What Passes for Rationality in the Modern World

“If you pull your trigger, my gun will instantly fire as well.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. If you pull your trigger my gun will go off too.”

“My arm’s getting tired.”

“Let’s get this over with.”

Appropriately named MAD — Mutual Assured Destruction — it has been in place since the 1950s and constitutes a strategy of deterrence whereby both Russia and the U.S. refrains from using their vast nuclear arsenals because both know their nations and probably the rest of the world would be destroyed. This bilateral suicide pact has been keeping the world “safe” for over half a century.

Now the U.S. in its quest for ultimate superiority and global supremacy is chipping away at it, installing ABM systems on Russia’s borders, literally creating a powerful incentive for them to “get this over with”.  It literally makes it a rational choice for each side to get a jump on the other by initiating a pre-emptive strike.

I don’t think Russia will hit the launch buttons. Despite all of the venomous anti-Russian propaganda and Putin-bashing going on right now in the U.S., Russia has been militarily a defensive nation for several hundred years. This is also true of China. Especially compared to the U.S. and its allies, both Russia and China have been notably unaggressive in their pursuit of power and standing in the world.

That’s not to say either nation will cower before the chest-thumping of America’s relentless pursuit of military superiority and world domination. Without any doubt, given what both countries have suffered historically at the hands of aggressors both in Asia and Europe, one can be absolutely certain they will stand their ground.

Yet, building on its almost perfect record of losing every conflict it has either started or been involved with since WWII, the U.S. is creating the conditions for confrontation with China with its “pivot to Asia“, and pushing all the wrong buttons [with Russia] by starting the conflict in Ukraine, then prompting a number of countries on Russia’s borders to station missiles and augment their military against an putative threat of Russian aggression.

I’m not going to pull any punches here. Obama, Biden, Kerry, Clinton before him, and the entire rat pack of power-crazed imperialists are driving America and the world toward war — the war to end all wars, because it will end everything.

Hasn’t the world had enough conflict, destruction and carnage?

Do any of these people read history?

Is there any way to explain all of the self-sabotaging maneuvering going on right now?

Let’s look at this with the the clarity and objectivity you and I have by living outside the Washington DC bubble and imperious fantasy world of our neocon government.

Who in their right mind would come up with MAD, then destabilize it with policies which replace its precarious, paranoid, hair-trigger brinkmanship with more confrontation and a renewed arms race?

Aah . . . maybe I’m on to something!

Who in their right mind . . .?