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Vancouver summit on N. Korea failed to provide alternative to Russian & Chinese proposals – Moscow

RT | January 17, 2018

The joint US-Canada summit is just a “heavy-handed attempt” to undermine the decisions of the UNSC, Russia’s Foreign Ministry has said. It added that the meeting failed to provide an alternative to the Russian-Chinese initiative.

Participants at the Vancouver summit failed to provide any alternative to the existing Chinese-Russian roadmap for easing the Korean knot, the ministry said in statement. It noted that instead of coming up with any “constructive” results, the gathering demonstrated “absolute disrespect” for the authority of the UN Security Council (UNSC).

What’s more, the decision to consider imposing unilateral sanctions against North Korea that overstep the demands outlined by the UNSC resolutions are “absolutely unacceptable and counterproductive,” the statement added. The ministry said further that a situation, in which some countries adopt roles as interpreters of UNSC resolutions without any permission or mandate – thus undermining the role of the UN – is “absolutely inadmissible.”

Back in July 2017, Moscow and Beijing put forward a proposal known as the ‘double-freeze’ initiative that envisaged the US and its allies halting all major military exercises in the region in exchange for Pyongyang suspending its nuclear and ballistic missile program. The initiative was, however, turned down by Washington – which was reiterated on Tuesday during the Vancouver summit.

The same day, the Russian Foreign Ministry again drew attention to the fact that the initiative is aimed at “resolving the entire range of problems [around the Korean Peninsula] solely through the political and diplomatic means.”

The Vancouver meeting, on the contrary, did not contribute to the normalization of the situation on the peninsula and only exacerbated existing tensions, the ministry said. Notably, neither Russia nor China was invited to the gathering despite being major players in the region as well as immediate neighbors of North Korea.

Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that he was told Russia and China would only be “briefed” on the results of the meeting, calling such an attitude “unacceptable.” He also said that it would be a “great result already” if the meeting merely avoided leading to anything “counterproductive.”

Beijing also slammed the summit by saying that it had “not the slightest legality and representativeness.” It also accused the meeting participants of evoking Cold War ghosts. Pyongyang denounced the Vancouver summit as a “provocation” which is not helping the talks between North and South Korea.

In the meantime, US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard noted that it was the US regime change policy that prompted Pyongyang to develop its nuclear and missile arsenal in the first place. She turned to Twitter to call on Washington to put an end to such practices as well as to cast away “unrealistic preconditions” that the US government has been setting for decades to negotiate with North Korea.

January 17, 2018 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Why “Coercive Diplomacy” is a Dangerous Farce

By Gareth Porter | Dissident Voice | January 16, 2018

With his recent “my (nuclear) button is bigger than yours” taunt, Donald Trump’s rhetoric has fully descended into school yard braggadocio, with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as a convenient foil. But his administration’s overwhelming reliance on military and economic pressure rather than on negotiations to influence North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ICBM programs is hardly new. It is merely a continuation of a well-established tradition of carrying out what the national security elite call “coercive diplomacy”.

As Alexander George, the academic specialist on international relations who popularized the concept, wrote:

The general idea of coercive diplomacy is to back one’s demand on an adversary with a threat of punishment for noncompliance that he will consider credible and potent enough to persuade him to comply with the demand.

The converse of that fixation on coercion, of course, is rejection of genuine diplomatic negotiations, which would have required the United States to agree to changes in its own military and diplomatic policies.

It is no accident that the doctrine of coercive diplomacy acquired much of its appeal on the basis of a false narrative surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962—that John F. Kennedy’s readiness to go to war was what forced Khrushchev’s retreat from Cuba. In fact, a crucial factor in ending the crisis was JFK’s back-channel offer to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey, which were useful only as first strike weapons and which Khrushchev had been demanding. As George later observed, enthusiasts of coercive diplomacy had ignored the fact that success in resolving a crisis may “require genuine concessions to the opponent as part of a quid pro quo that secures one’s essential demands.”

The missile crisis occurred, of course, at a time when the United States had overwhelming strategic dominance over the Soviet Union. The post-Cold War period has presented an entirely different setting for its practice, in which both Iran and North Korea have acquired conventional weapons systems that could deter a U.S. air attack on either one.

Why Clinton and Bush Failed on North Korea

The great irony of the U.S. coercive diplomacy applied to Iran and North Korea is that it was all completely unnecessary. Both states were ready to negotiate agreements with the United States that would have provided assurances against nuclear weapons in return for U.S. concession to their own most vital security interests. North Korea began exploiting its nuclear program in the early 1990s in order to reach a broader security agreement with Washington. Iran, which was well aware of the North Korean negotiating strategy, began in private conversations in 2003 to cite the stockpile of enriched uranium it expected to acquire as bargaining chips to be used in negotiations with the United States and/or its European allies.

But those diplomatic strategies were frustrated by the long-standing attraction of the national security elite to the coercive diplomacy but also the bureaucratic interests of the Pentagon and CIA, newly bereft of the Soviet adversary that had kept their budgets afloat during the Cold War. In Disarming Strangers, the most authoritative account of Clinton administration policy, author and former State Department official Leon Sigal observes: “The North Korean threat was essential to the armed services’ rationale for holding the line on the budget,” which revolved around “a demanding and dubious requirement to meet two major contingencies, one shortly after the other, in the Persian Gulf and Korea.”

