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US regime willing to escalate Ukrainian conflict

Washington’s recent maneuvers reveal US wants to take conflict to its ultimate consequences

By Lucas Leiroz | Aletho News | May 12, 2022

Once again, the US seems to be the side most interested in taking the Ukrainian conflict to its ultimate consequences. A law recently signed by Joe Biden threatens to escalate the dispute in Eastern Europe to extremely dangerous levels, increasing NATO’s support for Kiev in order for the Ukrainian forces to be able to continue fighting for a long time even without any material chance of real victory.

On May 9 the US president signed the “Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022”, leading to a new phase in Washington-Kiev relations, in which Americans will be authorized to streamline and de-bureaucratize the process of sending military aid to Ukrainian forces. The objective of such a maneuver is to banish any procedural obstacle to the agility of bilateral military partnership, encouraging the systematic sending of material so that Ukrainian troops maintain their “resistance” against the Russian special operation.

Explicitly, the American objective with such an attitude is not to contribute to the achievement of peace, but to encourage further combat and promote war. The indiscriminate escalation of the hostilities became a central point of American strategy in Ukraine. Washington assumes the objective is simply to make Ukraine beat Russia. In practice, as there is no possibility of this happening, the objective of the American “aid” seems to be to provoke a “long-term defeat”, that is, to make Russia suffer in this conflict enough so that it does not start any other operation like this again. This could only be achieved by fueling the fighting with more and more weapons for Ukraine, as proposed by the new law.

Scott Ritter, military analyst and former US Marine Corps intelligence officer commented on the topic as follows: “The stated policy of the United States at this point in time is to create the conditions for a strategic Russian defeat in Ukraine, one of the goals of which is to bleed Russia dry so that Russia can never again carry out an action such as it has undertaken in Ukraine, or anywhere else (…) This is the opposite of achieving peace. This is about promoting war. And as such, yes, the lend-lease legislation is not just adding fuel to the fire, it’s pouring fuel all over the fire”.

In fact, this supposed “strategic objective” seems incoherent. For there to be any real harm to Russia, the aid would have to be strong enough that Moscow would be forced to mobilize its full offensive potential towards Ukraine – which evidently is not happening now. And for that to occur, a level of help much higher than mere shipment of armaments would be needed. To reverse Ukraine’s current status of virtually strategic neutralization, the West would need to become more directly involved in the conflict, which would be interpreted as NATO intervention and would result in a Russian response – something the Americans certainly want to avoid.

So, the speech seems just an attempt to deceive public opinion: there is no real intention to “defeat” Russia, either in the short or long term. There is only the desire to carry the conflict forward in order to delay its consequences, which are the retreat of NATO in Europe and the geopolitical multipolarization. When victory becomes impossible, delaying defeat is the most strategic thing to do and that is precisely what the US is doing in Ukraine, to the detriment of the local people, who just want peace.

An important point to be commented on is the fact that the bill approved by Biden this week is not new. Despite its recent approval, the project had already been introduced by Senators John Cornyn (R-TX), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) in January 2022. This means that the intention of US lawmakers is old and has no specific relationship with Russian military operation. It was already the goal of the US to promote an unrestrained militarization of Ukraine, which demonstrates that Moscow’s justification for the need to demilitarize Kiev is valid. Had the operation not started, Kiev would now be receiving these weapons in the same way – and possibly using them against civilians in Donbass.

The first consequences of the Act are about to come. On May 10 the House approved a new budget of more than 33 billion dollars in military aid to Kiev. With the new Act, approval by the Senate must take place as quickly as possible, without further discussions or bureaucracies. Direct private transactions with Ukraine will also take place without regulation in the US. Of course, this will also be a precedent and the US is expected to force European countries to pass similar laws to reduce bureaucracy in military trade with Kiev.

Now the scenario is set for an escalation that is sure to further complicate the situation for Ukraine. The Russians clearly do not want to use their full military potential in this operation, but they are willing to tolerate it only up to a point. If necessary, Moscow will not hesitate to increase its fighting force to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.

Both the Ukrainian government and the West know this but prefer to maintain the narrative that it is possible to “defeat Russia”, perpetuating a situation that harms the civilian population more and more and only benefits the West and its military industry.

Lucas Leiroz is an researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

May 12, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

How many and who is dying for ‘our freedom’?

Free West Media | May 12, 2022

The Western propaganda machine never tires of claiming that a struggle for “Western values” and “democracy” is being waged against Russia in Ukraine. And the Zelensky regime, which has since become even more outright dictatorial, spreads the word that the West’s “freedom” is also being defended in the east and south of the country.

Whether the Ukrainian troops, who have been exposed to Russian attacks in their defensive positions for months now, see things the same way is open to debate. According to a number of reliable sources, they have suffered heavy losses of men and material.

Strangely enough, little or nothing is heard about this in the leading media outlets or from politicians. On the other hand, huge Russian losses are reported or speculated about with fervour, the Russian military leadership is alternately accused of incompetence or brutality, and every report from Kiev that signals a new Putin debacle is spread without hesitation. This has already aroused the mistaken hope among some contemporaries in the West that the Ukrainian comedian and his followers are well on the way to a victorious peace over the invaders.

There is a pronounced multimedia-supported lack of interest in Ukrainian military victims, even though they are supposedly allowing themselves to be shot dead or invalided for our “Western values”, for “freedom” and “democracy”. Therefore, not a word has been written about the latest bloody Kiev disaster in the failed recapture of the strategically important Snake Island in the Black Sea off Odessa. Or the fact that more and more completely inadequately militarily trained conscripted Ukrainians and mercenaries are being sent to the Eastern Front as cannon fodder to make up for the large crew losses there.

The total lack of empathy of the “value-based West” with the real suffering and dying Ukrainian soldiers is nothing short of scandalous and profoundly inhumane. As little as there was real interest in the West in the corrupt state of Ukraine before the war, so little interest is there now in the men who are now not only fighting for the independence of their country with weapons, but are supposed to weaken Russia and Putin to the maximum for the benefit of Joe Biden’s family and the tone-deaf clique in Brussels. It makes no sense for Ukrainian soldiers to risk their lives for this rag-tag bunch of deeply unpopular, self-anointed “leaders”. Their own people despise them.

The silence about the military victims of Ukraine results not least from the guilty conscience of those who unscrupulously let many young men die in supplying deadly weapons to “ruin” the much-maligned Vladimir Putin. Western “leaders” and their servants deserve only contempt and shame.

More young men face annihilation after Biden escalated the US proxy war with Russia by signing the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act into law this week, aimed at providing Ukraine with weapons on demand. They now risk triggering a global nuclear demolition for “our values”. How demented is that?

And corporate elites and political puppets like Biden drone on about the threat of “disinformation” but what they actually fear is dissent, not disinformation. They happen to be the top conveyers of untruths, actually. Not long ago, the same people claimed that the fact that the vaccinated can still contract and die from Covid was called disinformation, for example. Biden’s new disinformation Gauleiter Nina Jankowicz thinks “trustworthy verified people” like herself who had recently brazenly lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop, be given the power to turn Twitter into another heavily-redacted Wikipedia.

