No Cause for Sabre Rattling? Never Mind, They’ll Improvise One
It is fascinating to see how the United States is impaling itself like a butterfly on a military map of the world. In keeping with their traditional WDWTFWP (We-do-whatever-the-fuck-we-please) agenda, they are busy laying the groundwork for wars far from home on opposite sides of the world, and with both of the most notorious cases based on false pretenses. The Ukraine brouhaha has its roots in the American-sponsored ousting of that country’s democratically-elected president in 2014 and the subsequent CIA-fomented “civil war.” Long experience has taught the Gringos that a proxy war is more profitable than fighting yourself.
As for the Taiwan “emergency,” it is due to the Americans’ bad faith in denying a fact that they specifically agreed to in a September 13, 2016 State Department Fact Sheet: Taiwan is legitimately Chinese territory. Both of these conflicts admitted of negotiated solutions at the outset but in both cases the American response was to rush into the breach with–arms deals. For that is largely what all the American sabre rattling is about: the war business.
It’s Not about Winning Wars
We must keep in mind the principal objective of America’s arms-peddling projects. It’s not to win wars–as they have so lavishly demonstrated in every war they have waged since World War II–but to nourish the hyper-bloated balance sheets of the American war industries. War makes for wonderful business.
In the good old days, before Russia’s decisive armament innovations and China’s rise to economic prominence, the United States essentially cornered the market on military hardware. But in recent years they have increasingly been taken by surprise. The Russians’ new S-500 Prometheus surface-to-air /anti-ballistic missile, with a range of around 600 kilometres (370 miles) is about to go online–and on the market. It is effective against intercontinental ballistic missiles, as well as hypersonic cruise missiles and aircraft, and rumor has it, perhaps even satellites. According to The Buzz, a Syria-based S-500 obtained a lock-on on an F-35 on June 20,2021. The S-500 is so superior to its American Patriot counterpart that even US allies–notably Turkey–have placed their order, and India is looking like a potential client.
Russia was also the first country to produce hypersonic missiles that fly at least five times the speed of sound in zig-zag trajectories. The Chinese weren’t far behind, though their hypersonic weapon still requires a bit of tweaking. Last August they flew it on a low trajectory all the way around the world before striking just 19 miles off the target. The hypersonics can allegedly be very effective against aircraft carriers. John Harper writes in National Defense Magazine:
Carrier battle groups include ships equipped with advanced air-and-missile defense systems such as Aegis. But hypersonics pose a unique threat compared to traditional ballistic and cruise missiles, analysts say. Although today’s ballistic missiles can achieve hypersonic speeds, they tend to follow a predictable flight path that is easier to track.
The CSBA report warned that the new missiles would significantly lower or negate the effectiveness of U.S. air defenses even if the carrier strike group were operating as far as 1,000 nautical miles from the launch site. Anti-ship weapons may be able to speed past interceptors, while their flight paths could exploit seams between current high- and low-altitude U.S. air-and-missile defense systems, it explained.
National Defense Magazine
Faced with this daunting new challenge to ships on the high seas, posed by both Russia and China, how does the Pentagon decide to proceed? They are currently programming the construction of three new Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (CVNs)–at something like $13 billion a pop. I am not a naval strategist but I am already asking myself approximately how many hours can those American super carriers be expected to survive in a 21st-century shooting war.
USA–How and Where to Strut Their Stuff
The US currently has 11 nuclear aircraft carriers, more than any other country in the world. They’re also the largest; their total deck area is more that double that of all the rest of the world’s carriers together. Three new ones will bring the total up to 14. Where do they propose to float all these extravagant boats? Let’s look at where are they currently concentrating their naval resources. Curiously, it’s in the Black Sea, which is Russia’s Caribbean, and the South China Sea, whose name speaks for itself. These are purely defensive measures, mind you, not intended in any way as provocations. It’s only as if the Chinese were pacifically strutting their naval power off the coasts of Maryland and California.
All of this armed arrogance is reminiscent of the time after the Second World War when the United States was the undisputed preeminent military power in the world, when most of the rest of the world was flat on its back. But times have changed. It’s as if they haven’t noticed. Or they don’t want to acknowlege the new realities, believing desperately that jacking up the massive “defense” budget every year will save them and their splendid way of life. One is reminded of the mega-nostalgia that Great Britain harbored for the Empire, until it dragged them into Brexit’s blind alley. Today “Great Britain” sounds like a serious misnomer for a chilly, damp, lonely, little island lost in the North Atlantic. Is the United States convinced it should be following the same game plan?
