At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.
“Together We Are Wrong” — by Mr. Fish
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost.com
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America Africa and Asia.
NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden.
It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes.
It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called Asia Pacific Four, to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq.
Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes — including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp and chemical weapons use —in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.
It is quite a record for a military alliance that with the collapse of the Soviet Union was rendered obsolete and should have been dismantled. NATO and the militarists had no intention of embracing the “peace dividend,” fostering a world based on diplomacy, a respect of spheres of influence and mutual cooperation. It was determined to stay in business. Its business is war. That meant expanding its war machine far beyond the border of Europe and engaging in ceaseless antagonism toward China and Russia.
NATO sees the future, as detailed in its “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict.
“China has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft,” the NATO 2030 initiative warned.
“It has proven its willingness to use force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience, safeguard critical infrastructure, address new and emerging technologies such as 5G and protect sensitive sectors of the economy including supply chains. Longer term, China is increasingly likely to project military power globally, including potentially in the Euro-Atlantic area.”
Spurned Cold War Strategy
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, with U.S. President Joe Biden on June 30, at the alliance’s summit in Madrid. (NATO)
The alliance has spurned the Cold War strategy that made sure Washington was closer to Moscow and Beijing than Moscow and Beijing were to each other. U.S. and NATO antagonism have turned Russia and China into close allies.
Russia, rich in natural resources, including energy, minerals and grains, and China, a manufacturing and technological behemoth, are a potent combination. NATO no longer distinguishes between the two, announcing in its most recent mission statement that the “deepening strategic partnership” between Russian and China has resulted in “mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order that run counter to our values and interests.”
On July 6, Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, and Ken McCallum, director general of Britain’s MI5, held a joint news conference in London to announce that China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.” They accused China, like Russia, of interfering in U.S. and U.K. elections. Wray warned the business leaders they addressed that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”
This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future.
One cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The political and social turmoil in the U.S., coupled with its diminishing economic power, has led it to embrace NATO and its war machine as the antidote to its decline.
Washington and its European allies are terrified of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meant to connect an economic bloc of roughly 70 nations outside U.S. control.
The initiative includes the construction of rail lines, roads and gas pipelines that will be integrated with Russia. Beijing is expected to commit $1.3 trillion to the BRI by 2027. China, which is on track to become the world’s largest economy within a decade, has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trade pact of 15 East Asian and Pacific nations representing 30 percent of global trade. It already accounts for 28.7 percent of the Global Manufacturing Output, nearly double the 16.8 percent of the U.S.
China’s rate of growth last year was an impressive 8.1 percent, although slowing to around 5 percent this year. By contrast, the U.S.’s growth rate in 2021 was 5.7 percent — its highest since 1984 — but is predicted to fall below 1 percent this year, by the New York Federal Reserve.
June 8, 2018: Chinese President Xi Jinping welcoming Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state visit. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
If China, Russia, Iran, India and other nations free themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network financial institutions use to send and receive information such as money transfer instructions, it will trigger a dramatic decline in the value of the dollar and a financial collapse in the U.S.
The huge military expenditures, which have driven the U.S. debt to $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire GDP, will become untenable. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. The U.S. spent more on the military in 2021, $801 billion which amounted to 38 percent of total world expenditure on the military, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.
The loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will force the U.S. to slash spending, shutter many of its 800 military bases overseas and cope with the inevitable social and political upheavals triggered by economic collapse. It is darkly ironic that NATO has accelerated this possibility.
Russia, in the eyes of NATO and U.S. strategists, is the appetizer. Its military, NATO hopes, will get bogged down and degraded in Ukraine. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation, the plan goes, will thrust Vladimir Putin from power. A client regime that will do U.S. bidding will be installed in Moscow.
NATO has provided more than $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine, while the US has committed nearly $54 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to the country.
China, however, is the main course. Unable to compete economically, the U.S. and NATO have turned to the blunt instrument of war to cripple their global competitor.
Provocation of China
The provocation of China replicates the NATO baiting of Russia.
