Decoding the hypersonic Putin on a day of remembrance
Sitting alongside French President Macron during the 100th anniversary to commemorate the end of World War I, Putin and Trump stole the show in Paris
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Elysee Palace protocol was implacable. Nobody in Paris would be allowed to steal the spotlight away from the host, President Emmanuel Macron, during the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day marking the end of World War I.
After all, Macron was investing all his political capital as he visited multiple World War I battlefields while warning against the rise of nationalism and a surge in right-wing populism across the West. He was careful to always place the emphasis on praising “patriotism.”
A battle of ideas now rages across Europe, epitomized by the clash between the globalist Macron and populism icon Matteo Salvini, the Italian interior minister. Salvini abhors the Brussels system. Macron is stepping up his defense of a “sovereign Europe.”
And much to the horror of the US establishment, Macron proposes a real “European army” capable of autonomous self-defense side by side with a “real security dialogue with Russia.”
Yet all these “strategic autonomy” ideals collapse when you must share the stage, live, with the undisputed stars of the global show: President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin.
So the optics in Paris were not exactly of a Yalta 2.0 conference. There were no holds barred to keep Trump and Putin apart. Seating arrangements featured, from left to right, Trump, Chancellor Angela Merkel, Macron, his wife Brigitte and Putin. Neither Trump nor Putin, for different reasons, took part in a “walking in the rain” stunt evoking peace.
And yet they connected. Sir Peter Cosgrove, the governor general of Australia, confirmed that Trump and Putin, at a working lunch, had a “lively and friendly” conversation for at least half an hour.
No one better than Putin himself to reveal, even indirectly, what they really talked about. Three themes are absolutely key.
On the Macron-proposed, non-NATO European army: “Europe is … a powerful economic union and it is only natural that they want to be independent and … sovereign in the field of defense and security.”
On the consequences of such an army: It would be “a positive process” that would “strengthen the multipolar world.” On top of it, Russia’s position “is aligned with that of France.”
On relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Washington: “It is not us who are going to withdraw from the INF Treaty. It is the Americans who plan to do that.” Putin added that Moscow has not scheduled military drills near NATO borders as an attempt to appease an already tense situation. Yet Russia has “no issue with” NATO drills and expects at least a measure of dialogue in the near future.
Enter the Avangard
[dropcap]V[/dropcap]ast sectors of the US Deep State are in denial, but Putin may have been able to impress on Trump the necessity of serious dialogue due to an absolutely key vector: the Avangard.
The Avangard is a Russian hypersonic glide vehicle capable of flying over Mach 20 – 24,700km/h, or 4 miles per second – and one of the game-changing Russian weapons Putin announced at his ground-breaking March 1 speech.
The Avangard has been in the production assembly line since the summer of 2018, and is due to become operational in the southern Urals by the end of next year or early 2019.
In the near future, the Avangard may be launched by the formidable Sarmat RS-28 intercontinental ballistic missile and reach Washington in a mere 15 minutes, flying in a cloud of plasma “like a meteorite” – even if the launch is from Russian territory. Serial production of Sarmat ICBMs starts in 2021.
The Avangard simply cannot be intercepted by any existing system on the planet – and the US knows it. Here is General John Hyten, head of US Strategic Command: “We don’t have any defense that could deny the employment of such a weapon against us.”
Iran as the new Serbia?
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] wish I had been in Paris – my home in Europe – to follow these concentric World War I–related plots live. But it was no less fascinating to follow them from Islamabad, where I am now, back from the northern part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The British Empire used 1.5 million to 2 million Indian colonial subjects to fight, and die, for empire in that war. Quite a few were Punjabis, from what is now Pakistan.
As for the future, Trump is certainly aware of Russia’s hypersonic breakthroughs. Trump and Putin also talked about Syria, and might have touched on Iran, although no one at the working lunch leaked anything about it.
Assuming the dialogue continues at the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires at the end of November, Putin might be able to impress on Trump that just as Serbia catalyzed a chain of events that led great powers to sleepwalk into World War I, the same could happen with Iran leading to the terrifying prospect of World War III.
Team Trump’s obsession on strangling Iran into economic submission is a no-go, even for the Macron-Merkel-led European Union. On top of it, the Russia-China strategic partnership simply won’t allow any funny – reckless – games to be played against a crucial node of Eurasia integration.
Putin won’t even need to go hypersonic to make his case to Trump
Luciana Bohne discusses Washington’s efforts to subjugate Russia
The Russia Washington wanted in the 1990s—and failed to get
Putin is hated because he incarnates the resurgence of a sovereign Russia, and opposition to US hegemonism. Of course, that cannot be told the supine publics, hence the barrage of never ending lies.