At least Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia is not buying this crap about “our values”: She tore into the bill to provide Ukraine with an astonishing $40 billion military and economic aid and called a spade a spade: “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams!” She also pointed out that some pro-war US politicians were more interested in covering up their crimes in Ukraine than coming clean.

May 12, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Lawmakers push back against ‘sleepwalking’ into direct conflict with nuclear-armed Russia

Samizdat | May 11, 2022

Republicans in the US House of Representatives are increasingly divided over Washington’s aid pipeline to Ukraine, with establishment politicians touting a “proxy war” with Russia while members of the populist Freedom Caucus argue that Congress is neglecting domestic priorities while provoking a nuclear-armed adversary.

The infighting escalated as the House passed a $39.8 billion military and economic aid package for Kiev. While Democrats voted in lockstep to support the spending binge, 57 Republicans gave the plan a thumbs-down. Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), who was among the 149 GOP members who voted yes, followed up on Wednesday by saying that “Investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military without losing a single American troop strikes me as a good idea.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) shot back that Crenshaw was pushing a “proxy war.” She added, “You speak as if Ukrainian lives should be thrown away, as if they have no value, just used and thrown away. For your proxy war? How does that help Americans? How does any of this help?”

Crenshaw ignored the substance of Greene’s critique, replying, “Still going after that slot on Russia Today, huh?”

By playing the Russia card, Crenshaw essentially echoed the Democratic response to Greene when she spoke out against the Ukraine aid bill on Tuesday on the House floor. After Greene pointed out that Congress was neglecting such domestic crises as surging illegal immigration at the southern US border and a severe shortage of baby formula, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) accused her of repeating Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “propaganda.”

Greene wasn’t the only one speaking out against Washington’s Ukraine policy. For example, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) argued that by ramping up aid to Ukraine and sanctions against Moscow, President Joe Biden’s administration is “sleepwalking” into a direct war with Russia while leaving Americans “in the dark.”

“It’s as if the administration is probing Putin’s nuclear red line,” Gaetz said on Wednesday. “A game of chicken between nuclear powers is insane, and this from Joe Biden, who campaigned to be America’s calming sedative.” He added that US weapons are winding up in the hands of neo-Nazi ‘Azov’ fighters, even as Democrats go on a “daily snipe hunt” for white supremacy in the US.

“Just a year ago, we lost a war against goat herders waving rifles,” Gaetz said. “Now we’re rushing to fight a nation that possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads.”

Gaetz noted that Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Massachusetts) asserted last week that the US is already “fundamentally at war” with Russia.

“Then why not vote on an Authorization to Use Military Force?” Gaetz asked. “Or are we just going to operate in Ukraine like we have in Yemen and throughout the world – forever undeclared wars.”

“I suspect many in this body won’t want a vote or a debate because regime change in Russia is their actual objective, not defending Ukraine. And to achieve this goal, they’re willing to send billions to Kiev that will line the pockets of corrupt officials, just like we did in Afghanistan.”

Other conservative Republicans, such as Chip Roy (R-Texas), pointed out that the massive Ukraine aid bill was given to lawmakers just a few hours before the vote was scheduled.

“Why don’t we actually have a debate on the floor of the people’s House instead of the garbage of getting a $40 billion bill at 3 o’clock in the afternoon – not paid for, without any idea what’s really in it, with a massive slush fund that goes to the State Department?” Roy said. “We’ve got $40 billion that is unpaid for, and you want to sit here and lecture this body about what we’re going to do or not do about standing alongside Ukraine?”

Like other Freedom Caucus members, Roy said Congress was ignoring more important issues, such as “wide-open borders, the inflation that’s killing people, the jobs that people can’t get because of the costs of goods and services in this country.”

“We’ve got a baby formula shortage at home, inflation that is crushing working families and a president that is beholden to nearly all of our adversaries,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado). “I’d say there are a few problems closer to home that we need to solve.”

May 11, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Biden Wanted $33B More For Ukraine. Congress Quickly Raised it to $40B. Who Benefits?

Tens of billions, soon to be much more, are flying out of US coffers to Ukraine as Americans suffer, showing who runs the government.

Joe Biden speaks about the conflict in Ukraine during a visit to Lockheed Martins’ Pike County Operations facility on May 3, 2022 (Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
By Glenn Greenwald | May 10, 2022

From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the Biden White House has repeatedly announced large and seemingly random amounts of money that it intends to send to fuel the war in Ukraine. The latest such dispatch of large amounts of U.S. funds, pursuant to an initial $3.5 billion fund authorized by Congress early on, was announced on Friday; “Biden says U.S. will send $1.3 billion in additional military and economic support to Ukraine,” read the CNBC headline. This was preceded by a series of new lavish spending packages for the war, unveiled every two to three weeks, starting on the third day of the war:

  • Feb. 26: “Biden approves $350 million in military aid for Ukraine”: Reuters ;
  • Mar. 16: “Biden announces $800 million in military aid for Ukraine”: The New York Times ;
  • Mar. 30: “Ukraine to receive additional $500 million in aid from U.S., Biden announces”: NBC News;
  • Apr. 12: “U.S. to announce $750 million more in weapons for Ukraine, officials say”: Reuters ;
  • May 6: “Biden announces new $150 million weapons package for Ukraine”: Reuters.

Those amounts by themselves are in excess of $3 billion; by the end of April, the total U.S. expenditure on the war in Ukraine was close to $14 billion, drawn from the additional $13.5 billion Congress authorized in mid-March. While some of that is earmarked for economic and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine, most of it will go into the coffers of the weapons industry — including Raytheon, on whose Board of Directors the current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, sat immediately before being chosen by Biden to run the Pentagon. As CNN put it: “about $6.5 billion, roughly half of the aid package, will go to the US Department of Defense so it can deploy troops to the region and send defense equipment to Ukraine.”

As enormous as those sums already are, they were dwarfed by the Biden administration’s announcement on April 28 that it “is asking Congress for $33 billion in funding to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than double the $14 billion in support authorized so far.” The White House itself acknowledges that the vast majority of that new spending package will go to the purchase of weaponry and other military assets: “$20.4 billion in additional security and military assistance for Ukraine and for U.S. efforts to strengthen European security in cooperation with our NATO allies and other partners in the region.”

It is difficult to put into context how enormous these expenditures are — particularly since the war is only ten weeks old, and U.S. officials predict/hope that this war will last not months but years. That ensures that the ultimate amounts will be significantly higher still.

The amounts allocated thus far — the new Biden request of $33 billion combined with the $14 billion already spent — already exceed the average annual amount the U.S. spent for its own war in Afghanistan ($46 billion). In the twenty-year U.S. war in Afghanistan which ended just eight months ago, there was at least some pretense of a self-defense rationale given the claim that the Taliban had harbored Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda at the time of the 9/11 attack. Now the U.S. will spend more than that annual average after just ten weeks of a war in Ukraine that nobody claims has any remote connection to American self-defense.

