and 59 minutes’ bad,” she warned.

Earlier in the day, Biden described Russia’s decision as a “big mistake” as the presidents of Romania, Slovakia and Poland greeted him at the Bucharest Nine meeting. This came after Biden earlier in the week delivered a fiery speech in Poland intended to rally NATO to back Ukraine against Russia.

New START, in effect since February 5, 2011, is the last remaining legally binding arms agreement between the United States and Russia – the two countries with the largest nuclear capabilities.

Under the treaty, the United States and Russia have been required to reduce their nuclear arsenal to a total of 700 missiles, 800 launchers, and 1,550 deployed warheads.

February 22, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Top politician calls on Scholz to ‘stop’ German foreign minister

Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Soeder at a Political Ash Wednesday event in Passau, Germany, February 22, 2023. © Global Look Press / IMAGO / Frank Hoermann / Sven Simo
RT | February 22, 2023

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz must “stop” Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock before she becomes a “security risk” and pushes Berlin towards a conflict with Moscow with her “thoughtless statements,” Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Soeder said on Wednesday during a German political festival.

The foreign minister and her party – Alliance 90/The Greens – are talking themselves into a “war frenzy” amid the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Soeder told a crowd of cheering supporters during what is known in Germany as Political Ash Wednesday. Having originated in Bavaria, the 100-year old event allows German politicians to vent and pull no punches about the perceived shortcomings of their political rivals.

Soeder referred in particular to when Baerbock told the European Council back in January that the EU was “fighting a war against Russia,” words that sparked uproar at the time. In mid-February, Baerbock herself conceded that the remark was a mistake.

“A foreign minister has to be careful what she says,” Soeder warned during the event in Bavaria’s Passau, adding that “an escalation of words can quickly lead to the escalation of violence.” Germany is helping Ukraine but is not at war with Russia, he maintained.

“Mr. Scholz, finally stop Ms. Baerbock,” Soeder said, adding the foreign minister’s “thoughtless statements” are often “to the detriment of our country.”

Baerbock has emerged as one of the most hardline supporters of Kiev in the German government, repeatedly arguing for increased military aid to Ukraine and criticizing Chancellor Olaf Scholz for supposedly not doing enough. She has also supported tougher sanctions against Russia and opposed any compromises with Moscow.

In October 2022, she said that any concessions to Russia in the ongoing conflict would be “naïve.” The minister also maintained that the West should not settle for any peace agreement that would result in Ukraine losing to Russia any territory that it recognizes as Kiev’s.

Soeder, who has been a prominent figure in the German opposition, previously criticized Berlin for prioritizing military aid to Ukraine over the nation’s own security. In particular, he argued that Germany should not have sent IRIS-T air defense systems to Ukraine and should have instead used them to enhance its own national defense.

February 22, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

State Department globalists responsible for Ukraine coup – Trump

RT | February 21, 2023

Former US president Donald Trump has blamed “warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists” at the State Department for pushing Ukraine toward conflict. Trump, who is running for office in 2024, promised to rid Washington of “warmongers, frauds and failures” if elected again.

In a campaign video released on Tuesday, Trump warned that “World War III has never been closer than it is right now,” and laid the blame on “all the warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex.”

The former president singled out Victoria Nuland, the US Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs, whom he said was “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO.”

Trump declared that Nuland and “others just like her” at the State Department supported the 2014 “uprisings” in Ukraine that saw democratically-elected former president Viktor Yanukovych replaced with the pro-Western Petro Poroshenko, who then began a campaign of military repression against the people of Donetsk and Lugansk.

Nuland met with rioters in Kiev in 2014, where she promised pro-Western politicians a billion dollar loan guarantee program and military assistance. In an infamous leaked call between Nuland and the US’s then-ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, the pair discussed selecting a leader to replace Yanukovych from a list of opposition politicians.

Trump claimed, as he has on several occasions over the last year, that the conflict in Ukraine would have “never happened if I was your president.”

“I was the only president who rejected the catastrophic advice of many of Washington’s generals, bureaucrats and so-called diplomats who only know how to get us into conflicts,” he continued, adding that “we need to get rid of the corrupt globalist establishment that has botched every major foreign policy decision for decades.”