The Clinton administration briefly tried coercive diplomacy in mid-1994. Secretary of Defense William Perry prepared a plan for a U.S. air attack on the DPRK Plutonium reactor after North Korea had shut it down and removed the fuel rods, but would not agree to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to determine how many bombs- worth of Plutonium, if any, had been removed in the past. But before the strategy could be put into operation, former President Jimmy Carter informed the White House that Kim Il-sung had agreed to give up his plutonium program as part of a larger deal.

The Carter-Kim initiative, based on traditional diplomacy, led within a few months to the “Agreed Framework”, which could have transformed the security situation on the Korean Peninsula. But that agreement was much less than it may have seemed. In order to succeed in denuclearizing North Korea, the Clinton administration would have been required to deal seriously with North Korean demands for a fundamental change in bilateral relations between the two countries, ending the state of overt U.S. enmity toward Pyongyang.

U.S. diplomats knew, however, that the Pentagon was not willing to entertain any such fundamental change. They were expecting to be able to spin out the process of implementation for years, anticipating the Kim regime would collapse from mass starvation before the U.S. would be called upon to alter its policy toward North Korea.

The Bush administration, too, was unable to carry out a strategy of coercive diplomacy toward Iran and North Korea over their nuclear and missile programs because its priority was the occupation of Iraq, which bogged down the U.S. military and ruled out further adventures. Its only coercive effort was a huge March 2007 Persian Gulf naval exercise that involved two naval task forces, a dozen warships, and 100 aircraft. But it was aimed not at coercing Iran to abandon its nuclear program, but at gaining “leverage” over Iran in regard to Iran’s role in the Iraq War itself.

On nuclear and missile programs, the administration had to content itself with the highly subjective assumption that the regimes in both Iran and North Korea would both be overthrown within a relatively few years. Meanwhile, however, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose primary interest was funding and deploying a very expensive national missile defense system, killed the unfinished Clinton agreement with North Korea. And after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice got Bush’s approval to negotiate a new agreement with Pyongyang, Cheney sabotaged that one as well. Significantly no one in the Bush administration made any effort to negotiate with North Korea on its missile program.

Obama Whiffs on Iran and North Korea

Unlike the Bush administration, the Obama administration pursued a carefully planned strategy of coercive diplomacy strategy toward Iran. Although Obama sent a message to Supreme Leader Khamenei of Iran offering talks “without preconditions,” he had earlier approved far-reaching new economic sanctions against Iran. And in his first days in office he had ordered history’s first state-sponsored cyber-attack targeting Iran’s enrichment facility at Natanz.

Although Obama did not make any serious efforts to threaten Iran’s nuclear targets directly in a military attack, he did exploit the Netanyahu government’s threat to attack those facilities. That was the real objective of Obama’s adoption of a new “nuclear posture” that included the option of a first use of nuclear weapons against Iran if it were to use conventional force against an ally. In the clearest expression of Obama’s coercive strategy, in early 2012 Defense Secretary Leon Panetta suggested to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius that the Iranians could convince the U.S. that its nuclear program was for civilian purposes or face the threat of an Israeli attack or an escalation of covert U.S. actions against the Iranian nuclear program.

In his second term, Obama abandoned the elaborate multilayered coercive diplomacy strategy, which had proven a complete failure, and made significant U.S. diplomatic concessions to Iran’s interests to secure the final nuclear deal of July 2015. In keeping with coercive diplomacy, however, the conflict over fundamental U.S. and Iranian policies and interests in the Middle East remained outside the realm of bilateral negotiations.

On North Korea, the Obama administration was even more hostile to genuine diplomacy than Bush. In his account of Obama’s Asian policy, Obama’s special assistant, Jeffrey Bader, describes a meeting of the National Security Council in March 2009 at which Obama declared that he wanted to break “the cycle of provocation, extortion and reward” that previous administrations had tolerated over 15 years. That description, which could have come from the lips of Dick Cheney himself, not only misrepresented what little negotiation had taken place with Pyongyang, but implied that any concessions to North Korea in return for its sacrifice of nuclear or missile programs represented abject appeasement.

It should be no surprise, therefore, that Obama did nothing at all, to head off a nuclear-armed North Korean ICBM, even though former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter acknowledged to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last November, “We knew that it was a possibility six or seven years ago.” In fact, he admitted, the administration had not really tried to test North Korean intentions diplomatically, because “we’re not in a frame of mind to give much in the way or rewards.” The former Pentagon chief opined that no diplomatic concession could be made to North Korea’s security interests “as long as they have nuclear weapons.”

The Obama administration was thus demanding unilateral concession by North Korea on matters involving vital interests of the regime that Washington certainly understood by then could not be obtained without significant concessions to North Korea’s security interests. As Carter freely admits, they knew exactly what the consequences of that policy were in terms of North Korea’s likely achievement of an ICBM.

This brief overview of the role of coercive diplomacy in post-Cold War policy suggests that the concept has devolved into convenient political cover for maintaining the same old Cold War policies and military posture regarding Iran and North Korea, despite new and essentially unnecessary costs to U.S. security interests. The United States could have and should have reached new accommodations with its regional adversaries, just as it had with the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War. To do so, however, would have put at risk Pentagon and CIA budgetary interests worth potentially hundreds of billions of dollars as well as symbolic power and status.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare was published in 2014.