Even more amazingly, the total amount spent by the U.S. on the Russia/Ukraine war in less than three months is close to the Russia’s total military budget for the entire year ($65.9 million). While Washington depicts Russia as some sort of grave and existential menace to the U.S., the reality is that the U.S. spends more than ten times on its military what Russia spends on its military each year; indeed, the U.S. spends three times more than the second-highest military spender, China, and more than the next twelve countries combined.

But as gargantuan as Biden’s already-spent and newly requested sums are — for a ten-week war in which the U.S. claims not to be a belligerent — it was apparently woefully inadequate in the eyes of the bipartisan establishment in Congress, who is ostensibly elected to serve the needs and interests of American citizens, not Ukrainians. Leaders of both parties instantly decreed that Biden’s $33 billion request was not enough. They thus raised it to $40 billion — a more than 20% increase over the White House’s request — and are now working together to create an accelerated procedure to ensure immediate passage and disbursement of these weapons and funds to the war zone in Ukraine. “Time is of the essence – and we cannot afford to wait,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a letter to House members, adding: “This package, which builds on the robust support already secured by Congress, will be pivotal in helping Ukraine defend not only its nation but democracy for the world.”

We have long ago left the realm of debating why it is in the interest of American citizens to pour our country’s resources into this war, to say nothing of risking a direct war and possibly catastrophic nuclear escalation with Russia, the country with the largest nuclear stockpile, with US close behind. Indeed, one could argue that the U.S. government entered this war and rapidly escalated its involvement without this critical question — which should be fundamental to any policy decision of the U.S. government — being asked at all.

This omission — a failure to address how the interests of ordinary Americans are served by the U.S. government’s escalating role in this conflict — is particularly glaring given the steadfast and oft-stated view of former President Barack Obama that Ukraine is and always will be of vital interest to Russia, but is not of vital interest to the U.S. For that reason, Obama repeatedly resisted bipartisan demands that he send lethal arms to Ukraine, a step he was deeply reluctant to take due to his belief that the U.S. should not provoke Moscow over an interest as remote as Ukraine (ironically, Trump — who was accused by the U.S. media for years of being a Kremlin asset, controlled by Putin through blackmail — did send lethal arms to Ukraine despite how provocative doing so was to Russia).

While it is extremely difficult to isolate any benefit to ordinary American citizens from all of this, it requires no effort to see that there is a tiny group of Americans who do benefit greatly from this massive expenditure of funds. That is the industry of weapons manufacturers. So fortunate are they that the White House has met with them on several occasions to urge them to expand their capacity to produce sophisticated weapons so that the U.S. government can buy them in massive quantities:

Top U.S. defense officials will meet with the chief executives of the eight largest U.S. defense contractors to discuss industry’s capacity to meet Ukraine’s weapons needs if the war with Russia continues for years.

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told reporters Tuesday she plans to participate in a classified roundtable with defense CEOs on Wednesday to discuss “what can we do to help them, what do they need to generate supply”….

“We will discuss industry proposals to accelerate production of existing systems and develop new, modernized capabilities critical to the Department’s ongoing security assistance to Ukraine and long-term readiness of U.S. and ally/partner forces,” the official added.

On May 3, Biden visited a Lockheed Martin facility (see lead photo) and “praised the… plant that manufactures Javelin anti-tank missiles, saying their work was critical to the Ukrainian war effort and to the defense of democracy itself.”

Indeed, by transferring so much military equipment to Ukraine, the U.S. has depleted its own stockpiles, necessitating their replenishment with mass government purchases. One need not be a conspiracy theorist to marvel at the great fortune of this industry, having lost their primary weapons market just eight months ago when the U.S. war in Afghanistan finally ended, only to now be gifted with an even greater and more lucrative opportunity to sell their weapons by virtue of the protracted and always-escalating U.S. role in Ukraine. Raytheon, the primary manufacturer of Javelins along with Lockheed, has been particularly fortunate that its large stockpile, no longer needed for Afghanistan, is now being ordered in larger-than-ever quantities by its former Board member, now running the Pentagon, for shipment to Ukraine. Their stock prices have bulged nicely since the start of the war:

But how does any of this benefit the vast majority of Americans? Does that even matter? As of 2020, almost 30 million Americans are without any health insurance. Over the weekend, USA Today warned of “the ongoing infant formula shortage,” in which “nearly 40% of popular baby formula brands were sold out at retailers across the U.S. during the week starting April 24.” So many Americans are unable to afford college for their children that close to a majority are delaying plans or eliminating them all together. Meanwhile, “monthly poverty remained elevated in February 2022, with a 14.4 percent poverty rate for the total US population… Overall, 6 million more individuals were in poverty in February relative to December.” The latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau found that “approximately 42.5 million Americans [are] living below the poverty line.” Americans with diabetes often struggle to buy life-saving insulin. And on and on and on.

Now, if the U.S. were invaded or otherwise attacked by another country, or its vital interests were directly threatened, one would of course expect the U.S. government to expend large sums in order to protect and defend the national security of the country and its citizens. But can anyone advance a cogent argument, let alone a persuasive one, that Americans are somehow endangered by the war in Ukraine? Clearly, they are far more endangered by the U.S. response to the war in Ukraine than the war itself; after all, a nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Russia has long been ranked by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as one of the two greatest threats facing humanity.

One would usually expect the American left, or whatever passes for it these days, to be indignant about the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars for weapons while ordinary Americans suffer. But the American left, such that it exists, is barely visible when it comes to debates over the war in Ukraine, while American liberals stand in virtual unity with the establishment wing of the Republican Party behind the Biden administration in support for the escalating U.S. role in the war in Ukraine. A few stray voices (such as Noam Chomsky) have joined large parts of the international left in urging a diplomatic solution in lieu of war and criticizing Biden for insufficient efforts to forge one, but the U.S. left and American liberals are almost entirely silent if not supportive.

That has left the traditionally left-wing argument about war opposition to the populist right. “You can’t find baby formula in the United States right now but Congress is voting today to send $40 billion to Ukraine,” said Donald Trump, Jr. on Tuesday, echoing what one would expect to hear from the 2016 version of Bernie Sanders or the pre-victory AOC. “In the America LAST $40 BILLION Ukraine FIRST bill that we are voting on tonight, there is authorization for funds to be given to the CIA for who knows what and who knows how much? But NO BABY FORMULA for American mothers!,” explained Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Christian Walker, the conservative influencer and son of GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Georgia, today observed: “Biden should go apply to be the President of Ukraine since he clearly cares more about them than the U.S.” Chomsky himself caused controversy last week when he said that there is only one statesman of any stature in the West urging a diplomatic solution “and his name is Donald J. Trump.”

Meanwhile, the only place where dissent is heard over the Biden administration’s war policy is on the 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. programs on Fox News, hosted, respectively, by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, who routinely demand to know how ordinary Americans are benefiting from this increasing U.S. involvement. On CNN, NBC, and in the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, there is virtually lockstep unity in favor of the U.S. role in this war; the only question that is permitted, as usual, is whether the U.S. is doing enough or whether it should do more.

