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 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? Start with the knowns. First, the Team Biden U-turn – greenlighting Kiev’s use of Army Tactical Missile Systems on targets within Russia after all (said without a shred of evidence to be a response to North Koreans fighting in Kursk) – cannot alter the inevitability of Ukraine’s defeat. For one thing the ATACMS range of less than 200 miles, when the Russians have moved their serious strike capabilities outside this limit, 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 put the number in Kiev’s possession at fifty at most. And 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 neoliberalism whose prioritising of profits over effective deterrence rules out surge-capacity as wasteful. 1
Second, given its military irrelevance, why has Team Biden reversed its earlier insistence on not allowing Kiev to attack inside Russia? Born of despicable cynicism and childish spite, this move – latest of many to ensure that yet more Ukrainians and Russians will die in a war provoked, by a miscalculation of breathtaking hubris, to weaken a Russia now stronger than ever – seeks to hobble a Trump Administration stuffed with China and Iran hawks, 2 and wanting a rapid end to Biden’s war in Ukraine. It exposes European leaders – in particular Macron and Starmer, who’d sought but been denied this very permission for their Anglo-French Storm Shadows 3 – for 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 of nuclear weapons on a non nuclear state. Moreover, those same leaders have spelt out – this is what the Mirror headline above is getting at – that an ATACMS strike inside her borders would, since such a thing would require hands-on NATO involvement, place Russia 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 major civilian losses – 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 short of the nuclear (and parity on that last). There are those who say the only explanation for Ansar Allah’s ability to launch hypersonic missile (as opposed to drone) strikes on Israel – and on those who aid its genocide (as the aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln, now limping home from the Gulf after just such an attack can attest) – is that Russia is providing necessary satellite guidance which Ansar Allah certainly, and Iran probably, do not possess.
The point is generalisable. With the gloves off, every military base of an empire overextended on four continents becomes a military target; every cog and gear of its faltering financial sway an economic one. Worse still for said empire, should things spin out of control in the Middle East, the way Rubio, Waltz and Hegseth are slavering for, then China will be unable, for reasons given in US Neocons and Israel’s far Right: Part 4, to stay out of it.
Fifth, despite atrocious – on grounds of incompetence as much as insane belligerence – picks for his foreign policy team, Trump the businessman is no fan of war, which would distract from his domestic priority (likely unachievable) of ‘draining the swamp’, as shown by his choice of Tulsi Gabbard to rein in the alphabet agencies, in particular a ‘national security’ subset he has every reason to fear. Given his druthers, Trump will want to fight China by economic warfare of the kind sure 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 4 – now put a brave face on having legs sawn off at the knee. But as Gilbert Doctorow observed just yesterday, Trump will hasten – as the Ukraine already has – Europe’s economic suicide. 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.
We live in interesting times.
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- Surge capacity means maintaining ‘slack’, to enable rapidly accelerating production for a prolonged conflict. This requires levels of state oversight anathemic to the neoliberal mind set. Add to this the fact of Raytheon et al having every incentive – costs + 10% – to produce eye-wateringly expensive weaponry that wows arms fairs and may do well in short wars in the global south, but whose shortcomings – inability to produce at scale and temperamentality in the field – have been sharply exposed in the Ukraine. As has the revolving door, between government and a military industrial complex whose influence vastly exceeds that of the Israel lobby, which earned the outgoing Defence Secretary the moniker, Lloyd ‘Raytheon’ Austin.
- US Colonels Doug McGregor 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 they aren’t blocked by Senate, be gone within a year. One of several traits Donald Trump shares with Alan Sugar is a fondness of the phrase: “you’re fired”.
- The Storm Shadow missiles depend on US components, so may not be used without the say so of Washington.
- Europe’s politically unnecessary insulting of Trump was, like its assumption that Russia would lose and Putin be ousted, born of hubris; in this case that Tangerine Man could not stage a come-back.