January 17, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

How Russophobia wrecked normalization between US & Russia

By Finian Cunningham | RT | January 16, 2018

It’s a glaring contradiction that while US President Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced a desire for restoring friendly relations with Russia, the two countries stand even more frigidly apart than ever.

One year after Trump’s inauguration as the 45th US president, several metrics indicate bilateral ties have actually deteriorated, despite Trump’s oft-stated approval for better relations between Washington and Moscow.

Trump has said US cooperation with Russia should be seen as “an asset, not a liability.” Many people around the world, including within the US, would agree with Trump’s view. So, why the inertia in translating this into practical policy?

Not merely inertia, but in fact the opposite direction. The seizure of Russian diplomatic properties in the US, restrictions on Russian news organizations, and expanding sanctions on Russian business leaders are just some of the issues indicating growing hostility from Washington. Naturally, Russia has responded with its own countermeasures, which in turn exacerbates the antagonism.

The Trump administration’s green-lighting of lethal weapons supply to the Kiev regime in Ukraine regardless of Moscow’s appeals, and the emerging policy of Balkanizing Syria under a continuing American military presence in that country – again in contradiction to Moscow’s concerns – are more evidence of deteriorating relations.

While Trump was elected in November 2016 on a platform that included a reset from the antagonistic policy towards Russia under Democratic President Barack Obama – a policy Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was also advocating – the upshot has been a continuation of hostility under Trump.

This raises troubling questions about the limits of presidential power to exert avowed policies.

One of the levers of control over the Trump White House has been the relentless “Russiagate scandal.” Trump’s domestic political enemies within the intelligence establishment, Democrat politicians and aligned news media outlets have drowned out public discourse with endless – and baseless – claims that Trump benefited from alleged Russian interference in the presidential election.

Trump has feistily brushed off these claims as “fake news.” Nevertheless, the saturated media insinuations of Trump as a “Kremlin stooge” have inevitably hampered his options for bilateral relations with Russia.

When Trump first met Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Hamburg last July, both leaders greeted each other cordially. That caused cynical comments in US media of Trump being “played by Putin.”

They agreed to bring the Syrian war to a rapid close and to work together to implement a negotiated resolution of the Ukraine conflict. But US policy has since become even more menacing in Syria, with the recent announcement that it is forming a 30,000-member Border Security Force (BSF). That development prompted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov this week to say that he believes Washington is now intending to break up Syrian territorial integrity.

Then when Trump met Putin for a second time at the APEC summit hosted by the Philippines during November, the two presidents’ encounter was strangely crimped from a bilateral meeting to a glancing conversation on the sidelines of the event. News images showed Trump and Putin still enjoyed a cordial relationship. Trump also said then he accepted Putin’s assurances that Russia had not meddled in American domestic politics. Why the constraint then on having a bilateral meeting?

Moreover, a month later, Trump signed off on a new National Security Strategy document in December which explicitly accused Russia of using “subversive tactics” and “interfering in the domestic political affairs of countries around the world.”

The document, which Trump endorsed with his signature, went on to state: “The United States and Europe will work together to counter Russian subversion and aggression.”

Moscow has consistently responded with disdain to all such claims, pointing out the lack of evidence, and that the claims amount to a “frenzy of Russophobia.” Russia has admonished that this is damaging the prospect of restoring relations.

What is lamentable is that even though the Russophobia is at the level of baseless hysteria and wantonly irrational, it has had the palpable effect of negating any attempt to restore US-Russia relations to a more sane footing.

The “Russiagate scandal” can be ridiculed as a contrived drama that keeps running and running. It may be dismissed with contempt as a load of hogwash whipped by Trump’s political enemies within the US foreign policy establishment. But the disturbing thing is that the Russophobia has succeeded in controlling the White House.

Top Russian diplomat Lavrov this week reviewed priority foreign policy issues. They included establishing a peaceful end to the wars in Syria and Ukraine, as well as creating a peaceful settlement to the Korean nuclear crisis.

President Trump, from his brief personal meetings so far with Putin and Lavrov – the latter hosted in the White House – surely appears disposed to work with Moscow in addressing the foreign policy problems in a constructive bilateral manner. That is, in theory.

Regrettably, however, such cooperation between the American and Russian leaders will not be permitted to happen because of the Russiagate specter that has been conjured up over the Trump administration.

Hence, pressing global security concerns that would benefit from US-Russia cooperative dialogue are being jeopardized by the deepening, irrational chill in relations.

The baleful effect of this anti-Russian paranoia was illustrated in an article published last week by the Daily Beast. It was reported that a member of Trump’s National Security Council proposed early in the new presidency last year that the US should scale back its military forces in the Baltic countries.

Russia has long complained that the buildup of US-led NATO forces on its European borders is a provocative threat to its national security.

The idea of repositioning US troops from the Baltic was pitched as a “gesture to the Kremlin that would enable the nascent Trump administration to see its desire for friendly relations with Russia would be reciprocated.”

Apparently, the proposal was quickly rebuffed out of concern about how it would fuel US media claims of Trump being a Russian puppet.

Another idea that was similarly rejected was the lifting of US sanctions on Russia’s economy.