That the U.S. has no legitimate role to play in this war, or that its escalating involvement comes at the expense of American citizens, the people they are supposed to be serving, provokes immediate accusations that one is spreading Russian propaganda and is a Kremlin agent. That is therefore an anti-war view that is all but prohibited in those corporate liberal media venues. Meanwhile, mainstream Democratic House members, such as Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), are now openly talking about the war in Ukraine as if it is the U.S.’s own:

Whatever else is true, the claim with which we are bombarded by the corporate press — the two parties agree on nothing; they are constantly at each other’s throats; they have radically different views of the world — is patently untrue, at least when it comes time for the U.S. to join in new wars. Typically, what we see in such situations is what we are seeing now: the establishment wings of both parties are in complete lockstep unity, always breathlessly supporting the new proposed U.S. role in any new war, eager to empty the coffers of the U.S. Treasury and transfer it to the weapons industry while their constituents suffer.

One can believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is profoundly unjust and has produced horrific outcomes while still questioning what legitimate interests the U.S. has in participating in this war to this extent. Even if one fervently believes that helping Ukrainians fight Russia is a moral good, surely the U.S. government should be prioritizing the ability of its own citizens to live above the poverty line, have health insurance, send their kids to college, and buy insulin and baby formula.

There are always horrific wars raging, typically with a clear aggressor, but that does not mean that the U.S. can or should assume responsibility for the war absent its own vital interests and the interests of its citizens being directly at stake. In what conceivable sense are American citizens benefiting from this enormous expenditure of their resources and the increasing energy and attention being devoted by their leaders to Ukraine rather than to their lives and the multi-pronged deprivations that define it?

May 10, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Liberal Interventionists and Neoconservatives Dominate US Foreign Policy

And the bad outcomes are predictable

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • MAY 10, 2022

Once upon a time United States foreign policy was based on actual national interests, but that was long ago and far away before the country was beguiled into a colonial war with Spain followed by a twentieth century that was chock-a-block full of any type and intensity of warfare that one might imagine, including the use of nuclear weapons. Some might consider that the United States has become a nation made by war, to include a presumption that all the war-making has been both just and necessary, since America is “exceptional” and by default “the leader of the Free World.” Witness what is taking place vis-à-vis Ukraine and Russia right now, pressing forward with a full-scale economic war against Moscow while arming one of the belligerents in support of no actual national interest, as if by habit. The propensity of American politicians to resort to arms to compensate for their other failures is such that among circles in Washington and the media there has long been a joke making the rounds observing that no matter who is nominated and elected president we always wind up with John McCain. But if one is seriously concerned about the tendency of the United States to view nearly every foreign problem as solvable if only one uses enough military force, the joke might be updated to suggest that we Americans now always wind up with the Kagans, the first family of neoconservative/neoliberal advocates for an aggressive, interventionist US foreign policy.

Victoria Nuland, the architect of the disaster in Ukraine and a Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protege, is married to Robert Kagan and now serving as number three in the State Department. Robert is the Stephen & Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and is also a regular contributing columnist at The Washington Post. His brother is Fred, currently a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Fred’s wife Kimberley is head of the aptly named Institute for the Study of War.

When Congress-critters want to justify a new war, they frequently cite judgements made by one of the various groups associated with the Kagans. Robert is a frequent contributor to the national media both in interviews and opinion pieces calling inevitably for harsh measures against countries like Russia and Iran while Fred uses his bully pulpit to argue in favor of a large increases in military spending to counter “future threats.” Fred and Robert are members of the Aspen Strategy Group. They and their father, Donald, were all signatories to the neocon Project for the New American Century manifesto, Rebuilding America’s Defenses (2000).

Characteristically, the Kagan brothers love war but expect someone else to do the fighting. They are both considerably overweight and could never pass a military entrance physical if they were so inclined, which, of course they are not. The Kagans have been closely tied to the Democratic Party on many social issues and would likely describe themselves as liberal interventionists as well as neocons, since in practice both labels mean the same thing in terms of an assertive foreign policy backed by force. Plus, their flexibility gives them access to the foreign policy establishments of both major parties, as also does their support of Israeli interests in the Middle East, to include outspoken support of the Iraq War and for a covert war against Iran.

The Kagans are labeled by many as conservative, but they are not reliably Republican. Donald Trump was much troubled during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns by so-called conservatives who rallied behind the #NeverTrump banner, presumably in opposition to his stated intention to end or at least diminish America’s role in wars in the Middle East and Asia. The Kagans were foremost among those pundits. Robert was one of the first neocons to get on the #NeverTrump band wagon back in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and spoke at a Washington fundraiser for her, complaining about the “isolationist” tendency in the Republican Party exemplified by Trump. Many other notable neocons also declared themselves to be #NeverTrump, including Bill Kristol, Bret Stephens, Daniel Pipes, Reuel Gerecht, Max Boot and Jonah Goldberg.

To be sure, some high-profile neocons stuck with the Republicans, to include the highly controversial Elliott Abrams, who initially opposed Trump but later became the point man for dealing with both Venezuela and Iran, attracted by Trump’s hardline with both countries. Abrams’ conversion reportedly took place when he realized that the new president genuinely embraced unrelenting hostility towards Iran in particular as exemplified by his ending of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. John Bolton was also for a time a neocon in the White House fold, though he later became an enemy after being fired by the president and then wrote a book critical of Trump.

Even though the NeverTrumper neocons did not succeed in blocking Donald Trump in 2016, they maintained relevancy by slowly drifting back towards the Democratic Party, which is where they originated back in the 1970s in the office of the Senator from Boeing Henry “Scoop” Jackson. A number of them started their political careers there, to include leading neocon Richard Perle.

It would not be overstating the case to suggest that the neoconservative movement together with its liberal interventionist colleagues are dominating foreign policy thinking across the board in Congress and the White House. That development has been aided by a more aggressive shift among the Democrats themselves, with Russiagate and other “foreign interference” still to this day being blamed for the party’s failure in 2016 and for its dreary prospects in midterm elections later this year. Given that mutual intense hostility to Trump, the doors to previously shunned liberal media outlets have now opened wide to the stream of foreign policy “experts” who want to “restore a sense of the heroic” to US national security policy. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum have been favored contributors to the Atlantic while Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss were together at the New York Times prior to Weiss’s resignation. Jennifer Rubin, who wrote in 2016 that “It is time for some moral straight talk: Trump is evil incarnate,” is a frequent columnist for The Washington Post while both she and William Kristol appear regularly on MSNBC. Russian-Jewish import hardliner Max Boot is a regular feature contributor at the Post.

The unifying principle that ties many of the mostly Jewish neocons together is, of course, unconditional defense of Israel and everything it does, which leads them to support a policy of American global military dominance which they presume will inter alia serve as a security umbrella for the Jewish state. In the post-9/11 world, the neocon media’s leading publication Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard virtually invented the concept of “Islamofascism” to justify endless war in the Middle East, a development that has killed millions of Muslims, destroyed at least three nations, and cost the US taxpayer more than $5 trillion. The Israel connection has also resulted in neocon political and media support for the currently highly aggressive and dangerous policy against Russia, due in part to its involvement in defense of Israeli target Syria. In Eastern Europe, neocon ideologues have aggressively exploited the largely illusory policy of “democracy promotion,” which, not coincidentally, has also been a major Democratic Party foreign policy objective, both coming together nicely to justify the current chaos in Ukraine.