NATO expansion and the 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Kiev led Russia to first occupy Crimea, in eastern Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population, and then to invade all of Ukraine to thwart the country’s efforts to join NATO.
The same dance of death is being played with China over Taiwan, which China considers part of Chinese territory, and with NATO expansion in the Asia Pacific. China flies warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense zone and the U.S. sends naval shipsthrough the Taiwan Strait which connects the South and East China seas.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May called China the most serious long-term challenge to the international order, citing its claims to Taiwan and efforts to dominate the South China Sea. Taiwan’s president, in a Zelensky-like publicity stunt, recently posed with an anti-tank rocket launcher in a government handout photo.
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen is pictured holding a locally-made rocket launcher this morning.
Source: https://t.co/Ly18NmZJfN pic.twitter.com/nnYE6Vtvcd
— Rik Glauert (@RikGlauert) June 2, 2022
The conflict in Ukraine has been a bonanza for the arms industry, which, given the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, needed a new conflict. Lockheed Martin’s stock prices are up 12 percent. Northrop Grumman is up 20 percent. The war is being used by NATO to increase its military presence in Eastern and Central Europe. The U.S. is building a permanent military base in Poland. The 40,000-strong NATO reaction force is being expanded to 300,000 troops. Billions of dollars in weapons are pouring into the region.
The conflict with Russia, however, is already backfiring. The ruble has soared to a seven-year high against the dollar. Europe is barreling towards a recession because of rising oil and gas prices and the fear that Russia could terminate supplies completely. The loss of Russian wheat, fertilizer, gas and oil, due to Western sanctions, is creating havoc in world markets and a humanitarian crisis in Africa and the Middle East. Soaring food and energy prices, along with shortages and crippling inflation, bring with them not only deprivation and hunger, but social upheaval and political instability. The climate emergency, the real existential threat, is being ignored to appease the gods of war.
Threat of Nuclear War
The war makers are frighteningly cavalier about the threat of nuclear war. Putin warned NATO countries that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history” if they intervened directly in Ukraine and ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on heightened alert status.
The proximity to Russia of U.S. nuclear weapons based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey mean that any nuclear conflict would obliterate much of Europe. Russia and the United States control about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, with around 4,000 warheads each in their military stockpiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
U.S. President Joe Biden warned that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences,” without spelling out what those consequences would be. This is what U.S. strategists refer to as “deliberate ambiguity.”
The U.S. military, following its fiascos in the Middle East, has shifted its focus from fighting terrorism and asymmetrical warfare to confronting China and Russia. President Barack Obama’s national-security team in 2016 carried out a war game in which Russia invaded a NATO country in the Baltics and used a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon against NATO forces. Obama officials were split about how to respond.
“The National Security Council’s so-called Principals Committee — including Cabinet officers and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — decided that the United States had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear weapons,” Eric Schlosser writes in The Atlantic.
“Any other type of response, the committee argued, would show a lack of resolve, damage American credibility, and weaken the NATO alliance. Choosing a suitable nuclear target proved difficult, however. Hitting Russia’s invading force would kill innocent civilians in a NATO country. Striking targets inside Russia might escalate the conflict to an all-out nuclear war. In the end, the NSC Principals Committee recommended a nuclear attack on Belarus — a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.”
The Biden administration has formed a Tiger Team of national security officials to run war games on what to do if Russia uses a nuclear weapon, according to The New York Times. The threat of nuclear war is minimized with discussions of “tactical nuclear weapons,” as if less powerful nuclear explosions are somehow more acceptable and won’t lead to the use of bigger bombs.
At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.
“A simulation devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yieldsmore than 90 million casualties in its first few hours,” The New York Times reported.
The longer the war in Ukraine continues — and the U.S. and NATO seem determined to funnel billions of dollars of weapons into the conflict for months if not years — the more the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Flirting with Armageddon to profit the arms industry and carry out the futile quest to reclaim U.S. global hegemony is at best extremely reckless and at worst genocidal.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
Author’s Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waiver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
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Putin has been pressured by globalists to submit or be crushed for years as detailed by Douglas Valentine in CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME, chapter 9. He has more resources than Sir Lanka deplorables, Holland farmers, Canandian truckers.