INTRODUCTION BY HIROYUKI HAMADA
Here is an essential discussion in understanding establishment’s obsession with Russia. Luciana Bohne and Don DeBar describe the basic capitalist dynamics over Russia in timeline, in an easy to understand language. Share it, listen to it with your fiends and family members. I just played it in my car. After listening to the whole thing, one of the kids—I thought they were sleeping, asked me what Don meant by the people behind the administration with real power. I ended up explain about capitalism, military industrial complex, corporate funded think tanks, and importance of seeing through how the neo-feudal order operates, in the name of “freedom”, “justice” and “humanity”, in bringing about a new era for our species.
From Luciana’s wall:
“Topic today: The Russia Washington wanted in the 1990s
The Russia Washington wanted was not what it became in 2000. In fact, Russia was supposed to become more like Yugoslavia, broken into pieces and subordinate to Washington's whims--or like dutiful, stupid, anti-Soviet Poland. At any rate, Russia was not expected to "rise again." This idea that Russia would not again be a country, certainly not an independent country, was the greatest miscalculation and political failure by Washington since the Vietnam War.”
Luciana Bohne is a retired academic whose long life is almost a synthesis of the turbulence of the 20th century. She has lived under three systems: fascism, socialism, and capitalism. She has known war, been a refuge and displaced person, an immigrant, and a failed aspirant to bourgeois respectability. I don’t think she has ever been at home anywhere, except in early childhood in her native village in what was first Austrian dominion, then, Italy, then Yugoslavia, and finally Croatia. She can hardly say what her native language is but is thankful for knowing now the little English she uses for writing essays for Counterpunch and other internet sites. She has left behind her professional training and research to concentrate on just speaking her mind for what it’s worth.
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Things to ponder
While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
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US Fake World War 2 History Underlies Permanent Bipartisan Hostility Toward Russia
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here’s fake news. And then there’s fake history. Fake news lies about the world as it is. But fake history is the context for fake news. Fake history sanctifies abominations past and present. Fake history erases the struggle over thousands of years between those many who produced the planet’s wealth and the greedy few who appropriate it for themselves.
Cossack commander observing his troops' deployment in June, 1942.
Being born in the US the middle of the 20th century, I got the same massive doses of fake history as everybody else. They told me told the Greeks were the world’s only early adopters of democracy. I was taught the fairy tale of the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving. I played cowboys and Indians. My history books spoke glowingly of the Manifest Destiny bestowed upon white America to devour the continent of North American, murdering and dispossessing its inhabitants. I learned a very little about slavery in school, very little, and much more, almost everything of any value, afterward.
And like everybody else, I was treated to an entirely fabricated history of the Second World War. Lying about the World War 2, what came before and afterward was and remains today a central facet in the US mythology which justifies and undergirds its settler state at home and its global empire aborad.
Briefly, we’re taught that Nazi Germany was just plain inexplicable evil, that this Hitler dude came to power with his Nazi party, they persecuted Jews, gypsies and dissidents, they conquered France and they menaced England but were stopped short when they lost the battle of Britain in the air. Eventually the US joined the war, invading North Africa, defeating the Nazis there, going on to fight the Germans in Italy, and eventually staging the D-Day invasion of France. They marched into Germany to finally defeat the Nazis and hanged a number of Nazi officials for war crimes and genocide at Nuremberg. The Russians, the Soviet Union at the time, we were taught, were sort of in the war too as allies but soon after the defeat of the Nazis they became enemies, and have been that ever since.
Nearly all of that is horseshit.
A Red Army plattoon waits calmly for the enemy. The Russians' willingness to fight to the last man in many units impressed German commanders.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917, the US used troops already in Europe to fight the Germans in World War 1 to join with Britain, Japan and more than a dozen countries and invade the new nation, taking part in the bloody and disastrous Russian Civil War. The Bolsheviks won that civil war and founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s first avowed socialist country. The US did not diplomatically recognize the USSR until 1933, and ruling elites in the US and Europe conspired constantly to undermine and subvert the USSR at every means and at every turn.