The neocons and liberal interventionists are involved in a number of foundations, the most prominent of which is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), that are largely funded by Jewish billionaires and defense contractors. FDD is headed by Canadian Mark Dubowitz and it is reported that the group takes direction coming from officials in the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Other major neocon incubators are the American Enterprise Institute, which currently is the home of Paul Wolfowitz, and the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at John Hopkins University.

Many former Barack Obama White House senior officials who believe in liberal interventionism and democracy promotion while also hating Russia and Vladimir Putin have developed comfortable working relationships with the neocons. Foreign policy hawks including Antony Blinken, Wendy Sherman, Nicholas Burns, Susan Rice and Samantha Power are calling most of the shots given Biden’s senility but with neocon political and media support.

Unfortunately, nowhere in Biden’s foreign policy circle does one find anyone who is resistant to the idea of worldwide interventionism in support of claimed humanitarian objectives, even if it would lead to an actual shooting war with major competitor power Russia and also possibly China. In fact, Biden himself embraces a characteristically extremely bellicose view on a proper relationship with foreign nations “claiming that he is defending democracy against its enemies.” His language and authoritarian governing style leave no wiggle room for constructive dialogue with adversaries. The script being written by his Administration on how to deal with the rest of the world promises nothing but unending trouble and quite possibly sharp economic decline in the US for the foreseeable future.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

May 10, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Sanctions hurt US more than Russia – poll

Samizdat | May 10, 2022

A poll published on Saturday found that 53% of Americans believe that sanctions on Moscow hurt the US more than Russia. Amid soaring gas prices and a rising cost of living, voters are losing confidence in US President Joe Biden’s leadership, and 43% say they’re “OK” with Ukraine losing its ongoing conflict with Russia.

With inflation at a 40-year peak and gas prices near record highs, the Democracy Institute/Express.co.uk poll revealed that Biden is polling negatively in all policy areas, with foreign policy the worst. Some 56% disapprove of his handling of foreign matters, compared to 40% approving. On Ukraine specifically, only 38% approve of his stewardship, while 52% disapprove.

The Biden administration has attempted to blame Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, for the rising cost of living at home, with his officials repeatedly referring to “Putin’s price hike.” However, living costs were rising for months before Russia sent troops into Ukraine, and voters are pointing the finger at Biden for their economic woes.

Some 50% said they’d back Republicans in November’s midterm elections, compared with 42% saying they’d vote Democrat. In addition to more voters being “OK” than “not OK” with Ukraine losing the conflict with Russia (43%-41%), more Americans think it would be better for Biden to leave office than for Putin to step down, by 53% to 44%.

Biden has sanctioned the Russian banking and energy sectors, and his administration has sent nearly $4 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine, with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin promising last month to “move heaven and earth” to finance Kiev’s fighting. The US president has also asked Congress to approve another $33 billion aid package for Ukraine – of which $20 billion would be earmarked for military aid – and on Monday signed the Lend-Lease Act of 2022, allowing Washington to send unlimited quantities of arms to Kiev.

In the eyes of the Kremlin, this deluge of weapons plus the US and NATO’s intelligence-sharing arrangements with Kiev mean that the West is “essentially going to war with Russia through a proxy.”

American voters, however, are not as earnest as the Biden administration in fuelling this war. According to the latest poll, they consider Russia the fourth biggest threat to the US at 16%, behind North Korea (18%), Iran (20%), and China (40%).

“Americans were very pro sanctions at first, [but] they are not as keen on the sanctions as they were,” Democracy Institute Director Patrick Basham told Express. “Biden made these predictions at the outset – the ruble would be rubble, we were going to crash the Russian economy, people will rise up, Putin will be out, the Russians will run away from Ukraine … [but] none of those things have happened.”

This difference between expectation and reality has made people cynical, he claimed, comparing the apparent loss of trust to public disillusionment with coronavirus policies throughout the West.

“The problem [now] is that at least half of the country in America thinks they were hoodwinked over a lot of the Covid stuff, so they are even more cynical about government and media than they were two years ago,” he said.

May 10, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

UK pledges more military aid for Ukraine

Samizdat | May 8, 2022

The UK pledged a further £1.3 billion ($1.6 billion) in military support and aid to Ukraine on Saturday. London said the move nearly doubles London’s previous spending commitments to Kiev, and is the country’s highest rate of spending on a conflict since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The extra money will come from a reserve used by the government for emergencies. Like other NATO member states, the UK has been increasingly supplying Kiev with weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missile systems and armored vehicles.

This week, London said it was sending 13 armored vehicles to Ukrainian police and the National Guard. The UK government has also been delivering tanks to Poland in order to replace those Warsaw has donated to Kiev.

Similarly, the US pledged an additional $150 million in military assistance to Ukraine on Friday. The package includes 25,000 155mm artillery rounds, as well as radars and electronic jamming equipment.

Russia has repeatedly criticized the West for “flooding” Ukraine with weapons, and warned in April that foreign arms become legitimate targets once they reach Ukrainian soil.

May 8, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

American progressives join the War Party

Some leftist commentators can barely conceal their enthusiasm for American involvement in the Ukraine war

US representative Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez is among the Democratic Party members to vote in favor of a Republican sponsored Ukraine war bill
By James W Carden | Asia Times | May 6, 2022

Russia’s war on Ukraine has, among many other things, highlighted a consequential, indeed historic, shift taking place in American politics with regard to foreign policy.

A recent vote in the House of Representatives helps tell the tale. On April 28, Congress voted by an overwhelming majority of 417-10 to pass Republican Senator John Cornyn’s bill that would revive Lend Lease and apply it to Ukraine.

As is well known, Lend Lease was the brainchild of Franklin D Roosevelt as a way to get around the series of Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the 1930s, in order to help supply the British war effort against Nazi Germany.

One might be forgiven for wondering if such legislation is really necessary today; after all, according to numbers released by the State Department, the US has provided more than $6.4 billion in “security assistance” to Ukraine since 2014. And last week President Joe Biden put forward a request for another $20.4 billion in “additional security and military assistance” as part of a $33 billion aid package to Ukraine.

So what was the actual point of reviving Lend Lease? Well, it was in part, as is the case with many things that happen on Capitol Hill, performative: a way to signal to US arms manufacturers that constitute much of the political donor class that the money spigot will remain wide open for the foreseeable future.

But the Cornyn bill also tells us that the center of gravity of the anti-war movement is shifting away from its traditional home on the progressive left.

In the century since the US embarked on its journey to global hegemony with the Spanish-American War of choice in 1898, it was most often progressive Democrats who rallied under the banner of peace.

Jeanette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress, was one of 50 dissenting votes against American entering the First World War. Progressive magazines such as The Nation were a thorn in the side of proud American imperialists like Henry Cabot Lodge, Brooks Adams and Theodore Roosevelt.

The historian Barbara Tuchman noted that Roosevelt in particular “confused the desire for peace with physical cowardice.” Roosevelt took delight in targeting papers and magazines like the Evening Post and The Nation, which he wrote, “in all of whom there exists absolute physical dread of danger and hardship and who therefore tend to hysterical denunciation and fear of war.”