The Daily Beast goes on to make the pejorative editorial comment that the floated proposals “fit a pattern within the Trump administration… of sidling up to Russia. Taken in sum, the pattern raises questions about whether Trump and his team are willing to pay Russia back for the Kremlin’s role in the [presidential] election.”

Note how the article asserts as fact the dubious speculation about Russia interfering in US politics.

Reportedly the proposals for trying to restore relations with Russia have since dried up within Trump’s National Security Council.

Indeed, the NSC official named as the originator of the ideas – Kevin Harrington – is understood to have led the team that produced the hawkish National Security Strategy published at the end of last year.

Thus, from reasonable proposals to engage with Russia floated at the start of Trump’s first year in office, within 12 months the administration has absorbed and adopted the Russophobia narrative.

Anti-Russian group think espoused by US elites has become institutionalized, against the stated views of the president and the American electorate. Where’s the democracy in that?

READ MORE:

Senate probe expanded to anyone ‘of Russian descent or nationality’ – email

January 16, 2018 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

New US Nuclear Posture Review to Bury Arms Control

By Alex GORKA | Strategic Culture Foundation | 16.01.2018

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) will be released soon. No significant changes should be expected, as there is little time left until it is officially made public. This is a document of great importance. It is coming out just as arms control is on the verge of disintegration. The draft review was published by HuffPost.

America is planning to upgrade its entire nuclear arsenal. It will replace warheads and modernize its command-and-control systems in order to stay at the “head of the pack.” The potential nuclear scenarios include responding to a “significant non-nuclear strategic attack” that would result in large-scale casualties or target key components of US infrastructure. For comparison, the 2010 review stated that nuclear weapons could be used in “extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.” No nuclear arms can be used against non-nuclear countries that comply with their non-proliferation obligations. And with only a little stretch of the imagination a “significant non-nuclear strategic attack” could mean anything. Many scenarios might fall into this category. As one can see, the first-use constraints are going to be relaxed. The 2010 review also opted not to develop new warheads. It did not anticipate any new missions or capabilities. In a major policy shift, the new draft document does away with these restrictions.

The 2018 draft review includes a low-yield warhead developed especially for sea-based strategic nuclear missiles. The warhead will include the trigger. The thermonuclear part of the two-stage warhead will be removed. The idea is that submarine-based weapons will serve as the means to “deter” Russia in Europe.

Actually, the plan has been under consideration for some time. Those who follow the latest developments on this topic remember the statement made by Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last August. The official praised the idea of incorporating low-yield warheads into the designs of strategic missiles.

Does the United States really need new weapons to deter Russia, a program that will require  a lot of money, time, and effort? What about the low-yield nuclear weapons already in its inventory, such as tactical bombs and air-launched cruise missiles? Are they not enough?

Actually, the only advantage of an SLBM-launched low-yield warhead is its ability to penetrate Russia’s S-400 and S-300V4 theater air-defense systems. They can intercept targets moving at 4,800 or 4,500 meters per second or intermediate-range missiles launched from a distance of about 2,500–3,500 kilometers. But the systems cannot hit a Trident SLBM until Russia’s S-500 air-defense system is operational.

Low-yield warheads will be seen as more usable, lowering the nuclear threshold. The idea of producing new Trident warheads has made headlines, but there is another element to the 2018 review that is even more detrimental for arms control and global stability.

Retired from service in 2013, the Tomahawk TLAM-N, intermediate-range, nuclear-tipped, sea-based cruise missile with variable yield warheads (5 to 150 kt), designed to strike ground targets from a distance of 2,500 km, is to be brought back. Its W80 nuclear warhead is to be upgraded and installed on new LRSO missiles that will be developed sometime after 2025.

The return of the TLAM-N is a highly provocative act. It requires little time to reinstall  these weapons on ships and submarines. There is no way for Russia to know if a shipborne missile is nuclear-tipped or not. The possibility of a retaliatory nuclear strike will greatly increase. The return of the TLAM-N will mean the end of the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs). Those executive orders made it possible to achieve a spectacular breakthrough without binding documents. In 1991, the leaders of the US and the Soviet Union made reciprocal unilateral pledges to significantly limit and reduce their tactical nuclear arms. All non-strategic nuclear weapons were removed from surface ships and multipurpose submarines and the sea has been free of them ever since. Now the US is going to make the PNIs a thing of the past and abruptly extend the arms race into this new domain.

A US ship launching a TLAM-N from the Baltic, Mediterranean, or Black Seas becomes a strategic weapon aimed at Russia. It makes no difference if a nuclear strike is delivered by an ICBM or a shipborne long-range cruise missile. Russia will respond, putting nuclear warheads on Kalibr sea-based cruise missiles and sending guided missile ships and submarines to patrol North American waters, ready for a retaliatory strike. The idea of resurrecting TLAM-N missiles undermines the entire arms-control regime. Sea-launched weapons cannot be regulated. There is no way to verify whether shipborne cruise missiles are nuclear or not. With the TLAM-N back in service, all the work to control nuclear arms will go down the drain. That’s where the real threat to global stability is coming from.

January 16, 2018 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Amnesty International Is Barking Up The Wrong Tree

By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | January 15, 2108

I have received a letter from Margaret Huang, Amnesty International’s executive director. She is fundraising on the basis of President Trump’s “chilling disregard for our cherished human rights” and his exploitation of “hatred, misogyny, racism and xenophobia,” by which he has “emboldened and empowered the most violent segments of our society.”