“The State Department, Pentagon, and national security establishment will be a very different place by the end of my administration,” Trump said, claiming that “the warmongers, frauds and failures in the senior ranks of our government will all be gone.”

Opposition to America’s “forever wars” was a core component of Trump’s 2016 platform. Although Trump was the first president in decades not to involve the US in a new foreign conflict, he was criticized by his base for briefly hiring noted war-hawk John Bolton as his national security adviser, and for authorizing missile strikes on Syria.

While President Joe Biden has pledged to indefinitely supply Kiev with weapons, Trump has claimed that he would call Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin if elected and “have a deal made in 24 hours.”

February 21, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

How Long Did Americans Support America’s Longest War?

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | February 21, 2023

In an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times, Alexander J. Moytyl, a professor of political science at Rutgers, asks, “How long will Russians tolerate Putin’s costly war?” After pointing out the many negative consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moytyl makes a pointed observation: “And yet, almost a year after the invasion of Ukraine, Russians continue to support strongman Putin and the war.” Moytyl just cannot understand how this can be.

Well, maybe if we look inward, which Moytyl certainly does not do in his op-ed, we can figure out the answer. 

Let’s consider, for example, the U.S. government’s wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. There were lots of negative aspects of those two wars, beginning with the fact the U.S. invasions of both countries were illegal, both under International law and U.S. law.

It is undisputed that neither Afghanistan nor Iraq ever attacked the United States. That means that the U.S. was the aggressor in both wars.

Yes, I know, defenders of the Afghanistan invasion point to the fact that Osama bin Laden, who was accused of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks, was supposedly living in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, under International law, the U.S. had no legitimate legal authority to invade Afghanistan to arrest or kill him. 

It is also undisputed that there was no extradition treaty between Afghanistan and the United States. Therefore, when President Bush demanded that the Afghan government extradite bin Laden to the U.S., under international law Afghanistan had the legitimate authority to say no. Under international law, Bush had no legitimate authority to invade the country simply because Afghanistan rejected his unconditional extradition demand. 

It is also undisputed that neither the Iraqi people nor the Iraqi government had any connection to the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. invasion of that country was a pure war of aggression, one based on the flagrant and fraudulent pretense of uncovering non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” 

It is also undisputed that there was no declaration of war issued by Congress against either Afghanistan or Iraq, as required by the U.S. Constitution. That made both invasions illegal under our form of constitutional government. 

It is impossible to know exactly how many people in Afghanistan and Iraq were tortured, injured, or killed by U.S. forces in those two wars of aggression. That’s because, early on, the Pentagon announced that it would not keep track of enemy dead. That’s because the lives of Afghans and Iraqis didn’t count. 

However, according to the Watson Institute at Brown University, “Nearly 20 years after the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan, the cost of its global war on terror stands at $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths.”

That is a lot of money. And that is a lot of dead people. I would estimate that 99 percent of those dead people had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. 

Yet, many Americans supported their government throughout all this mayhem, just as the Russian people are standing with their government during its current mayhem. In fact, I remember church ministers all across the United States beseeching their congregations for years to “support the troops, especially those in harm’s way in Afghanistan and Iraq.” I also recall how we were all encouraged to “thank the troops for their service” whenever we saw them in uniform. I also remember all those critical things that were said against those of us who opposed these wars of aggression and resulting occupations. 

Supporting their government in time of war is what most citizens do in every nation, including Russia, the United States, and Germany. Most citizens are forced into the state’s educational system at a very young age, where their minds are molded to blindly come to the support of their regime during wartime. Children are inculcated with mindsets of deference to authority and blind trust in their political, military, and intelligence officials. That mindset continues well into adulthood. In the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I recall many people, including commentators in the mainstream press, exclaiming, “We need to trust our officials. They have access to information that we don’t have.”

So, what befuddles me is why Alexander J. Moytyl is befuddled by the overwhelming support by Russian citizens of their regime during wartime. If American citizens blindly support their regime during wartime, why would anyone expect that Russian citizens would respond differently?