The Vietnam era marked perhaps the high point of progressive dissent against the American war machine. The anti-war movement was certainly well represented (especially by today’s standards) in the US Senate, where J William Fulbright, William Proxmire, Wayne Morse, Robert F Kennedy, George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy and Frank Church opposed president Lyndon B Johnson’s war.

Perhaps the most recent example of exemplary progressive bravery on Capitol Hill is that of Representative Barbara Lee, who cast the sole vote in the House against granting the George W Bush administration practically unrestricted power to wage war (via the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF) in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Now, it seems we have entered a new era.

The House’s overwhelming passage of the Cornyn bill will in effect cement Washington’s status as a co-belligerent in a war against a nuclear-armed and increasingly unpredictable Russia.

A look at the roll-call vote in the House shows that only 10 members voted against Cornyn’s bill, all of whom were Republicans.

Not a single Democratic progressive voted against the legislation. All the leaders of the progressive left in Congress, including Ro Khanna (D-CA), Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Pramila Jaypal (D-MI), voted for Lend Lease – as did every member of the so-called “Squad,” including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Cori Bush (D-MO).

But perhaps most important of all was the vote cast by Representative Barbara Lee.

Not only did Lee vote for the Cornyn bill, she accompanied Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House’s leading Russia hawk Adam Schiff on a trip to Kiev last weekend, where they paid homage to the Ukrainian president and promised US support “until victory is won.”

Lee’s vote takes on additional significance since she chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, which oversees foreign-aid programs such as those funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to Ukraine.

Still worse, progressive activists, journalists and thought leaders have likewise joined the American War Party. A longtime progressive hero and anti-poverty activist, the Reverend Dr William J Barber II, recently released a statement that attempted to leverage the tragedy of the war to drum up support for his grassroots campaign of poor people’s marches.

In a fundraising letter, Barber writes that “Russia’s assault on Ukraine has produced scenes that demand action from people who want to hold on to our humanity.”

“If Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine demand action,” said Barber, “then so too does the failure of the US Senate to pass Build Back Better’s provisions for affordable housing, green jobs, living wages for care workers, and a child tax credit that will immediately lift 4 million children out of poverty.”

After reading the statement, a Chicago-based labor activist wrote to me in disgust. “This [expletive] happens all the time in the left-wing non-profit industrial complex,” he wrote. “They have a really, really bad sense of history, and specious moral claims and comparisons like these are made all the time – usually done to raise money.”

The darling of the progressive foreign policy community, Bernie Sanders’ foreign-policy adviser Matt Duss, recently defended the policy that arguably brought us to this point, NATO expansion.

Brooklyn lefties were once so besotted by Duss that he landed on the cover of the The Nation magazine. His recent comments will no doubt keep him high in their esteem because, with few exceptions, progressive writers and activists have abandoned their commitment to peace: We are all Ukrainians now, or so we are told.

Some progressive commentators can barely conceal their enthusiasm for American involvement. Here is the chickenhawk founding editor of the progressive magazine American Prospect, Robert Kuttner:

“It is appalling that the West keeps lionizing Zelensky, giving him standing ovations after he addresses national parliaments, but denying him what he needs to save his country.

“What does he need? He needs warplanes.

“Sooner or later, NATO will have to give Ukraine planes powerful enough to annihilate Russia’s invading armies. It might as well be sooner.”

Quincy Institute non-resident fellow Joe Cirincione, a longtime nuclear-arms-control expert, has, like Kuttner, embraced his inner chickenhawk. He recently praised the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization for supplying more arms to Ukraine, and hence prolonging the war in blithe disregard of the possible consequences, including Russia resorting to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, writing:

“Supplying Ukraine with artillery that can out-range Russian artillery can be a dramatic shift in the war. It may save cities now threatened by brutal Russian bombardment. Smart move by US/NATO.”

In the end, the unanimous Democratic support for the Ukrainian Lend Lease bill and the calls for more and more weapons by leading progressives shows they have abandoned their traditional and long-held opposition to American wars of choice.

What a shame.

James W Carden is a former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the US Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, the Los Angeles Times and American Affairs.

May 7, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

US ‘directly’ involved in Ukraine conflict – Moscow

Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin
Samizdat | May 7, 2022

Washington should be added to a “list of war criminals” as it is now directly participating in “hostilities” in Ukraine, Chairman of Russia’s State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin claimed on Saturday, citing media reports about alleged US intelligence-sharing with Ukraine.

US President Joe Biden has told senior intelligence officials that “counterproductive” leaks about data sharing with Ukraine should stop, NBC reported on Friday.

Though there was no official reaction to the report from the US authorities, Volodin took to Telegram to comment on it. “The United States is taking part in hostilities in Ukraine. US President Biden, demanding to stop leaks about the exchange of intelligence information with Ukraine, admitted that Washington had been exposed,” he wrote.

Volodin said that the Ukrainian government, which he described as the “Kiev Nazi regime,” not only relies on weapons from the West, but also on the “assistance of American intelligence forces.”

The Duma chairman wrote that Washington “essentially coordinates and develops military operations” in Ukraine, and is therefore directly participating in the “hostilities” against Russian forces.

“For the crimes committed in Ukraine by the Kiev Nazi regime, the US leadership should also be held accountable, adding to the list of war criminals,” Volodin concluded.

However, the Pentagon earlier dismissed some of the media reports and specifically denied that the US had provided data allowing Ukrainian forces to strike Russia’s Black Sea flagship ‘Moskva’ off the coast of Odessa last month.

“The Ukrainians have their own intelligence capabilities to track and target Russian naval vessels, as they did in this case,” said US military spokesman John Kirby.

Russia insists that its missile cruiser wasn’t attacked, but sank on April 14 after a fire that had broken out on board caused ammunition to explode.

The White House National Security Council has admitted, however, that the US is “regularly providing detailed, timely intelligence to the Ukrainians on the battlefield to help them defend their country against Russian aggression and will continue to do so.”

This statement apparently did not come as a surprise to Moscow. On May 5, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists that the Russian authorities know the US, the UK and NATO “on a permanent basis” transmit intelligence and other data to Kiev but this would not “hinder the achievement of the goals set during the special military operation.”

Russia attacked its neighboring state following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, signed in 2014, and Moscow’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered Minsk Protocol was designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.

The Kremlin has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join NATO. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.

May 7, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

With no missile host in Pacific, new US strategy seeks to arm Japan against China

Press TV – May 4, 2022

The United States is struggling to find allies in the Indo-Pacific region who would be willing to host its intermediate-range missiles (IRBM), a new report has found.

The report by US-based think tank RAND Corporation, close to the Pentagon, looks at the likelihood of Pacific countries agreeing to host US IRBMs, the benefits and drawbacks of potential alternatives, and the most feasible alternative.

The report finds that the US strategy that relies on an ally agreeing to permanently host these ground-based IRBMs is bound to fail because of its inability to find a willing partner in the Pacific region.