Considering the hostility of Identity Politics toward Trump, one can understand why Ms. Huang frames her fundraiser in this way, but are the Trump deplorables the most empowered and violent segments of our society or is it the security agencies, the police, the neoconservatives, the presstitute media, and the Republican and Democratic parties?

John Kiriakou, Ray McGovern, Philip Giraldi, Edward Snowden, and others inform us that it is their former employers, the security agencies, that are empowered by unaccountability and violent by intent. Certainly the security agencies are emboldened by everything they have gotten away with, including their conspiracy to destroy President Trump with their orchestration known as Russiagate.

The violence that the US government has committed against humanity since the Clinton regime attacked Serbia was not committed by Trump deplorables. The violence that has destroyed in whole or part eight countries, murdering, maiming, and displacing millions of peoples, was committed by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes, their secretaries of state such as Hillary Clinton, their national security advisers, their military and security establishments, both parties in Congress. The murder of entire countries was endorsed by the presstitute media and the heads of state of Washington’s European, Canadian, Australian, and Japanese vassals. Trump and his deplorables have a long way to go to match this record of violence.

Whether she understands it or not, Ms. Huang with her letter is shifting the violence from where it belongs to where it does not. The consequence will be to increase violence and human rights violations.

The most dangerous source of violence that we face is nuclear Armageddon resulting from the neoconservative quest for US hegemony. Since the Clinton regime every US government has broken tension-easing agreements that previous administrations had achieved with Moscow. During the Obama regime the gratuitous aggressions and false accusations against Russia became extreme.

Why doesn’t Amnesty International address the reckless and irresponsible acts of the US government that are violating the rights of people in numerous countries and pushing the world into nuclear war? Instead, there have been times when Amnesty International aligns with Washington’s propaganda against Washington’s victims.

By jumping on the military/security complex’s get Trump movement, human rights and environmental organizations have increased the likelihood that rights and environment will be lost to war.

There can be no doubt that Trump is undoing past environmental protections and opening the environment and wildlife to more destruction. However, the worst destruction comes from war, especially nuclear war.

Would things be different if the liberal/progressive/left had rallied to Trump’s support in reducing tensions with Russia, in normalizing the hostile relations that Obama had established with Moscow? Would the support of the liberal/progressive/left have helped Trump resist the pressures from the neoconservative warmongers? In exchange for support for his principal goal, would Trump have mitigated industry’s attacks on the environment and vetoed the renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that violates human rights?

We will never know, because the liberal/progressive/left could not see beyond the end ot its nose to comprehend what it means for the environment and for human rights for nuclear powers to be locked into mutual suspicion.

Thanks to the failure of the liberal/progressive/left and to the presstitute media to understand the stakes, the military/security complex has been successful in pushing Trump off his agenda. The damage that a mining company and offshore drilling can do to the environment is large, but it pales in comparison to the damage from nuclear weapons.

January 16, 2018 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Big Guns, Better Chow, and More US-NATO Aggression

By Brian CLOUGHLEY | Strategic Culture Foundation | 16.01.2018

A headline in the US military magazine Stars and Stripes last September was eye-catching. It told readers that there were “Big guns, better chow for US soldiers on Russia deterrence mission” in Lithuania. Apparently the guns and chow were provided for the “500 173rd Airborne Brigade soldiers that swooped into the Baltics this month on a mission to deter Russian aggression.”

Then the UK’s Observer newspaper informed us that “US Special Forces have been deployed close to the border with Russia as part of a ‘persistent’ presence of American troops in the Baltics. Dozens of special ops soldiers are being stationed along Europe’s eastern flank to reassure NATO allies Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The move will also allow the US to monitor Russian manoeuvres amid fears of further destabilisation following its annexation of Crimea in 2014… US special operations forces will complement around 4,000 NATO troops posted to Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia in the coming months.”

It was noted by Nick Turse on January 9 that “for the past two years the US has maintained a Special Operations contingent in almost every nation on Russia’s western border. As Special Operations Command chief General Raymond Thomas put it last year, ‘We’ve had persistent presence in every country — every NATO country and others on the border with Russia doing phenomenal things with our allies, helping them prepare for their threats.”

What threats? What Russian aggression? What destabilisation? Russia has never threatened any Baltic State and there is not the slightest piece of evidence that Russia wants to invade Lithuania. Their trade balance is that Russia imports total $2.5 billion a year from Lithuania and exports are $3.3 billion and it is in the best interests of both countries to expand this mutually beneficial arrangement, although it seems a trifle strange that although Lithuania’s exports declined by 2.5 per cent in 2016, this was in part “explained by the drop in exports of oil products (due to American competition).”

But all US and most European mainstream media claim that when the majority of the citizens of Crimea voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia, this was somehow evidence of Russian aggression, extending to the Baltic.

As the BBC reported in March 2014, “voters were asked whether they wanted to join Russia, or have greater autonomy within Ukraine” and made their preference clear. In the period between the US-inspired coup in Ukraine and the vote to rejoin Russia there was not a single case of bloodshed in Crimea. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was asked by the government of Crimea to send representatives to monitor the referendum but refused to do so.