Putin has been pressured by globalists many years to submit or receive more pressure–as detailed by Douglas Valentine in CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME, chapter 9. He has resources Holland, Ser Lanka, Canadain people
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One Russian submarine, loitering silently and undetectable somewhere off the Atlantic coast of the USA, and another off the Pacific coast. Sixteen missiles in each, with multiple warheads. Boston, New York, Washington, Charlotte, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Nashville, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, Austin, Houston – that’s only 14. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Tuscon, Albuquerque, Denver – that’s another dozen. There’s 6 spare if back-up were needed. The possibility is beyond comprehension. Are US / OTAN war mongers truly this insane?
This article by Chris Hedges has two primary flaws:
First, like many other analysts on all sides it (once again) fails to pay attention to the redefinition of the so-called
“cold war” by Joyce and Gabriel Kolko in their masterpiece “The Limits of Power'(1972). See especially p. 31
and the rest of the book. Hedges like too many others take the common definition of the “cold war” presented
to all of us. I agree with the Kolkos that it simply doesn’t bear careful scrutiny.
Second, nowhere in the his analysis does Hedge name names and give us a clue on just who specifically these
contractors are. We also need information on the amounts of money they are making. William Hartung does
just this in his recent article from Tomdispatch “Fueling the Warfare State” as well as in his classic work
“The Prophets of War.”
It is of the essence that those of us who criticize know precisely whom we are criticizing and the amount of profits
and so forth.
Many thanks as always to Mr. Hedges for sharing his outrage which many of us feel as well.
Chris Hedges last sentence, “Flirting with Armageddon to profit the arms industry and carry out the futile quest to reclaim U.S. global hegemony is at best extremely reckless and at worst genocidal,” says a multitude. It is a simple but true statement, yet carrying with it the most profound and terrifying consequences.
It is incomprehensible that those in power cannot have taken into account the possible endgame of their actions and if so, one can only conclude that insanity prevails in abundance. In other words, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
Never has the Western World so lacked in leadership, at a time when it is so badly needed.
The quality of those attending the recent G7 summit in Germany can be gauged by the “hilarious” childlike banter between those present.
Johnson’s comment, “jackets on, jackets off, can we take our clothes off,”and “we all have to show we are tougher than Putin”, was hailed with bouts of laughter from those present. Trudeau added “bare-chested horseback ride is the thing you’re discussing, right? and Ursula Von Der Leyen added, ‘horse back riding is the best.” We’ve got to show them our pecs,” retorted Johnson.
It is almost impossible to comprehend that the future of our civilisation and survival rests in the hands of such a puerile bunch of reprobates.
Agree Tom. That despicable display of juvenile behaviour by “supposed” leaders representing a nation was indeed nauseating. Boris is gone now. I wonder who we’ll be lumbered with next.
Yes, Tom, I loved that sentence too. Succinct and clear. But my question is, when didn’t the US flirt with Armageddon to profit the elites? You might think this is the “worst” Armageddon, but there have many many of them over my lifetime—I’m 77–each one the “worst”, starting with The Bomb, and the Arms Race, to the felling of the amazon for beef, to Carmageddon and the destruction of the ozone layer to the prison industrial Hillary complex where we lock up everyone who dares decent, wether it be by being black, smoking weed, or just contradicting the power elites…The Us has been on a headlong race to death since the Empire began—and all for the almighty dollar.
How I wish that Chris Hedges and other prominent truth speakers/seekers would sit down with someone like Australian economist and Marxist Bill Mitchell and learn the obvious truths of MMT. In a world of fiat money, the debt of any nation, to be paid off in its own self-created currency, could be paid off immediately at any time. Period.