The author of the report concludes that in the absence of any willing hosts, Washington should encourage Japan to develop a missile arsenal of its own to threaten Chinese ships, thus using Japan as a pawn in its no-holds-barred war against China.

After the US pulled out from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, it sought to develop and deploy ground-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km.

That immediately sparked a debate on where the US will deploy those missiles. Since China was not a signatory of the INF and had developed missiles of its own, Americans eyed the Indo-Pacific region.

The author of the report looks at the likelihood of US allies in the Indo-Pacific region—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Republic of Korea, and Thailand—hosting its IRBMs to counter the Chinese threat, but finds all of them unwilling.

He also examines alternatives to permanently basing US missiles on allies’ territories, but finds drawbacks with each alternative and thus recommends Japan develop an arsenal of ground-based anti-ship standoff missile capabilities at the behest of the US.

In the report published on Monday, the author argues that “the likely receptivity to hosting such systems is very low as long as current domestic political conditions and regional security trends hold,” referring to Thailand, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan.

As long as Thailand “continues to have a military-backed government that pursues closer ties with China”, the US “would not want Thailand to host GBIRMs”, it notes.

In the Philippines, as long as a president “continues policies toward the United States and China similar to those of President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines is “extremely unlikely to accept US GBIRMs.”

The government of South Korea shares ties with China, so Seoul also is “highly unlikely” to agree to host US missiles amid “a general deterioration of US-ROK relations.”

Australia’s historical ties with the US mean that the possibility cannot be ruled out, but “its historical reluctance to host permanent foreign bases and its distance from continental Asia make this unlikely.”

Japan is willing to “bolster its own defense capabilities vis-à-vis China,” but is reluctant to accept any increase in the US military presence or “deploying weapons that are explicitly offensive in nature”, the report says.

The report suggests that to continue to pursue GBIRMs for the Indo-Pacific, the strategy most likely to succeed would be “helping Japan develop an arsenal of ground-based, anti-ship missile capabilities”.

“This would be the first step in a longer-term US strategy to encourage Japan to procure similar missiles with longer ranges,” it states.

Meanwhile, the foreign affairs chief of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) said on Tuesday that the country should deploy surface-launched intermediate-range missiles in the northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido to deter missile attacks from China, Russia and North Korea.

Masahisa Sato, the head of the LDP Foreign Affairs Division, made the remarks at an event in Washington organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think tank.

Washington has in recent years made strenuous efforts to make inroads into the strategic Indo-Pacific region, with singular aim of countering the rise of Chinese dragon. The attempts, however, have produced no results.

In a bid to ramp up its diplomatic engagement with Pacific countries, the Biden administration is set to host leaders from the region later this year, a senior US government official said on Monday.

Kurt Campbell, who serves as coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the US National Security Council, made the announcement at a US-New Zealand business summit, amid rising tensions with China.

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Former NATO Commander Disguises War Propaganda as Novel

By Patrick Macfarlane | The Libertarian Institute | April 26, 2022

On March 9, 2021, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Admiral James Stavridis, co-authored a fiction novel with Elliott Ackerman, another former U.S. military officer. The book, entitled 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, imagines a kinetic war between the United States and China.

Given the pedigree of its authorship, the novel provides a compelling window into the psychology of NATO’s military leadership and, correspondingly, the foreign policy establishment behind it. To those familiar with said psychology, the events of the novel will not be surprising.

It begins with a Chinese ambush of a U.S. vessel in the South China Sea; an Iranian capture of a U.S. pilot; a full scale naval battle between the U.S. and China (resulting in a total U.S. defeat); and a Russian invasion of Poland. The novel concludes with a limited nuclear exchange between the U.S. and China.

Given the last few decades’ hawkish hand wringing about Chinese and Russian cyber capabilities, the tactics employed in the novel are similarly unsurprising. A Chinese cyberattack disables U.S. hardware, allowing the naval rout. The Iranians, as allies of Russia and China, similarly disable U.S. aircraft. For their part, the Russians slice underwater communications cables leading to a complete internet blackout in the West.

To an uncritical reader, the novel appears to be a “cautionary tale” and a “warning” against global conflict. The novel’s dust jacket states:

Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors’ years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid.

Mainstream outlets were as successful in their attempts to paint 2034 as a “warning” as their reviews were cringeworthy.

Wired, which ran a series of exclusive pre-print excerpts, had this to say:

WIRED HAS ALWAYS been a publication about the future—about the forces shaping it, and the shape we’d like it to take. Sometimes, for us, that means being wild-eyed optimists, envisioning the scenarios that excite us most. And sometimes that means taking pains to envision futures that we really, really want to avoid.

By giving clarity and definition to those nightmare trajectories, the hope is that we can give people the ability to recognize and divert from them. Almost, say, the way a vaccine teaches an immune system what to ward off. And that’s what this issue of WIRED is trying to do…

Consider this another vaccine against disaster. Fortunately, this dose won’t cause a temporary fever—and it happens to be a rippingly good read. Turns out that even cautionary tales can be exciting, when the future we’re most excited about is the one where they never come true.

The Washington Post’s review was almost worse.

This crisply written and well-paced book reads like an all-caps warning to a world shackled to the machines we carry in our pockets and place in our laps, while only vaguely understanding how the information stored in and shared by those devices can be exploited. We have grown numb to the latest data breach—was it a pollical campaign (Hillary Clinton’s), or one of the country’s biggest credit-rating firms (Equifax), or a hotel behemoth (Marriott), or a casual-sex hookup site (Adult Friend Finder), or government departments updating their networks with the SolarWinds system (U.S. Treasury and Commerce)?

In “2034,” it’s as if Ackerman and Stavridis want to grab us by our lapels, give us a slap or two, and scream: Pay attention! George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, “Nineteen Eighty-four: A Novel” was published 35 years before 1984. Ackerman’s and Stavridis’s book takes place in the not-so-distant future when today’s high school military recruits will just be turning 30.

Between Wired’s ham-handed COVID-19 vaccine analogy and the CIA Washington Post’s ironic Orwell reference, the mainstream marketing campaign clearly attempts to portray the novel as a cautionary tale.

It is impossible to gaze into the hearts of men, but we do have some clues. Those clues suggest that the co-authors really do seek to warn against war with China. However, in doing so, they advocate for it. Indeed, their warning is not against the folly of empire, but against a rising China.

Ultimately the co-authors’ MacBethian premonition of conflict necessitates escalatory U.S. policy.

On March 18, 2021, the pair were interviewed by NPR. Stavridis had this to say:

… a subtext in all of this [the novel] is to strike a warning bell about the rise of China and the propensity in human history going back 2,500 years almost any time a [sic] established power is challenged by a rising power, it leads to war. It’s a dangerous moment. And 15 years from now, I think, will be a moment of maximum danger because China will have advanced in its military capability and technology. Therefore, our military deterrent will somewhat decline. We’re standing in the danger, as we say in the Navy.

Ackerman embraces this view:

…and we’re not only sounding the alarm bell, but the book is also trying to situate where America is in this moment of 2034.

Further, the pair assert they do not believe in the American decline.

Interviewer (to both): “…do you believe this, that America will be the author of its own destruction?”