February 21, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Biden’s Kiev trip ‘a slap in the face’ to America – US Congressman

RT | February 21, 2023

US President Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine was “a slap in the face to every American,” Republican Rep. Paul Gosar declared on Monday. Already under fire over the hundreds of billions of dollars he’s handed Kiev, Biden is now being savaged by Republicans for his handling of a disastrous chemical accident on US soil.

Biden made an unannounced visit to Kiev on Monday, where he told Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky that his administration was readying a $500 million military aid package for his forces. Biden’s administration has handed Zelensky almost $30 billion in military aid since last February, and has set aside more than $110 billion for continued military and economic assistance to Ukraine.

“Joe Biden visiting Ukraine is a slap in the face to every American, especially the people of East Palestine, Ohio,” Gosar tweeted. “Ukraine is not our friend, and Russia is not our enemy.”

Gosar has bitterly opposed Biden’s bankrolling of Ukraine, and sponsored a resolution earlier this month that would halt US aid to Kiev. The resolution, signed by 11 members of the anti-interventionist ‘Freedom Caucus’, calls on Russia and Ukraine to reach a peace agreement.

Republicans from the Freedom Caucus and beyond have hammered Biden for his handling of the East Palestine chemical spill. A train carrying vinyl chloride and other hazardous chemicals derailed in this small Ohio town earlier this month, and a controlled burn of these substances blanketed the town in a cloud of black smoke.

Biden has not visited East Palestine, nor has he approved a disaster declaration. Biden’s transportation secretary blamed the derailment on former President Donald Trump, and although Biden has sent Environmental Protection Agency and Health and Human Services officials to the location to declare it safe, residents have complained of alarming physical symptoms as well as dead pets, livestock and fish.

“That was the biggest slap in the face,” East Palestine Mayor Trent Conway said of Biden’s trip to Kiev. “That tells you right now he doesn’t care about us. He can send every agency he wants to, but I found out this morning that he was in Ukraine giving millions of dollars away to people over there and not to us…on President’s Day in our country, so I’m furious,” he told Fox News.

February 21, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Mass demo in Munich against war

Free West Media | February 21, 2023

While Annalena Baerbock and US VP Kamala Harris discussed the further escalation of the war in Ukraine at the Munich Security Conference convened in the Bayerischer Hof, thousands demonstrated peacefully against war on the Königsplatz.

Several demonstrations took place in Munich on Saturday on the fringes of the Security Conference directed against the meeting itself. The organizers of one group, Munich Stand Up! counted between 20,000 to 25,000 of their participants.

Protesters followed the call by the Munich AfD on Saturday morning to the Old Botanical Garden, where they could be seen with peace signs and Russian flags.

According to the police, there was a scuffle and verbal confrontations with a small group of left-wing counter-demonstrators. They shouted “Fascist pack” and “Nazi plague”. Around noon, many participants in the AfD demo joined the protest on the Königsplatz, the largest gathering.

Right and left come together

Regardless of whether they were right-wing or left-wing: in terms of symbolism, both groups held flags displaying peace signs and Russian colours.

Slogans criticized NATO and the press as “warmongers” or drew parallels with the Corona pandemic, which many believe had been staged for nefarious purposes. The speakers included the left-wing politician Dieter Dehm and the former CDU politician Jürgen Todenhöfer.

Dehm spoke of “Ukrainian killer gangs and Nazi fascists” while Todenhöfer said in his speech: “The West wanted this war.” He accused the federal government of “madness”.

The final rally of the big “Anti-SiKo-Demo” took place on Marienplatz. As every year, the Munich “Action Alliance against the NATO Security Conference” had called for the demonstration. The opponents, who came mainly from the left-wing spectrum, had gathered at the Stachus shortly after noon.

The demonstrators called to “Create peace without weapons” on posters. Rainbow flags with the words “Pace” (Italian for peace) were displayed next to the dove of peace.

Confronting Ukraine supporters

As in previous years, peace demonstrators walked through the city center, where they passed a gathering at Odeonsplatz  – a small band of supporters of Ukraine.