The Waning Power of the Same Old Lies
The Americans’ egregious lying and deception–pages out of a rancid cold-war playbook–quickly evolve into dangerous brinkmanship that places the entire world in jeopardy. Other countries are overtaking the United States on all fronts, and by leaps and bounds. Britain’s eminent China specialist, Martin Jacques, the author of The Post-Western World, commented the other day on The Thinkers’ Forum, that, by the experts’ best estimates, in 2035 the Chinese economy would be double that of the US. That’s just 14 Christmases away.
Meanwhile, the American response to evolving world events is a combination of petulance and nostalgia summed up in the shopworn, “The Russians are coming…” That story may find buyers in Idaho and Mississippi, but it has lost most of its gloss in the real world. What we are seeing these days on the part of the American leadership is panic induced by myopia. They are blinded by the fear of the rising status of both Russia and China. The Yanks being Yanks, the only response they can conceive of is military, the exact worst possible choice.
Neither of their formidable adversaries has spent its time and treasure in the past few decades waging fruitless ideological wars nor surrounding their adversaries with military bases, nor delivering democracy via intelligent drones. China has not saddled itself with the conflicts and complications of religion: no freebooting, down-dumbing megachurches, no private-airliner televangelists, no horny chief executives with racy “spiritual advisors,” no heads of diplomacy bovinely awaiting “the rapture.” China is thus free of politicians at the highest levels of government awaiting–and promoting–an imminent Armageddon, unlike the illuminated American leaders who feel they needn’t bother about solving the problems of the here and now. As they see it, their important work begins after we–and they–are all dead.
Permanent War Is an American Scam
Although there’s no profit in losing wars, the shrewder Americans don’t need victories to make astronomical profits. All they need is for their brilliant communications industry, the greatest creators of public opinion since the New Testament–to sow danger and instability around the world.
They warn of the imminent Russian threat to Europe, the Islamic terrorism threat to the Middle East–and Manhattan–and the wily Chinese threat to the Far East and further afield. It’s an arms peddlar’s paradise out there, and the Americans have been exploiting it adroitly for more than half a century. Every one of those perceived or invented threats to the “Free World” requires its corresponding counterthreat. And that presents one of history’s most lucrative business opportunities. So the wheels of the US arms industry never stop. Never mind that most of these perceived dangers are contrived. In fact, the principal danger is that posed by the Americans themselves, armed to the teeth and led by sociopathic leaders nurtured in a culture of agression, hypocrisy, and deception, while embracing a demented, take-over-the-world agenda. America’s leaders are just as much victims of the prevailing exceptionalist myths as the rest of the country. They went to the same schools.
NATO: Protection Racket, Distribution Center and More
The Americans have been singularly successful selling their world view and all the glittering death toys that accompany it. One of their principal distributors is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an American-engendered military alliance created in 1949 in the wake of the 1947 National Security Act. This enabling legislation opened the doors, a couple of years later, to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), regime-change and black ops specialists, and the National Security Agency (NSA), the world’s foremost wire tapper, signals grabber and hacker. The NSA allegedly has more personnel and a bigger budget than the CIA. Nobody really knows what goes on at the bottom those two murky ponds. What little we do know is thanks to brave and selfless whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Will we ever know all the facts? Not if the US government’s latest foot-dragging on the release of the JFK assassination papers is any indicator.
Though NATO was theoretically created as an anti-communist defensive pact (anti-communism is the magic elixir), it soon became clear that it was much more than that. NATO talking points unceasingly revolved around the imminent danger of Soviet arms and ill intentions, and the fact that NATO nations were dangerously under-armed. Not to worry, the Americans would sell them all the materiel they needed.
NATO began with 12 founding members and has since reached a total of 30, the most recent additions being Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020. The boost in membership was largely thanks to a NATO recruiting campaign among ex-Soviet satellite states after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The principal byproduct of this initiative is a string of NATO (American in essence; NATO’s chief military officer, the supreme Allied commander Europe, has always been an American) bases forming a semicircle around western Russia. NATO maintains that this array of missiles close to the Russian border is a strictly defensive measure. Russia, understandably, does not agree. A report from The Guardian (30 Nov. 2021) features Russian president, Vladimir Putin saying:
“You asked about Ukraine, where are these red lines?” he said in televised remarks during an investment conference. “They are above all in the creation of threats to us which could come from [Ukraine].”
In particular, he warned against the stationing in Ukraine of missile defence systems similar to those in Romania and Poland. Putin claimed they could serve as cover to deploy offensive weapons such as Tomahawk missiles capable of reaching Moscow in minutes.