In February 1933, a month after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, a mysterious fire in the Reichstag, the German Parliament building was blamed on the Communists. It became the excuse to grant absolute power to Hitler and his Nazi party, which promptly opened up concentration camps for communists, socialists, union members, Jews, gypsies, dissidents of all kinds. Nazism became the official ideology of the German state, holding among other things that the main threat to civilization was Jewish-led communism. Hitler spells it all out in a book called Mein Kampf (My Battle), how Germans were the center of a so-called aryan race destined to rule over the rest of lesser humanity, and obligated in the very short run to make war upon the subhuman populations to their east from Poland to the steppes of Russia and Siberia, also eliminating communism from the face of the earth.
Hitler very much admired the example of North America, which he regarded as an exemplary model of white supremacist conquest, murdering and thoroughly dispossessing a native population. He named his personal armored train Amerika.
Western elites including prominent US corporations like Texaco and bankers who included the Bush family, and IBM did business with Hitler and aided the rearming of Germany. In 1939 and 1940 Nazi Germany absorbed Austria, Czechoslovakia, invaded Poland and beat the French army down enough to force French leaders, many of whom sympathized with the Nazi ideology anyway to collaborate with Hitler. Germany bombed Britain but stopped short of invading the British isles to turn east toward the Soviet Union, and the ultimate Nazi goals of conquering and displacing entire populations of what it regarded as subhumans there and ending communism once and for all.
A child being buried in Leningrad, 1942. The German Siege of the city—lasting 900 days—caused widespread starvation among citizens, and lack of medical supplies and facilities made illnesses and injuries far more deadly. Some 1.5 million soldiers and civilians died in Leningrad during the siege - nearly the same number were evacuated, and many of them did not survive the trip due to starvation, illness, or bombing. Russia lost more than 27 million people in the war, the equivalent, at the time, of the total population of Texas, New York and California combined.
The Nazi invasion of the USSR was, all by itself the largest and bloodiest war in human history. Germany sent more than 3 million men in 149 divisions into Russia. They plundered and burned and razed entire rural districts, villages, slaughtered the populations of entire ancient cities, and made a point of rounding up Jews and communists. In many places they found significant numbers of like-minded collaborators. They killed millions of Soviet civililans and soldiers, and aimed to starve out the Russian population to make room for German settlers in the near future.
Multiple standalone battles, like Stalingrad in 1942-43 or the 900 day seige of Leningrad accounted for a million or more deaths each, dwarfing the US loss of some 400,000 during the entire war in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. The USSR lost 26 million lives in the war, about a third of them military the other two thirds civilians starved or murdered. The USSR spent a million lives liberating Poland, and another million plus liberating Hungary, Romania, parts of Yugoslavia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The battle of Berlin alone cost the lives of yet another million Soviet soldiers. The USSR is 25 years gone now, but Russians remember.
Soviet defenders of Stalingrad, 1942.
The USSR begged Britain and the US to open a second front in the west, and Franklin Roosevelt promised to do just that before the end of 1942. But he allowed the Brits, led by Winston Churchill to dissuade him. Britain thought it more important to preserve its own empire, first by securing the link to India and the Far East through Suez, so the Americans landed in North Africa instead of France. Some American politicians, like Harry Truman who would succeed Roosevelt as US president argued that the US should help the Nazis if the Soviets were winning and the Soviets if the Nazis were winning so as many as possible would die. When the North Africa campaign was wrapped up, the Americans and Brits invaded Italy instead of France, prompting US General George Marshall to accuse his superiors of “periphery pecking” instead of fighting the war. The US conducted bombing raids from bases in Britain, but delayed its land invasion of France till June 1944 when the defeat of Nazi Germany was already assured, and the outcome of the war no longer in doubt.
There’s a famous photo of US Marines raising a flag at the end of the horrific battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific. But there are no pics of Brits or Americans raising the Union Jack or the stars and stripes over the ruins of Berlin in 1945. That’s because the Brits and Americans never got to Berlin, they never intended to. American forces never faced more than an eighth of the German land forces at any time during World War 2. The Soviet Red Army raised the hammer and sickle over the Reichstag at war’s end. At the victory celebration in Moscow, the Red Army threw the hundreds of banners of Hitler’s legions on the pavement before Lenin’s tomb. The Brits and Americans didn’t capture enough of these to make a good parade.
US president Roosevelt died 3 weeks before the Nazi surrender, and was succeeded by Harry Truman, who instantly adopted a profoundly hostile policy toward the USSR. American use of the first atomic bombs against Japan, which had been seeking to surrender was perceived as a threat to the USSR, rather than a military necessity to end the war. US intelligence agencies aided the escape of thousands of Nazi war criminals to the Western hemisphere. America placed other ex-Nazis in positions of responsibility in the German regime set up in their occupied zones, and prevented the early reunification of Germany, turning the boundary between Soviet and Western occupation zones into a fortified international border. Truman’s warlike stance against communism and the USSR was inherited and greatly expanded upon by his successors, former General Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Kennedy, both of whom menaced the USSR with nuclear weapons and placed nuclear missiles in Turkey next to the Soviet borders. Russians remember this too.