On the stage in front of the Feldherrnhalle, the members of the Bundestag Anton Hofreiter (Greens) and Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP) spoke, and again called for the escalation of the war in Ukraine. Jamila Schäfer (Greens) expressed her satisfaction that the government had now initiated the delivery of battle tanks.

When the two protest camps met, it remained peaceful. However, it got a bit loud because both sides started chanting their slogans.

Some Ukrainian supporters burst into tears when they saw the peace posters: “Negotiate instead of shooting” was written on them.

Nazis for Ukraine

At the Feldherrnhalle, the site of Hitler’s putsch in 1923, the war supporters demonstrated for the Zelensky regime.

President Zelensky has banned all opposition media and parties in Ukraine and is openly cooperating with neo-Nazi militias and, according to recent photographs taken by die Associated Press, also with ISIS commanders.

Before the conference, he had even demanded the delivery of banned cluster bombs.

Thousands of police officers

According to the police, around 4,500 officers from Bavaria and other federal states as well as 300 federal police officers were on duty around the conference. At the international meeting of experts from Friday to Sunday, the main focus was on arming Ukraine. In addition, there were also debates about other conflicts such as in the Middle East, Yemen or Iran.

In support of the conference therefore, a few people demonstrated loudly for regime change in Iran in the morning on Odeonsplatz. The country’s green, white and red flag flew over the heads of people who want a pro-US regime and called on the European Union to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization. The “National Council of Resistance of Iran” had called for the protest.

February 21, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Clear majority of Austrians say no to war

Free West Media | February 21, 2023

VIENNA – According to a recent survey by Unique Research, 65 percent of Austrians want Ukraine to stop fighting. They want peace talks. It is interesting to also note that only Green voters want fighting to continue.

The effects of the war are becoming more and more dramatic. A current survey done for the magazine Heute is therefore unsurprisingly very clear: the Austrians have had enough. They feel that Ukraine should finally sit down at the negotiating table with Russia, even if that means giving up territory.

Escalation spiral continues

“There are no compromises with the Russians,” according to Ukrainian President Zelensky. Not only has he demanded battle tanks, but Kiev wants cluster munitions and phosphorus bombs. The reason for the constant escalation lies not least in the situation at the front. After months of fighting with thousands of dead, the Donbass “fortress” Bakhmut is about to fall.

Only Greens are still for war

While many European politicians (and much of the media) continue  their warmongering, a peace movement is therefore sweeping through Austria. The war is only still popular among the Greens. Some 49 percent of the former pacifist party want Ukraine to keep fighting while 48 percent want peace – the rest are unsure.

Only 21 percent of respondents believe that Ukraine should continue fighting, while 65 percent have called on Kiev to negotiate. The call for peace was most pronounced among FPÖ voters, with 86 percent in favor of a speedy end to the war, even if Ukraine would have to make concessions to do so.

Similarly, 63 percent of SPÖ voters want to go down the path of diplomacy and 59 percent of ÖVP supporters call for peace. Among Neos voters, 54 percent are in favor of immediate negotiations.

February 21, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Russia issues warning about future of Ukraine conflict

RT | February 21, 2023

Western elites “intend” to transform the conflict in Ukraine from a regional to a global one, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. Moscow perceives this as an existential threat and will react accordingly, he said.

The goal of those in power in the US and other Western nations is to “end us once and for all,” the Russian leader stated during a keynote speech on Tuesday. They are using Ukraine as a “battering ram” against Russia and don’t care how many people will die as a result, he said.

“They intend to turn a local conflict into a phase of global confrontation. That is how we understand things and will react accordingly. Because the issue here is the existence of our state,” Putin said.

The Ukraine conflict was unleashed by the West when it supported an armed coup in Kiev in 2014, the Russian president noted. Western powers then poured resources into the new regime, even as it used the military against its own population and became increasingly nationalist and extreme.

Western elites “don’t care who they are betting on in their fight against us, their fight against Russia. They just want them to go to war,” Putin observed. The current Ukrainian government is “alien” to the people it governs and serves Western interests, he believes.

“Nobody among them counts the loss of human lives and tragedies, because trillions of dollars are at stake, an opportunity to keep robbing everyone under the cover of rhetoric of democracy and freedoms,” the Russian leader warned.

