Reactions to Team Biden’s U-turn:
Forbes business magazine, November 19, 2024
Caitlin Johnstone, November 20, 2024
British tabloid exclusive reveals that Sir Keir – his permanently puzzled look that of a man unable to know what a genocide looks like even when livestreamed to the world – has the Russian president quaking in his ski boots.
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What to make of it? First, the Biden U-turn of November 17 to permit Kiev’s use of Army Tactical Missile Systems on targets within Russia – due, it is claimed without evidence, to North Korean forces in Kursk – cannot avert Ukraine’s inevitable defeat. For one thing the ATACMS reach of less than 200 miles, when the Russians have moved their serious strike capabilities outside this range, makes them a nuisance but not a serious military threat. (I’ll get to the consequences of a strike on civilian targets in a moment.)
For another, even NATO mouthpieces like Forbes and Murdoch’s Sunday Times put the number in Kiev’s possession at fifty at most. But if the West’s foolish proxy war on Russia has taught us anything it is that (a) said West’s arsenal is sorely depleted, with every weapon to Zelensky one less to a Netanyahu who sees them all as rightfully his; (b) the capacity of its arms sector to step up production, for a war of attrition with a peer adversary, will be constrained for years to come by a prioritising of profits over effective deterrence which rules out surge-capacity as wasteful. 1
Second, given the military irrelevance, why has Team Biden reversed its earlier refusal to allow a Kiev attack inside Russia? This move – latest of many to condemn even more Ukrainians and Russians to die in a war the West provoked to weaken a Russia now stronger than ever – seeks to hobble a Trump Administration stuffed with China and Iran hawks, 2 and wanting an off ramp from Biden’s folly. It exposes Europe’s leadership, above all Starmer and Macron, who’d sought but been denied this very permission for their Storm Shadows, 3 as the fools and supine knaves they truly are.
Third, while ATACMS striking inside Russia may be fleabites, they’d cross a red line publicly set out by Vladimir Putin, Sergey Lavrov, Sergei Shoigu et al. The RF has amended its constitution to allow use, in extremis, of nuclear weapons on a non nuclear state. 4
Moreover, those same leaders have spelt out – this is what the Mirror headline above is getting at – that an ATACMS strike into Russia would, because such a strike could only be staged with hands-on NATO involvement, place the latter at war – hot war – with the West.
Fourth, in the unlikely event of serious military damage – and the far likelier one of Zelensky’s desperation causing civilian deaths – Russia has options other than the thermonuclear. In one of several parallels with Iran vis a vis Israel, she now has escalatory dominance at all levels bar the nuclear (and parity on that). Some say Ansar Allah’s ability to hit Israel and its accomplices in genocide, not just with drones but hypersonic missiles, is down to Russia providing satellite guidance which Ansar Allah certainly, and Iran probably, do not possess. 5
Who can verify such things amid the fog of war? But the point is generalisable. With the gloves off, every USAF and naval asset of an empire overextended across four continents becomes a military target; every cog and gear of its faltering financial sway an economic one. Worse still for said empire – and, alas, the world and its grandmother – should things spiral out of control in the Middle East the way Rubio, Waltz and Hegseth are slavering for, China will be unable, for reasons laid out in US Neocons and Israel’s far Right: Part 4, to stay out of it.
Iran is pivotal to Washington regaining the initiative n Central Asia. The better to threaten Russia, disrupt Belt and Road and, most ominous of all for Beijing, put a choke on China’s oil supply – 50% of which comes through the Hormuz Strait.
Fifth, despite atrocious – on grounds of inexperience as much as insane belligerence – picks on foreign policy, Trump the businessman is no fan of war, which would distract from the domestic priority (likely unachievable) of ‘draining the swamp’ as per his Director of National Intelligence choice of Tulsi Gabbard to rein in the alphabet agencies whose ‘national security’ subset he has every cause to rein in. Given his druthers, Trump will want to fight China by economic warfare of the kind guaranteed, in an inextricably interconnected world, to hurt China, hurt Americans, and devastate Europe …
… whose leaders, having backed the wrong side in the US duopoly democracy – and needlessly insulted a man childishly unforgiving of personal slight 6 – now put a brave face on having legs sawn off at the knee. But as Gilbert Doctorow observed just yesterday, Trump will exacerbate – as its monumental folly in the Ukraine already has – Europe’s economic irrelevance. 7 One of the lesser consequences being the fading out of the Scholzes and Von der Leyens, the Starmers and Macrons, to the advantage of the Viktor Orbans and, indeed, the Nigel Farages.