There were energetic attempts in the West to paint the post-accession treatment of Ukrainians in Crimea as harsh, but even the ultra-right-wing UK Daily Telegraph reported that “Like many of the Ukrainian servicemen in Crimea, the 600-strong marine battalion in Feodosia has strong local links. Many of the men are either local recruits or have served here so long they have put down roots. Only about 140 of the 600-strong battalion stationed here are expected to return to Ukraine. The remainder, with local family and friends, have opted to remain in Crimea — the land they call home.”

Exactly a year after the referendum Forbes noted that “… the Crimeans are happy right where they are . . . poll after poll shows that the locals there — be they Ukrainians, ethnic Russians or Tatars — are mostly all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine… Despite huge efforts on the part of Kiev, Brussels, Washington and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the bulk of humanity living on the Black Sea peninsula believe the referendum to secede from Ukraine was legit.” Not much evidence of Russian aggression there — but a great deal of evidence of Western interference aimed at destabilising the region.

The US-NATO military alliance, the Brussels-Washington nexus mentioned by Forbes, refuses to believe that the citizens of the Peninsula are content or that Russia has no desire to “annex” any territory. As Stars and Stripes informs us, the big guns and better chow for US soldiers sent to Russia’s border are “part of Operation Atlantic Resolve, the United States’ commitment to deter aggression in Europe in response to Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.” The drumbeat of “annexation” is continuous and as with many propaganda campaigns has succeeded because Western media seldom permit publication of even-handed accounts of what actually happened. The Psyops campaign directors are guided by the old saying that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”, which is wrongly attributed to Josef Goebbels but spot on for accuracy.

In February 2015 the Washington Times and the UK’s Daily Mail published an objective piece by Steven Hurst of Associated Press in which he stated that “Since the Soviet collapse [the US-NATO military alliance] — as Moscow had feared — has spread eastward, expanding along a line from Estonia in the north to Romania and Bulgaria in the south. The Kremlin claims it had Western assurances that would not happen. Now, Moscow’s only buffers to a complete NATO encirclement on its western border are Finland, Belarus and Ukraine. The Kremlin would not have to be paranoid to look at that map with concern.”

Steven Hurst, it should be noted, is an “AP international political writer [who] reported from Moscow for 12 years and has covered international relations for 33 years.” No Western mainstream media published his piece of balanced analysis. Well, they wouldn’t would they? — it didn’t fit with the propaganda line.

After the Warsaw Pact disbanded in March 1991 the US-NATO military alliance, although deprived of any reason to continue in existence not only kept going but in 1999 added Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to its then 16 members. As the BBC noted, these countries became “the first former Soviet bloc states to join NATO, taking the alliance’s borders some 400 miles towards Russia.”

NATO continued to expand around Russia’s borders, with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joining in 2004. As President Putin observed in an interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera in 2015, “we are not expanding anywhere; it is NATO infrastructure, including military infrastructure, that is moving towards our borders. Is this a manifestation of our aggression?”

But US Big Guns and Better Chow will continue to surge against Russia’s borders, as the US-NATO alliance continues its confrontation. Russia will have to remain militarily alert for the foreseeable future, until saner councils prevail in the West’s military-industrial complex.

January 16, 2018 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Denmark wants huge hike in military budget ‘to deter Russia’

Press TV – January 16, 2018

The Danish government aims to increase its military spending to counter an alleged security threat from Russia in Eastern Europe.

During a visit to the Danish Air Force team in Lithuania on Monday, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said his center-right minority government needed to persuade the Danish parliament next month to back a proposed, whopping 20-percent hike in Denmark’s military budget over a five-year period.

“We want to look at ourselves as a core NATO member. And in order to behave like such a member, we need to increase our expenditures,” Rasmussen said.

An agreement made in 2006 calls on NATO member countries to have a military spending of at least two percent of their GDP. While many members of the military alliance have refused to allocate that percentage of their GDP to the military, some have recently been invoking the agreement in an ostensible attempt to deter Russia.

The Danish prime minister said his country’s military budget needed a “substantial increase.”

“Five years ago we thought that the defense line, so to speak, would not be in Europe, but would be international operations. Now we realize that we need to have the capability to do both,” he added.

The brandishing of a “Russian threat” comes while NATO member states have significantly increased their military activities near Russia’s western borders in recent years.

Last week, Denmark deployed 200 troops to a UK-led NATO mission in Estonia, citing the alleged threat from Russia. NATO has deployed around 4,000 troops, consisting of four battle groups, to Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland — all near Russian borders — in recent years.

Russia, realizing that security threat under its nose, has held several military drills to maintain preparedness. The NATO countries have then referred to those drills as signs that Russia has aggressive and not defensive intentions.

NATO — largely made up of Western European countries — also accuses Russia of having a hand in the crisis in Ukraine, which Moscow denies.

Eastern Ukraine has been the site of a conflict since 2014, when the government in Kiev started a crackdown on pro-Russia protests in the country. Earlier that same year, the Crimean Peninsula, then Ukrainian territory, voted in a referendum to separate from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. Western countries branded the subsequent unification as an “annexation” of the territory by Russia, and Ukraine soon confronted pro-Russia protests elsewhere — in its eastern Donbass region — with a heavy hand.