Stavridis: “I believe there are many in the world who do believe that. I personally do not… there are many in the world who believe our best days are somehow behind us. They would be miscalculating, in my view, to believe that.”

Ackerman: “I would add I am by no way a believer in the decline of America. And I am very much committed to the idea of the American ideal. That being said, looking back throughout our entire history, the greatest threat is us turning inward and destroying that ideal. Lincoln himself said – I’m paraphrasing, but basically said that if America is going to destroy itself, we will be the author and the finisher. And I think he says, a nation of free men will live forever or die by suicide. And I don’t think that’s Lincoln being a declinist about the United States. But I think it’s him recognizing that our divisiveness can oftentimes be the greatest threat and what leaves us the most unable to respond to challenges from outside the country.”

Indeed, a reader would be hard pressed to find any point where the co-authors suggest any strategy short of increasing military confrontation with China.

Instead, they warn that America must be more united against an outside threat. It must, by implication, build up its military force, and, oddly enough, confront Chinese technological advances with less reliance on our own technology.

Stavridis expanded on his China policy prescriptions in a June 2021 interview:

The South China Sea is a vital entry point for the United States today. It’s a massive body of water full of oil and gas as well as fisheries, and about 40 percent of global trade passes through it.

So, there are strong strategic reasons, as the United States values its alliances in Asia, to push back against Chinese claims.

It is not just the South China Sea but also the East China Sea, where the Senkaku Islands lie, that are vital to American interests as long as our allies operate there and trade flows through there.

And above all we simply as an international community cannot acquiesce to China’s preposterous claims, which have been rejected by international law.

Indeed, a number one red line would be an attack against our allies.

For example, if China attacked and tried to forcibly take the Senkaku Islands, that would be a red line for the United States. Or an attack against the Philippines, another treaty ally of the United States. An attack against any treaty allies would be the number one red line.

A second red line would be trying to attack U.S. military personnel operating in the South China Sea.

We conduct what we call “freedom of navigation patrols.” These are our warships sailing through international waters such as the South China Sea.

If China were to attack a U.S. ship to attempt to demonstrate their view that they own the South China Sea, that would be a red line. In fact, the book “2034” opens with an attack involving U.S. military personnel being killed in the South China Sea.

Stavridis believes that the U.S. must continue to devote itself to entangling alliances, against which the founding fathers warned. The U.S. must also continue to press its presence in the South China Sea.

Despite resolutely warning against a war against China, Stavridis commits the U.S. to myriad tripwires that would ignite it.

These China policy positions parallel Stavridis’ positions on Ukraine. It’s always more, more, more.

More funding, arming, and training Ukrainians, more U.S. commitment to NATO, more U.S. weaponization of Big Tech, more money to the U.S. State Department, more interagency cooperation, and more silencing dissent. These positions are escalatory. At the very least, they flirt with making Washington a direct party to the War in Ukraine. They may give Russia reason to attack U.S. and NATO forces.

Given Russia’s nuclear footing, these policies pose an existential threat to humanity itself.

Indeed, it will always be a mystery how the hawks convinced the American public that the path to peace leads through war. Perhaps those of us who survive the inevitable result of this mantra can ponder the answer while painting on the cave walls.

Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. He is the host of the Liberty Weekly Podcast at www.libertyweekly.net, where he seeks to expose establishment narratives with well researched documentary-style content and insightful guest interviews. His work has appeared on antiwar.com and Zerohedge. He may be reached at patrick.macfarlane@libertyweekly.net

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Lavrov’s ‘anti-Semitic’ remarks

By Gilbert Doctorow | May 4, 2022

In the past couple of days, there were two major diplomatic scandals at the international level. One concerns the Ukrainian ambassador to Berlin, who grossly insulted the Chancellor. The other concerns Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov’s offhand remarks in an interview regarding anti-Semitism, which immediately riled the political establishment in Israel. Though both incidents have been featured in news bulletins, neither has been approached from the angle of investigative journalism.

When Ambassador Andrij Melnyk accused Olaf Scholz of behaving like “an offended liver sausage” for refusing to visit Kyiv, that caught the attention of not only German media, but global media. The term “offended liver sausage” may have seemed peculiar to English speakers, but it clearly was not meant as a compliment.

The Daily Beast went further than most of the press in identifying the term as a German colloquialism “commonly employed to describe someone as a prima donna.” They connected this insult to the head of government with a tit-for-tat by the Chancellor: in the preceding month, Zelensky had refused to receive German head of state Frank-Walter Steinmeier because of his past close ties to Moscow and this motivated Scholz’s decision not to go.

However, the nominally investigative journalists of The Daily Beast looked no further. Neither this paper nor mainstream has asked and then answered persuasively why Kiev would intentionally offend the most powerful country within the EU, upon whom it greatly depends for military and economic assistance. Some put it down to the ambassador’s personal views. Others are simply confounded. No one has considered that the spat Kiev’s man on the spot has initiated with Scholz might be a calculated intervention in German domestic politics, with a view to pushing the indecisive Scholz out of power. The Chancellor is known to be under threat from other members of his own party and from coalition partners who would gladly replace him with someone more committed to helping the Ukrainian cause with action and not just words.

The case of Lavrov’s remarks about Jews and anti-Semitism has received even less penetrating analysis. He is quoted in the press as having said that Hitler also had Jewish blood and that the worst anti-Semites are found among Jews. These words were instantly denounced by the Israeli government, which called for an apology.

The Western press was equally quick to remark how Lavrov had precipitated what can only be a cooling of relations with Israel. Jerusalem would now surely abandon its claims to be an honest broker and would align itself more closely with Kiev. In Washington and London, editors were gleeful.

However, no one asked the question which begs to be addressed: how, why would Sergei Lavrov, who is surely the most experienced diplomat on the world stage, make remarks that could only do damage to Russian-Israeli relations?

I admit that there is an innocuous explanation. Lavrov intended his words as a counter to Western denial that Kiev is a Nazi-dominated regime on grounds that President Zelensky himself is Jewish. But Lavrov had to be aware how Jerusalem would react to his words, so we should look further.

Let me hazard a guess. Lavrov knew well what he was doing and probably had discussed this subject with his boss, Vladimir Vladimirovich, before he opened his mouth.

The Russians are very dissatisfied with Israel over its past military cooperation with Ukraine, and Lavrov’s statement was only the opening round. If we go back to the very first days of Russia’s ‘special military operation,’ when they took control of the Zaporozhye nuclear power station and seized there documents relating to Ukraine’s efforts to build a ‘dirty nuclear weapon,’ the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that there were foreign enablers active there. Then the next day, unexpectedly and in great haste, Israeli Prime Minister Bennett flew to Moscow for unscheduled talks with Putin.  Almost nothing was disclosed about the subject of their talks. But subsequently the foreign enablers were never identified by the Russians.

Though I have been praised by some readers for avoiding ‘speculation,’ I will permit myself just this once to speculate: it is not inconceivable that the Israelis were among the key advisers to Kiev on its program to build nuclear weapons. If that is so, we may expect Russian-Israeli relations to get a lot worse in the coming weeks and months.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

May 4, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

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