“We would have to create a similar threat for those who are threatening us,” he said, warning that Russia could deploy hypersonic missiles. “And we can do that already now,” he added.
The Guardian
The frosting on the NATO cake is their terrorist-program-in-Europe initiative that poisoned European politics for decades and may have left some of its operatives on the loose. When it came to light in the Italian courts in 1990 they dubbed it “Operation Gladio.” I wrote a long piece on it in April of 2020.
American Arms Business Not Limited to Europe
American wheeling and dealing in armament is not limited to European countries. The latest succulent operations to surface in the world media are the deals made with Taiwan and Australia. The former is Chinese territory by common agreement since 1971 so that issue settles itself, but Australia? And to the tune of eight nuclear submarines? How do the Americans manage to close these fantasmagoric arms deals and enroll these unlikely allies against shadowy enemies? It’s almost as if the Americans are trying to provoke China to behave as a dangerous enemy.I want to propose a Congressional Medal of Honor for the genius who closed that submarine deal on the Aussies. China is Australia’s most important trading partner–providing a substantial chunk of their economy. The Chinese also have the largest armed forces in the world. Do the Aussies really want to provoke them? It doesn’t make sense.
It doesn’t have to. The world is ruled by whims and miffs, business deals and interests, not sense. Let’s just look for the simplest possible solution. There’s always a thriving market for running dogs avid for ever-juicier bones. It is through them that powerful economic interests can influence geopolitical outcomes. All that these powerful interests–governments, industries, banks, big farma, big anything–have to do is to bribe a few well-placed government power brokers in order to influence key decisions. Some of these operations are kept secret, but some of them are flaunted in the world media. The Australian submarine deal is one of these. The Aussies are proud of themselves, like a six-year-old who has just managed to pull the pin on a hand grenade.
Back to Reality
The American portrayal of Chinese policy is the exact opposite of the truth. The Chinese are not the warmongers. They are not surrounding their adversaries with military bases, nor constructing fanciful “defensive alliances” to coerce them. China’s remarkable success in economic development is based not on military threats and black ops but on respect and mutually beneficial cooperation with developing countries–71 at last count.
It is precisely the wealth not misspent on militarism that has permitted the Chinese to invest in their country’s future. The American policy of creating military threats that oblige them to bankrupt themselves matching the Americans in an arms race cannot work on the Chinese the way it worked on the Russians. It was deployed too late. The Chinese were already off and running, and the Americans already trillions of dollars in debt to them.
Then there’s the US propaganda attack on China for its brutal treatment of their Uyghur Muslim minority. This is the ultimate surreal example of the American pot calling the Chinese kettle black. The Americans’ grave concern over civil rights violations in Xinjiang province’s Tarim Basin smell moldy indeed in view of their own heinous racist abuses from Mississippi to Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, Serbia, Libya, and countless other places. Do the Chinese even have a word for “lynching,” or do they have to borrow it from the American language?
Pre-Cooked American Public Opinion
Where the American yarn spinners can sell their tainted goods is in their own country. American public opinion is pre-cooked. All the lies and myths are readily at hand, the exceptionalism, the uber-patriotism, the racism, the wily Chinese communist enemies, and the “brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” With all this previous conditioning, it’s easy for the Pentagon to send American young people into harm’s way in pointless ideological and commercial wars. And once they get there the support-the-troops pavlovian phenomenon clicks in at home.
The CIA, which orchestrates much of the patriotic drumbeat is virtually a hermetic country unto itself. Its existence is built on foundations of absolute secrecy used to obfuscate the highest elected offices in the land. How do they manage to keep vital secrets from the US Congress and the President himself? They are partial to a ploy called “plausible denial.” By not informing the country’s elected elites of their most egregious operations such as their bloody regime-change operations abroad and domestic surveillance at home, the CIA and the NSA allege that they are not depriving the highest levels of government of vital strategic information. They are actually shielding them from responsibility for some of the country’s most heinous and far-reaching black ops. When they eventually come to light, the response is, “The President knew nothing of this program.” That’s plausible deniability.
What’s Next? Will It Be the End?
The simple truth is: we don’t know if the end is near. If the President of the United States himself can be kept in the dark, how are the citizens of the US and the world supposed to know anything? We have to guess. And given the intellectual and moral stature of America’s leaders, and their behind-the-scenes big-bucks handlers, an impartial outside observer cannot venture even to guess what comes next, nor when. The fact that their American backs are against the wall might encourage them to take desperate measures. Will they try taking on Russian and China in tandem. We can only hope not, and try to forget the depressing old truism: “hope is not a strategy, and a wish is not a plan.”
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Trump and All the Rest 