The crisis in the Donbass soon turned into an armed conflict, which has so far left over 10,000 people dead and more than a million others displaced. Western countries have blamed Russia, which denies any involvement.

“Russia’s behavior has created an unpredictable and unstable security environment in the Baltic Sea region,” Lokke Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, said at a joint news conference with Latvian Prime Minister Maris Kucinskis in the capital, Riga.

“Given the Russian aggression and what happened in Crimea, I think we simply have to be realistic about things and invest more in our security,” he said.

January 16, 2018 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

US missile systems in Japan may have offensive purpose & be controlled by Washington – Moscow

RT | January 15, 2018

The US-made Aegis missile-defense system deployed in Japan could be used for offensive purposes and fall under full control of Washington, the Russian foreign minister warns.

The deployment of the American Aegis Combat System, designed to provide defense against short to intermediate-range ballistic missiles, casts a shadow over Russia-Japan relations, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during his annual Q&A on Monday. Moscow has serious concerns over its purpose and who will be behind the operational control of the missile system in Japan. Despite Tokyo’s assertions, Moscow remains unconvinced.

“We have data that the system that will be deployed in Japan is based on universal launchers, which can use assault weapons,” the foreign minister stated. He added that Washington has never given control over its weapons to the country of deployment and this time will be no exception.

“We have heard that it will be Japan that will allegedly operate this system, and the United States will have nothing to do with it, but we have serious doubts that it is so.”

The statement comes on the heels of a report, which states that the stationing of the Aegis system is allegedly aimed at curbing Russia and is intended as a deterrent against its nuclear missiles, Japanese media say, citing an unnamed official.

Last month, Tokyo decided to boost its ballistic missile defense system and approved the purchase and deployment of two Aegis Ashore batteries – expected to become operational by 2023 – at a cost of around $2 billion.

Moscow has repeatedly stressed that it is eager to engage in dialogue over the stationing of US missile defense systems overseas, to make sure they will not “become a serious destabilizer” of the international climate, according to Lavrov. Despite US claims that the weapons are not directed against Russia, Moscow has “plenty of evidence that all this is not so.”

January 15, 2018 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Intra-Korean Talks: Who Got Whom To Blink First?

By Andrew KORYBKO – Oriental Review – 15/01/2018

Intra-Korean talks resumed in the run-up to the PyeongChang Winter Olympics and immediately following Trump’s threatening tweet about his big nuclear button.

The American President claimed in a later tweet that his tough stance was the reason why Kim Jong-Un decided to return to the negotiating table, but the truth is that North Korea did this immediately following news that the US and South Korea delayed a planned military drill until after the upcoming Olympic Games. In hindsight, it’s possible that Trump’s “nuclear brinksmanship” on social media was meant to divert the attention of the global masses from this ‘politically inconvenient’ fact and provide a ‘face-saving’ distraction from a pragmatic move that could have otherwise misleadingly been painted by his opponents as “backing down”.

As it stands, Trump believes that the implementation of his “Madman Theory” in practice is the reason why it was Kim who backed down, not himself, while Kim seems to think that his year of successful nuclear and missile tests was responsible for the US taking the first step in de-escalating the situation by delaying its upcoming military exercises with South Korea. Both sides can brush off any criticism over who blinked first by actually embracing this charge and justifying it on the basis of being in the “Olympic spirit”, thereby turning any potential attack into a soft power advantage if they’re clever enough.

It’s highly likely that this incipient “détente” will only last until the end of the Olympics, if at all, but there’s also the chance that it could provide China with a golden opportunity to make progress in mediating the crisis on the peninsula. Beijing has previously called for a so-called “double freeze”, or the simultaneous suspension of US-South Korean military drills and North Korean nuclear & missile tests, which is actually what in fact has just temporarily happened despite none of the parties openly recognizing this. Depending on the outcome of the intra-Korean talks, South Korean President Moon Jae-In might even feel encouraged to revive last year’s campaign pledge to initiate a “New Sunshine Policy” towards North Korea.

The challenge to this happening has always been the US, which has sought to provoke North Korea over the past year in order to provide South Korea with the ‘plausible pretext’ for shelving this policy and agreeing to more THAAD deployments on the peninsula, so it remains to be seen whether America will ruin the possibly positive progress that both sides might make. Even if it tries to, however, then it’ll be important for North Korea not to take the bait, since this “goodwill gesture” could build enormous trust and confidence in the South Koreans and show them that Pyongyang is serious about abiding by China’s “double freeze”, which could conceivably enter into effect so long as Seoul is convinced to continue delaying military drills with the US or outright suspending them like Beijing proposed.

To revisit the analysis’ original question, it can be argued in conclusion that neither Trump nor Kim backed down in paving the way for the intra-Korean talks, but that both have an interest in making it seem like their rival was the one who did, though the ultimate judge of character will be in seeing which of the two subverts the “Olympic spirit” either during the games or afterwards in returning to the status quo of much-ballyhooed rhetorical hostility.

The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday Jan 12, 2018.

January 15, 2018 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

US Army awards Sikorsky to supply 17 Black Hawk helicopters to Saudi

Press TV – January 13, 2018

The US Army has awarded Sikorsky, a leading American aircraft manufacturer based in Connecticut, a contract worth nearly $200 million to supply 17 Black Hawk helicopters to Saudi Arabia.