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ixty million people perished in World War 2, but the US emerged with relatively light losses, most of the planet’s intact manufacturing capacity and as the world’s leading creditor, owed money by friend and former foe alike. It was to be the dawn of an American Century, in which the US called the shots for the entire world. The fake history we were and still are taught purposefully erase the fact that it was the Russians, the Soviets at the time, who defeated Nazi Germany, not the Americans and Brits. Without the defeat of Nazi Germany, the last 70 years would be vastly different. To cite only a couple of possibilities, Brazil’s ruling classes were firmly pro-Nazi and Brazil has the largest black population of anyplace outside Africa. What would have happened there? How would decolonization in Africa have proceeded in a world dominated by Nazis?
Today in Eastern Europe, where the US has installed anti-communist and often pro-fascist regimes, the graves of fallen Soviet soldiers who liberated those places from the Nazis are being defaced. Polish governemnt officials just hosted a gathering of 60,000 pro-Nazi demnstrators from across Europe. School children in Austria and Lithuania are being taught today that the Russian communists started the war, and Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (along with key Republicans – it’s a bipartisan thing) directly and conspicuously aided forces that included open neo-Nazis to stage a coup in Ukraine, on the western borders of Russia. Neo nazi units are now incorporated into the Ukrainian Army.
None of the US antics over the last 70 years are remotely justifiable without the fake history we were taught, and still allow to be taught about the Second World War. For more than 70 years now the politicians of both US capitalist parties – both US government parties, have built their politics on this fake history. US troops are still in Germany, still in Japan more than two generations after the war, and the US maintains an empire of a thousand military bases on six continents and fleets in every ocean.
Hostility toward whatever regime sits in Moscow has been the bipartisan bedrock and staple of US imperial policy for a century since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This week Congress passed a record Pentagon spending bill, earlier in the legislative cycle than any time since the 1990s. Most of House Democrats, the so-called “resistance” to Trump supported it, in their continuing bid to be more warlike than Trump and the Republicans.
The rest of the world will do what it must, but only Americans can shut down the American empire. And we can only do that if we begin to shake ourselves free from our fake history, and face the real world around us.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com, where you can subscribe to our free weekly email notifying you of all new audio and print content at Black Agenda Report, your source for news, commentary and analysis from the black left since 2006. You can find our audio commentaries and our weekly Black Agenda Radio program on Soundcloud, iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
Please be aware that Google and other corporate marketing platforms have asserted the right, and in the case of Google are already suppressing Black Agenda Report articles, audio and video in search results. So the only guarantee that you’re getting access to to Black Agenda Report is to securely subscribe to our email updates. This is Bruce Dixon for Black Agenda Report.
CORRECTION: Soviet losses at the battle of Berlin were in the range of 2 or 3 hundred thousand, not a million, still a horrific sacrifice in a military operation of about 2.5 million soldiers.
Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a state committee member of the GA Green Party, which unlike Democrats and Republicans unequivocally supports network neutrality. He lives and works in Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
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We Can’t Forgive Israel for Downing the IL-20 and Killing Russians
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE SAKER
by Ruslan Ostashko
The reckless audacity of Israel’s behavior in the Middle East, sooner or later had to lead to tragic consequences. And they finally came: from the provocation of Israel’s Air Force, a Syrian missile hit our Il-20 recon aircraft, killing fifteen Russians.
Published on Sep 20, 2018
[dropcap]D[/dropcap]o you remember the story with Gilad Shalit? He was a corporal of the Israel Defense Forces who on 25 June 2006, was captured by Hamas. To save their own soldier, the IDF started a military operation called “Summer Rains.” After the operation and other efforts did not succeed, after 5 years and 4 months, Israel exchanged Shalit for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.
So this is to the question of how the state of Israel values lives of its soldiers. Now let’s return to the current events and the words of the Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu about the actions of Israel, that caused the deaths of fifteen of our military servicemen.
“The blame for the downing of the Russian plane and the deaths of its crew members lies completely on the Israeli side,” Minister Shoigu said.
“The command center of the Russian troops were only informed with 1 minute left before the airstrikes by the Israeli F-16s began,” he mentioned.