Inflation is the result of things like shortages of resources or interruptions of supply chains, not the “printing of money” which will obviously be necessary to address pressing human and environmental crises. How often do I read a piece like this one, filled with moral and political truth, only to come across macroeconomic misinformation that detracts from its impact. Damn shame.
Perhaps one should consider and popularize Paraguay Solution. No country that still exists suffered as calamitous destruction as Paraguay in the ” War of the Triple Alliance, a South American war that lasted from 1864 to 1870″. Today Paraguay has the highest military expenditures in South America as the proportion of GDP. However, the security of the country is even more reliably assured by not alienating Brazil and Argentina in the same time AGAIN (with some third country to make it a Triple), and that worked for 150 years so far, with no sign of impending crisis.
The worst thing about NATO is the inbred mind set that searches for enemies and proceeds with attempts to eliminate them, like Libya and Yugoslavia, or attempting to ruin them, like Nicaragua, Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Belarus, Iran, and, the cherry on top, Russia and China. Paraguay Solution is the path not taken. Note the harmless countries on the list, basically the ground for training and amusement of the increasingly voracious and sadistic sanction apparatus.
Of course this mindset is reflected in propaganda, the washes the minds of the populations and elites. Vestiges of common sense are identified and purged, with mopping operations in nooks and crannies of NATOland like Montenegro and North Macedonia.
As Scott Ritter has said, NATO is like a rabid dog.
Humanity is in a new era – one of war not peace. Political and military planners have not worked this into their calculus: assuming the current crisis is simply a re-run of the Cold War, and will end the same way. But the Cold War was an era of peace (or relative peace). What has followed is an age of instability and inability to control the factors that will lead to WW III. Often it is too late when states realize the war the get is the one they are trying to avoid.
If interested in more on this feel free to download my free ebook, search: A free ebook: The Pattern Of History and Fate of Humanity
This article should be on the front page of every western mainstream media newspaper, instead of the endless rhetoric and propaganda about Russian & Chinese expansionism and aggression. People in the west need to understand clearly where the real and bigger threat is coming from.
They need to start thinking properly, independently and critically about what their own governments and politicians are saying and doing. If they could be made to see, just for a few movements, that for nearly every accusation or criticism of Russia & China that is made by western governments – the opposite is true to an extent. The accuser is guilty of the accusation, and the critic of the criticism. It is quite revealing when one starts thinking this way.
Russia and China are understandable drawing closer, and showing noticeable reserve and caution as they recognise the increasing threat. But with the rising levels of Russiaphobia, and the irrational thinking and behaviour of the collective west, it seems far more likely that any nuclear strike will be initiated by NATO (triggered by the US). The inevitable loss of the Ukraine war is going to drive this behaviour even further towards the brink.
The question is whether the few remaining ‘rational’ government & military officials in the US and Europe will have enough influence to prevent a major escalation into nuclear conflict.
You sure are right when you say that many more people need to read the words and ideas presented daily in Consortium News. There are what, 330 million Americans in our population? Yet it’s the same 40 or 50 individuals that post commentary in response to the articles published here every day. That is a pittance compared to the worth of the information that can rarely be obtained anywhere else in the Western world. Articles like this one need to be disseminated by the NYT, WaPo, the Guardian, Daily Mail and other high circulation newspapers, not confined to a small cadre of those who walk the extra mile to seek the truth. Alas, the fact is that those mills of mediocrity go out of THEIR way to hide and obfuscate the truth. They and their readers have eyes but will not see… deliberately! They cultivate willful ignorance, which is no way to end a civilisation… but it will.
“Striking targets inside Russia might escalate the conflict to an all-out nuclear war. In the end, the NSC Principals Committee recommended a nuclear attack on Belarus — a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.”
Logically, that means the only and ultimate guarantee preventing a country from getting nuked, “collaterally” or otherwise, are survivable & deliverable nukes. Looks like North Korea had it right all these decades.
Is this what the powers-that-be behind America imagines for the world? To terrorize everyone to get nukes & missiles and aim them at the US/Western alliance for their own protection?
