Hands up if you think Russia is bluffing

The RF President on Thursday: “It is not Russia but the US that has destroyed the system of international security”

There’s no inherent contradiction between materialist understandings of the root drivers of war, and idealist assessments of the role played by ego and human folly.

While defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world – John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Commencement Address at American University in Washington DC, June 10, 1963

[Europe’s] gamble that Russia would lose, Putin be ousted and the RF be broken up USSR style for easy asset-stripping was born of blinkered hubris – steel city scribe, Five things to know about Kiev’s ATACMS

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A consistent theme of this site’s coverage of the proxy war on Russia in Ukraine is that, contrary to a three year propaganda blitz but entirely in line with facts easily verified, Russia was baited by decades of threats, lies, insults and broken promises. This image, rolled out more times than Boris Johnson has lied to the House of Commons …

… is my cartographic shorthand for the fuller list of provocations given in this June 10 post. I see no need to revisit them here.

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History offers no precedent for a super power passively watching the material basis of its might being slowly eroded. The empire WILL strike back, in the name of lofty ideals sold to us by media beholden by their business model to power.

With Ukraine ablaze, is Taiwan next?

Another consistent theme of this site, long predating the war in Ukraine, is that neither Russia nor China pose – other than in response to a stream of aggressions from the elites who rule the West from behind a thinning veil of democracy – any threat to you or me. What they threaten, by their growing economic power and the means to defend it militarily, is a revoking of those elites’ licence to appropriate for their personal enrichment the lion’s share of earth’s resources.

So how does any self respecting ruling class go about conflating a real threat with an imaginary one? C’mon now: this ain’t rocket science!*

Corporate media need to show themselves trustworthy even when doing so may embarrass those in high office. (Not only does their long term capacity to influence opinion and manufacture consent depend on this. So too, on pain of losing market share, do their business models.) But the trust so gained helps them mislead us, more by omission than commission, on matters critical – above all the vilifying of states and leaders in the way of empire designs – to the power they ultimately serve

what of ideology when reality intrudes?

Corporate media business models allow them to be truthful on matters, not all of them trivial, which do not threaten the core interests of those elites but, on matters which do, they play a vital role in persuading us that these interests are also, by happy coincidence, yours and mine.

(Even that a livestreamed genocide is a nation’s right, if it’s the right nation, to self defence)

These truths too, and the arguments in support, I see no reason to revisit. The scene duly set, let’s go straight to this month’s deadly countdown.

November 5: Donald Trump decisively beats Kamala Harris. He wants the US out of Joe Biden’s war in the Ukraine, and to saddle Europe’s quisling leaders with the costs.

(Observers I take seriously, such as Jeffrey Sachs and Alexander Mercouris, have warned for months that the interregnum following a Trump win would heighten the danger, both in the Middle East and the Ukraine, of lethal escalation. ¹ )

November 17: Biden, i.e. State Secretary Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan – are the Pentagon, and Defence Secretary Austin, even in the loop? – reverses the refusal, reaffirmed as recently as September, to allow ATACMS to be used for strikes on Russia.

(For context, implications and why the U-turn aims, with breathtaking cynicism given the stakes, to tie Trump’s hands in January, see Five things to know about Kiev’s ATACMS.)

November 19: ATACMS, which require US personnel for their firing, strike Bryansk in the RF. Putin reaffirms a red line drawn in September: that an attack from a non nuclear state with the support of a nuclear power would place both at war with Russia; its constitution amended, also in September, to lower its legal threshold for using nuclear weapons.

British Major-General Rupert Jones speaks for all of the West’s nuclear dice-rollers in his confidence that Putin is bluffing.

November 21: Britain’s Storm Shadows strike a military target in Kursk. These require UK personnel for their firing and, since they house US components, Americans too.

November 22: Russia strikes a military-industrial site in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with a new missile, the Oreshnik  (‘Hazel’). It flies at Mach 10+, which no defence system can counter, and carries six warheads, each with three separately programmable payloads, conventional or nuclear – in this case the former – and has a 5,000 mile range that puts every European city and military or other strategic target within reach. Likewise every US equivalent when fired from the next generation of stealth submarines. ²

(This is over and above the ability of Russia, the US and China to strike one another with the slower intercontinental ballistic missiles which had a less somnolent generation out on the streets in protest in the era of Reagan, Thatcher and Brezhnev.)

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Let us not talk falsely now. The hour is getting late – Jimi Hendrix pace  Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

So where does that leave humankind? At its freaking scariest point in the seven hours, eighteen days, three months and seventy-nine years since America dropped, for reasons explored here, its atomic bomb on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945.

(OK: I made the hours count up, in a nod to Prince and Sinead, but not the DDMMYY tally.)

This video is long but you need only stick around for the first nine minutes forty, as the grim of face Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector, sets out the perilous pass we’ve come to, with an aside or two on the emotionally challenged halfwits who presume to guide us through it.

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1. The risks of escalation prior to January 20 flow from separate but interlinked calculations in Washington, Tel Aviv and Kiev.
2. On his substack two days ago, Andrew Korybko had this to say:

   … faced with the choice of either escalating or continuing his policy of strategic patience, the first of which could foil attempts by Trump to reach a peace deal while the second could invite more aggression, Putin chose the former … Putin rattled Russia’s nuclear sabre in the most convincing way possible short of testing a nuclear weapon.