The terms of the “firm-fixed-price” agreement between the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, and the army were announced Thursday by the Department of Defense.

Saudi Arabia is expected to receive eight UH-60Ms for the kingdom’s National Guard, while the other nine helicopters will go to the Royal special security forces.

The UH-60M Black Hawk, a medium-lift, rotary-wing helicopter, has been in use by military forces around the world since it was first introduced in 1979.

It has multi-mission capabilities and can be used in combat search-and-rescue, airborne assault, command-and-control, medical evacuation, search-and-rescue, disaster relief and fire-fighting.

Sikorsky will begin work under the $193.8 million deal to manufacture the helicopters with an estimated completion date of the end of 2022.

The deal comes as the US is under pressure to suspend its arms sales to the Saudi regime, which has been waging a deadly military aggression against Yemen since 2015.

At least 13,600 people have been killed since the start of the war.

During his first trip to Saudi Arabia last year, President Donald Trump signed a $110 billion arms deal with the Saudis, with options to sell up to $350 billion over a decade.

Facilitated by Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, the massive package includes missiles, bombs, armored personnel carriers, combat ships, terminal high altitude area defense (THAAD) missile systems and munitions.

The announcement generated backlash in Congress, with Republican Senator Rand Paul promising to work to block at least parts of the package.

The Trump administration is looking to loosen restrictions on American arms sales to boost the country’s weapons industry.

The move seeks to ease export rules for military equipment “from fighter jets and drones to warships and artillery,” according to officials familiar with the plan.

January 13, 2018 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Trump’s craving for more nukes a ‘rip off’ that only benefits military industrial complex

RT | January 13, 2018

The Trump administration’s blueprint for building more nuclear warheads to contain “strategic competitors” is a “rip-off” that only benefits manufacturers, not the American people, foreign policy analyst Robert Naiman told RT.

The plan to expand the US low-yield nuclear arsenal, outlined in the draft of the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review leaked to the media, is an “outrageous and foolish” idea that will add nothing to US national security, argues Robert Naiman, policy director at Just Foreign Policy and president of the Truth Out organization.

“The United States has already more than enough nuclear weapons, and the idea of building more is foolish, dangerous and unnecessary and robbery of other priorities,” Naiman told RT. By channeling money into more nukes, Trump betrays his voters, who expected him to focus on infrastructure projects at home, he added.

“He talked about America First, rebuild America, people thought that meant we’re going to fix the roads and the bridges. Nah, we are going to build more nuclear weapons,” Naiman said.

While the nuclear plan is expected to be unveiled by Trump next month, the rather hawkish draft is still in the works and requires congressional approval, Naiman noted. He hopes lawmakers contest it.

Naiman also hopes other countries will not be “so stupid as to take the bait” and allow themselves to be dragged into an expensive new arms race. The funds that would be funneled into the pockets of arms manufacturers are US taxpayer dollars, stolen “under pretext of defending the US,” he stressed.

“Every billion dollars that are spent on nuclear weapons is a theft from education and healthcare and medical advances and roads – things that people need. Things that people need. We can’t eat nuclear weapons, we can’t educate ourselves with nuclear weapons. It’s a rip off.”

Attempts by the Trump administration to justify the nuclear build-up by claiming Russia and China pose a threat to the US do not hold water as “nobody really thinks that any sane person is going to do nuclear weapons in a strategic competition.”

While Russia and China are indeed “strategic competitors” to the US, the “idea that this means we need to produce more nuclear weapons doesn’t follow at all,” Naiman argued. In terms of nuclear deterrence, according to Naiman, it is not the quantity of nuclear weapons that matters, but the mere fact that the country possesses them.

The analyst believes it will be weapons manufacturers who will be the primary beneficiaries of the shift in nuclear policy, which is “not in the interest of the world” and “not in the interest of the majority of people in the United States.”

“The huge driver of this is the Pentagon industrial complex. Pentagon contractors are going to make money off producing nuclear weapons,” Naiman said, stressing that “parochial interests” of certain military industry players might be behind the overhaul. “We are not going to be more safe if we spend money on weapons that we don’t need.”

January 13, 2018 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Pentagon Seeking New Technologies in Preparation for Space Wars

Sputnik – January 11, 2018

WASHINGTON – The United States is seeking help from 11 unspecified organizations to develop tools and techniques to manage US military operations in outer space, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said in a press release on Wednesday.

“To help ensure future US technological and strategic superiority, DARPA’s Hallmark program seeks to develop revolutionary tools and technologies to plan, assess, and execute US military operations in space,” the release said. “The program has completed initial research and awarded Phase 1 contracts to 11 organizations, which both augment existing commercial technologies and pursue entirely new capabilities.”

DARPA described Hallmark’s Phase 1 as one of the first instances of using “cognitive evaluation” to develop tools for U.S. military command and control in space.

Cognitive evaluation, the release explained, refers to tool-and-task combinations that quickly convey information, thereby enhancing real-time decision making.

Recently a new report revealed, that the latest version of the US’ fiscal year 2018 appropriations bill already designates more funding to a space-based ballistic missile defense capability, which includes developing a sensor layer to detect incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles as well as an interceptor to neutralize threats.

January 11, 2018 Posted by | Militarism | | Leave a comment

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