And people criticize this site as un-American. Perhaps their idea of the ultimate expression of patriotism is to have their charred and radioactive corpses strung out under the soot-covered skies. Definitely sounds like a great idea.
Chris Hedges at his best.
the “deepening strategic partnership” between Russian and China has resulted in “mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order that run counter to our values and interests.”
Just imagine the audacity of anyone attempting to undercut the “rules-based international order” that runs counter to our values and interests. How dare they attempt to undercut rules made up by the U.S. under the guidance of Wall Street and corporate leaders for the express purpose of meeting their profit motivated values and interests.
Sorry, NATO. I have no problem with anyone attempting to undercut rules that tilt the playing field in favor of the rule maker.
Bless you, W.R. Knight
Fact remains that NATO is incapable of actually winning ANY conflict that they have so enthusiastically started, and participated in. Ukraine is the latest example. Short of using nuclear weapons, NATO has no other realistic military power projection – defensive or offensive. It took them 20 years to replace the rag tag Taliban with…the Taliban.
That does not make NATO any less dangerous to world peace and stability. It is clear however, that NATO will not get its way unless they usher in global nuclear Armageddon.
I don’t really think that “winning” has anything to do with NATO backed wars. Instead it is simply a means to get taxpayers to fund replacement weapons. In fact I would argue that a 100 years war with no victor, is definitively preferable to a ‘quick victory’ at least when it comes to military contractors and Big Oil. I also don’t think the corporate America wants to launch a nuclear war, but they would seriously consider it if they thought it were profitable. It is the common accidents that occur which has me worried the most in regards to a nuclear weapon being launched.
FK. It’s nearly too grisly to contemplate. This was done of the moment in response.
Achtung!
Weaponize hunger, weaponize debt,
weaponize whatever you can make into a threat.
Weaponize the atmosphere, weaponize Earth,
weaponize whoever you decide will end up giving birth.
Weaponize the waters, weaponize the seas,
Weaponize the very air that carries your disease.
Weaponize our thoughts, the one against the other.
Weaponize the impulse to call someone our brother.
Weaponize our mothers, our fathers & our priests.
Especially weaponize the ones who already are deceased.
Weaponize the heavens, the hells & in-betweens.
Weaponize whoever shows up to make a scene.
And when the thunder starts to roll, & time has come to kill
And when the grisly edge of doom, looms behind a hill,
Word goes out: on count of three, you’d better pull the trigger
Or you will be the 1st to go, is kind of how we figure.
Independent writers like yourself, and Chris for sure you’re
one of the best of a far too few, have to put responsibility for a
possible nuclear war “genocide” on the American military-industrial
complex, its deep state. Only American militarism used nuclear
weapons (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and the taste of nuclear blood still
resides in its corporate power elite.
Unless authentic journalists place total responsibility for a nuclear
war on U.S. neocon war industry militarists, they will be like the
corporate media blaming Russian or China differing only in particulars,
not in essence.
So what are we going to do about this? How about collecting Robert Reich, Thom Hartman, Robert Scheer, Michael Moore, Greg Palast, Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Scahill and whoever else would be of that ilk to join you to turn you gadflies into a force? We need a voice, and, if you all deliberated on what you would do if you ran the country, everybody would hear you. You could collect us into the Human Survival Party – not a political party but a people’s voice that would figure to be huge.
An immediate thing I’d submit, in the SUGGESTION BOX you’d create, would be something to deal with how separated into camps we are. Any trial or fraud conviction won’t put off Trump’s followers, where we will stay divided even if we get our pounds of flesh, but, instead, how about an intervention? Get Trump to show up on some fabrication and get the Republicans who’ve been testifying against him to sit in a circle with him and read him chapter and verse. For what the country needs, offer him total immunity from all prosecutions to admit he lost and whatever he’d say about that – omg, a Trumpian mea culpa would be something to behold. But he’d be speaking for the good of the country, to unite us. He might love being that kinky hero.