“The actions of the Israeli military were not in keeping with the spirit of the Russian-Israeli partnership, so we reserve the right to respond.” – Minister Shoigu emphasized.
A question arises, if Israel has repeatedly been warned about the danger of such actions, and we have air defense systems in Syria, then why the hell did they not open fire on those who are a threat to Russian aircraft?
No, I understand international relations, a special partnership, and so on, but what kind of partnership is this, in which one side does what it wants, and then puts the other under attack? Do we need such a partnership?
I think you read how the head of Russia reacted to the incident.
“Regarding the response, they will be primarily aimed at additional security for our servicemen and our facilities in the Syrian Arab Republic, which will be such steps that everyone will notice,” Putin said.
It is very sad that our country does not undertake “steps that are noticed by everyone” before any tragedy occurred, but after the fact. Yes, Turkey didn’t just pay with sanctions on its tomatoes for shooting down our fighter jet, Turkey experienced economic pain and decided to be our partner. But, Israel has already been in our corner. At least we used to think that Israel is in our corner. Netanyahu attended the Victory Day parade in Moscow. May 9th in Israel is considered a holiday, and so forth. And now what? Are we going to forgive Israel, who fights for the life of every IDF soldier, for the loss of our fifteen compatriots?
I consider that it would be a demonstration of weakness. And the weak are attacked. I think that we should take down any of Israel’s military jets that threatens us even with 1% of probability of the attack. After the first of their fighter jets is shot down, we will be faced with their screaming and barking, but what will Tel Aviv do? Declare war on Moscow? It’s ridiculous.
Tel-Aviv either will be trying again and again, or may continue attacks until our next downed plane, or it will give up their attacks immediately. Meaning they won’t be able to set us up again. You cannot let down the lives of Russians to anyone, especially – to such clever “partners”. When our people die in terrorists’ attacks, we strike them non-stop until they are destroyed. Enough fidgeting with the Israelis. Otherwise, a similar thing will 100% happen again.
Every Israeli fighter jet approaching dangerously close to our aircraft and bases in this region must be destroyed. The Israelis themselves act exactly this way. And they should inherit that.
P.S. An interview with the distinguished military pilot of Russia, Vladimir Popov, explains how the Israeli F-16 had been hiding literally under the wings of the Russian aircraft.
The Usual Tricks! Israeli Pilots Baited Syrian Missile By Hiding Under Wing of Russian Aircraft
Published on 20 Sep 2018
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
Behind the Anglo American War on Russia
“The starting point of the National Security Strategy is the recognition that America has entered a period of big-power competition, and that past US policies have neither sufficiently grasped the scope of this emerging trend nor adequately equipped our nation to succeed in it.
Then he continues with the following extraordinary admission:
“Contrary to the hopeful assumptions of previous administrations, Russia and China are serious competitors that are building up the material and ideological wherewithal to contest US primacy and leadership in the 21st Century. It continues to be among the foremost national security interests of the United States to prevent the domination of the Eurasian landmass by hostile powers. The central aim of the administration’s foreign policy is to prepare our nation to confront this challenge by systematically strengthening the military, economic and political fundaments of American power.”
In the State Department’s later sanitized version, the original text, “It continues to be among the foremost national security interests of the United States to prevent the domination of the Eurasian landmass by hostile powers.” And the sentence, “The central aim of the administration’s foreign policy is to prepare our nation to confront this challenge by systematically strengthening the military, economic and political fundaments of American power,” mysteriously were deleted. Because it was formal testimony presented to the Senate, however, the Senate version remains true to his original text, at least of 7 September, 2018. The State Department has been caught in a huge blunder.
If we pause to reflect on the meaning behind the words of Wess Mitchell, it’s pretty crude and wholly illegal in terms of the UN Charter, though Washington today seems to have forgotten that solemn document. Mitchell says US national security priority is to, “…prevent the domination of the Eurasian landmass by hostile powers.” He clearly means powers hostile to efforts of Washington and NATO to dominate Eurasia, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union more than a quarter century ago.
But, wait. Mitchell earlier cites the two dominant powers who combined, he says, are the current prime foe of US global control. Mitchell states explicitly, “Russia and China are serious competitors that are building up the material and ideological wherewithal to contest US primacy and leadership.” But US control of Eurasia then means US control of Russia, China and environs. Eurasia is their land space. The Wess Mitchell Senate declaration is a kind of obscene global rollout of the 19th Century USA Monroe Doctrine: Eurasia is ours and “hostile powers” such as China or Russia who try to interfere in their own sovereign space, become de facto “enemy.” Then the formulation “building up the material and ideological wherewithal…” What’s that supposed to mean as justification for Washington policy to prepare a military response? Both nations are energetically moving, despite repeated Western economic warfare, to build their economic infrastructure independent of NATO control. That is understandable. But Mitchell admits it is for Washington Casus Belli.