And Trump may not get his druthers. The risk of WW3 has always arisen less from the desire for it as from the willingness of the crazies to play one too many rounds of thermonuclear chicken.
It still does. We live in interesting times.
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- Surge capacity means maintaining slack – plant standing idle – to enable a near instant stepping up of arms production when needed. Such wastefulness from a profit-centric standpoint requires levels of state oversight which are anathema to the neoliberal mind. Add to this the fact of Raytheon et al having every incentive – costs + 10% – to make eye-wateringly expensive weaponry which can wow arms fairs, and may do lethally well in seven-day wars on the global south, but whose shortcomings – inability to produce at scale, and unreliability in the heavy usage of protracted war as opposed to the quick-win conditions of “shock and awe” – stand exposed in the Ukraine. Ditto that revolving door between government and the military industrial complex (whose gravy-train influence, by the way, vastly exceeds that of the Israel lobby) which has earned the incumbent Defence Secretary the moniker, Lloyd ‘Raytheon’ Austin.
- Retired US Colonels Doug Macgregor and Larry Wilkerson, voices I take seriously, say Trump’s picks – Mike Waltz (National Security Advisor), Marc Rubio (Secretary of State) and Pete Hegseth (Defence Secretary) – will, even if not blocked by the Senate, be gone in a year. The Donald, no deep thinker, shares with Alan Sugar a fondness for the phrase: “you’re fired”.
- The Anglo (Storm Shadow)-French (Scalp) ATACMS house US components, and on that count may not be deployed without Washington say so. Starmer’s September visit to the US sought but did not gain that say so.
- Here, verbatim, are the words of the Russian President on September 25th this year:
I would like to draw your attention specifically to the following. The updated version of the [constitution amending] document is supposed to regard an aggression against Russia from any non-nuclear state but involving or supported by any nuclear state as their joint attack against the Russian Federation. It also states clearly the conditions for Russia’s transition to the use of nuclear weapons.
- Last week Ansar Allah struck the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. The Pentagon says damage was token. Maybe, maybe not, but the Lincoln promptly left the Red Sea. This follows the June withdrawal of the USS Dwight Eisenhower, another of the US fleet total of eleven carriers and, like the Lincoln, despatched to deter objectors to genocide. Draw your own conclusions as to what such tail-between-legs exits say about the Houthi threat. With a further two being built, and six more on the order books despite vulnerabilities now exposed – see my post last year on their floating pointlessness – in an age where swarms of cheap drones can overwhelm the most sophisticated defence systems prior to missile strikes, draw your own conclusions too as to what the commissioning of more of these shareholder friendly behemoths says about America’s military industrial complex.
(A counter argument that China, with no equivalent of America’s MIC and whose military spending is unabashedly dirigiste, is also building aircraft carriers falls wide of the mark. China’s arms-spend is, like Russia’s, defensive. (This is not a propaganda point but based on the reality that neither has bases ringing the globe, while both have surpassed the US on hypersonic missiles to neutralise the US threat, potent a decade ago, of a first nuclear strike taking out the bulk of their own nukes while relying on “star wars” technologies to absorb a ‘dead hand’ retaliation by the remnants. There is no “star wars” defence against incoming missiles at Mach 10-20.) Where a naval power has home protection – as China does in the Taiwan Strait, the East and South China Seas, and more generally the South Pacific – aircraft carriers still offer considerable advantage.)
- The gratuitous insulting of Trump by Europe’s globalist elites and their liberal media was – like the gamble that Russia would lose, Putin be ousted and the RF be broken up USSR style for easy asset-stripping – born of blinkered hubris: in this case that Tangerine Man could not stage a come-back. In their entitled aloofness those elites and liberal followers discounted “the deplorables” of a swollen precariat. But as Norman Finkelstein recently put it, “if you have a choice between more of the same and a roll of the dice – when more of the same is intolerable – well rationally you’ll choose the roll of the dice”.
- Europe’s manufacturing powerhouse, Germany, is in crisis. Biden’s ecocidal sabotage of NordStream, with the abject acceptance if not full-on involvement of Europe’s comprador leaders, has robbed it of the cheap energy which kept it competitive. As Europeans pay through the nose to stay warm and put food on the table, firms go under else relocate in the USA. With Europe (the UK especially) having little to trade and unable to feed itself – even as sunset on Western supremacy erodes its ability to extract global rents on finance capital – its future looks bleak. Indeed, the one thing Washington can rightly claim as an irrefutable gain of its backfired war on Russia is that Europe’s status vis a vis the USA has been demoted from junior partner to semi-colony.