I agree with you Suzanne, but the problem is that our current collection of Democrats and Republicans are so far entrenched into the corporate sphere, that nothing good can come from either party. Instead I think a new Party, like the “Human Survival Party” that you suggested, is what is required to save our species. A new Party would immediately get anyone and everyone who is against the corporate authoritarian government that we all despise, to sign up. However, getting the Party actually on the ballot would require a massive grass roots campaign with a ton of corporate money throw at it all the time attempting to disable any threat to the status quo. The recent “success” of the North Carolina State legislature to exclude the Green Party from the ballot box, is just one recent example of how far corporate America will go to undermine any popular movement.
I also agree with the need to bring the different ‘camps’ together, but surely a simple platform like eliminating corporate influence from the government or guaranteeing universal healthcare should unite so many disenfranchised voters. Americans are dying to ditch the two corporate Party’s, but they need someone else to vote for. Jill Stein was a great choice, but she didn’t have enough support from internet platforms or from grass roots donations to make an impact. Now that Biden and Trump have thoroughly discredited both party’s, we may have a chance to usher in an era of democracy and a government that represents the public interest.
The current power structure in the United States will never allow the acceptance of defeat in this de facto war they have started with Russia. So far, every move by one side is countered with an equivalent escalation by their opponent (or as Russia erroneously called the American regime for far too long: their “partners”). The inevitable end point WILL be thermonuclear war.
Actually, Russia has one option short of that which Washington still lacks. They could devastate the American homeland using hypersonic missiles tipped with thermobaric warheads. This could actually counter Washington’s advantage in having missile batteries mere hundreds of kilometers from Moscow and St. Petersburg. This still produces a stalemate but at least generates casualties short of the tens or hundreds of millions that would die from thermonuclear devices, and might elicit a cease-fire from sane opponents.
Would Washington stop there, with both sides suffering enormous losses but not quite existential defeat? Knowing my own fellow countrymen and the true villains they have somehow allowed to take power in our government, I would say NO. In their mindset, if they cannot have it ALL, neither can anyone else. They would gladly see their fellow citizens immolated in a nuclear conflagration than to sue Russia for peace–even the ones who stupidly voted for them.
The only way to prevent this inevitable outcome is for the current power structure to collapse and be forcibly removed from office, that is a regime change in Washington through some mechanism. That mechanism may ultimately have to be a military coup if no other opportunity presents itself. The most optimal and least damaging would be for most of the legislative branch and the executive to be swept out of office in the next couple of elections and replaced with peace candidates–individuals committed to ending this war no matter who is embarrassed or even prosecuted for war crimes. Most of the heavy hitters certainly deserve such a fate, but they always seem to have the allies and the means to protect their despicable interests. Both the Democratic and Republican parties deserve to be dumped on the ash heap of history. New ones should be formed, with all current D’s or R’s disqualified like the Germans did the Nazis after WWII. But has such a scenario happened ANYWHERE on this planet heretofore? Please apprise us if it has. A coup is more likely, but with the military entrenched in power would they ever give it up? There is actually precedence for that, in fact, it usually happens in South America almost according to a regular cycle. That may be the best we can hope for to continue the human race.
NATO was an afterthought after Winston Churchill made up the Iron Curtain malarkey, and Barney Baruk the ‘Cold War’ baloney at the U.N. Harry Truman under Sec. Wilson, and Byrnes influencing tutaledge kept the New ‘Permanent War Economy’ started at the new Pentagon Bldg. in 1944. Truman had no skill at peace time economy building, just whistle blowing to FDR about war profiteers. He fit right in with the new NSA in 1947, and Mossad-West (CIA) in 1948.
“In the end, the NSC Principals Committee recommended a nuclear attack on Belarus — a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.”
In other words, something along the lines of a nuclear “Rape of Belgium” scenario that the US National Security Council and NATO can only hope does not metastasize into something infinitely more serious, to say nothing of how numerous Baltic citizens whose country remains wholly or partly occupied by Russian troops, alongside other Eastern and Western Europeans, will still be in the direct vicinity of potentially lethal radioctave fallout regardless, given the geographic location of Belarus.