To realize what a strategic blunder the Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs made with that one careless sentence and why the State Department rushed to delete his remarks, a brief excursion into basic Anglo-American geopolitical doctrine is useful. Here, discussion of the worldview of the godfather of geopolitics, British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder is essential. In 1904 in a speech before the Royal Geographical Society in London, Mackinder, a firm advocate of Empire, presented what is arguably one of the most influential documents in world foreign policy of the past two hundred years since the Battle of Waterloo. His short speech was titled “The Geographical Pivot of History.”
Russia and Eurasian Pivot
Mackinder divided the world into two primary geographical powers: Sea power versus Land power. On the dominant side was what he termed the “ring of bases” linking sea powers Britain, USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia and Japan in domination of the world seas and of commerce power. This ring of dominant sea-powers was inaccessible to any threat from land powers of Eurasia or Euro-Asia as he termed the vast continent. Mackinder further noted that were the Russian Empire able to expand over the lands of Euro-Asia and gain access to the vast resources there to build a naval fleet, “the empire of the world might then be in sight.” Mackinder added, “This might happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia.”
Mackinder noted the enormous geopolitical implications of the then-new Russian Trans-Siberian Railway linking the vast territory of Russia from in Moscow at Yaroslavsky Vokzal, across all Russia some 6,000 miles to Vladivostock on the Pacific. He warned his select British audience, “the century will not be old before all Asia is covered with railways,” creating a vast land area inaccessible to the naval fleets of the British and later, Americans.
What the world has experienced since that prophetic 1904 London speech of Mackinder is two world wars, primarily aimed at breaking the German nation and its geopolitical threat to Anglo-American global domination, and to destroy the prospect of a peaceful emergence of a German-Russian Eurasia that, as Mackinder and British geopolitical strategists saw it, would put the “empire of the world” in sight.
Those two world wars in effect sabotaged the “covering of all Eurasia with railways.” Until, that is, in 2013 when China first proposed covering all Eurasia with a network of high-speed railways and infrastructure including energy pipelines and deep-water ports and Russia agreed to join the effort.
The Washington-orchestrated coup d’etat in Ukraine in February, 2014 was explicitly aimed at driving a bloody and deep wedge between Russia and Germany. At the time, Ukraine was the prime energy pipeline link feeding the German industry with Russian gas. German exports of everything from machine tools to cars to high-speed locomotives to build the rapidly-recovering Russian economy was transforming the geopolitical balance of power in favor of an emerging German-Russian-centered Eurasia to the detriment of Washington.
In an interview in January, 2015 following what he called “the most blatant coup in history”, the USA coup in Ukraine, Stratfor founder George Friedman, a student of Mackinder, stated, “…the most dangerous potential alliance, from the perspective of the United States, was considered to be an alliance between Russia and Germany. This would be an alliance of German technology and capital with Russian natural and human resources.”
Desperate Measures
At this point Washington is becoming more than a little desperate to bring the genie back in the bottle that their clumsy 2014 Coup d’etat in Ukraine caused to get out. That coup forced Russia to take more seriously its potential strategic alliances in Eurasia and catalyzed present Russia-China cooperation as well as the Russian engagement with key Eurasian neighbor states in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Wess Mitchell’s predecessor, Victoria Nuland, with her cocky hubris in Ukraine, when she was caught telling her Kiev Ambassador, “F**k the EU,” was noted across Eurasia. She gave the Washington game away. It’s not about principled diplomatic partnership. It’s about power and empire.
Now Wess Mitchell’s admission that the US strategic policy is to “prevent domination of Eurasia by hostile powers” tells Russia and tells China, had they had any doubts, that the war is about a fundamental geopolitical contest to the end over who will dominate Eurasia—it’s legitimate inhabitants, centered around China and Russia, or an imperial Anglo-American axis that has been behind two world wars in the past century. Because Washington mismanaged the Russian “Reset” that was meant to draw Russia into the NATO web, Washington today is forced to wage a war on two fronts—China and Russia—war it is not prepared to win.
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All image captions, pull quotes, appendices, etc. by the editors not the authors.
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The Russian Peace Threat examines Russophobia, American Exceptionalism and other urgent topics
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report