He said that ultimately Russia’s opponents must realize that the country cannot be defeated on the battlefield. That is why they target it in different ways, trying to undermine its unity via historical revisionism and attacks on Russian traditional values, Putin explained.

The remarks were part of the president’s address to the Federal Assembly, as both chambers of the Russian parliament are called, as well to as senior Russian officials and public figures.

February 21, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Putin Announces Suspension of New START Treaty, Orders New Strategic Systems Be Put on Combat Duty

Sputnik – 21.02.2023

Russia will be suspending its participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction (New START) Treaty, President Vladimir Putin has announced.

The Russian president made the announcement during the course of a major annual address to lawmakers on Tuesday that focused on the security crisis in Ukraine and the broader global tensions between the West and Russia.

“They [the West] seek to inflict a strategic defeat on us and to creep onto our nuclear sites. In connection with this, I am forced to announce today that Russia is suspending its participation in the New START Treaty. I repeat – not exiting from the treaty, but suspending its participation,” Putin said, speaking to gathered lawmakers in Moscow during his speech to the Federal Assembly.

Putin explained that “at the start of February, the North Atlantic Alliance made a statement factually demanding that Russia ‘return to the implementation of the strategic offensive arms treaty,’ including the admission of inspections to our nuclear and defense facilities.”

“I don’t even know what to call this – some kind of theater of the absurd. We know that the West is involved directly in attempts of the Kiev regime to strike the bases of our strategic aviation,” Putin said, pointing to recent Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia’s Engels Air Base, home to part of the airborne contingent of Russia’s nuclear triad.

The drones used in these attacks were “equipped and modernized with the assistance of NATO specialists,” Putin said. “And now they want to inspect our defense facilities. In the current conditions and today’s confrontation, this simply sounds like some kind of nonsense.”

“A week ago, I signed a decree putting new ground-based strategic weapons systems on combat duty. Are they going to stick their nose in there too?” Putin asked.

The Russian president suggested that NATO’s collective statement essentially amounted to an application to join the New START Treaty, and said Moscow would only welcome such a move.

“We agree, please go ahead. Furthermore, we think that such a formulation of the issue is long overdue. After all, NATO contains not just one nuclear power – the USA. Britain and France also have nuclear arsenals, which are being developed and improved, and which are also directed against us, against Russia,” Putin said.

Slamming the US and NATO over the “hypocrisy” of their demands, Putin recalled how the Western bloc has attempted to assure Moscow that “there is no connection between issues related to strategic offensive arms and, say, the conflict in Ukraine, or other hostile actions against our country,” while at the same time seeking to “defeat” Russia militarily.

“This is either the height of hypocrisy and cynicism, or the height of stupidity. You can’t call them idiots, they are not stupid people: they want to inflict a strategic defeat on us,” the president said.

What is New START and Why Is It Important?

The New START Treaty is the last major strategic arms limitation agreement between the nuclear superpowers – Russia and the United States. The agreement, drafted in 2009 and signed by then-Russian and US Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010, limits the two countries’ deployed arsenals of strategic weapons and nuke stockpiles, and features a series of measures aimed at increased transparency and trust, including the broadcast of telemetry data, limits to missile testing activities, and the exchange of other information.

The Trump administration threatened to let the clock run out on New START in late 2020 after withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty – a late Cold War-era pact which eliminated Soviet and US ground-based nuclear missiles in the 500-5,500 km range, in 2019. The Biden administration agreed to renew New START for five years in early 2021. Pentagon planners have repeatedly criticized the strategic treaty for its failure to account for the nuclear arsenal of China. Beijing has said that it would be happy to sign a nuclear agreement with Washington if the US reduced the size of its nuclear arsenal to China’s level.

The post-Cold War strategic security order began to be dismantled in late 2001, when the George W. Bush administration announced that it would scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty – a landmark 1972 agreement designed to limit anti-missile defenses and thus reduce the danger of a global nuclear war. Washington quit the treaty despite proposals by Moscow at the time to establish a joint missile defense system in the Caucasus to eliminate any threats posed to the US or Europe.

February 21, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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