If my post yesterday, Hands up if you think Russia is bluffing – and the Scott Ritter address it housed in the opening minutes of this video – were unnerving (and we should be unnerved) here’s a slightly more reassuring note from the ‘offensive realist‘, John Mearsheimer.
I disagree with Professor Mearsheimer on two important generalities. One, he overstates the power of the Israel Lobby. Why? Because he understates the alignment of Israel’s interests with those of the US ruling class.
That error flows from another. Offensive Realism, though affording greater explanatory power than the idealist claptrap of our political and media castes – such as that the West’s elites give a flying fig for human rights in distant lands – fails to see the US as hub of a dying hence triply dangerous empire. That failure, I say, underpins his perverse stance, remarked upon by others – including his friend and on many things ally, Jeffrey Sachs – as regards China. His refusal to join the dots, to see that America’s bilateral policy of containing China is not distinct from but of a piece with its attitudes to Russia and Iran, translates into a failure to see that his outstanding critiques of Washington’s catastrophic policies in the Middle East and Ukraine apply equally, and for the same reasons, to its provocations in the China Seas.
But when the professor speaks on matters Ukraine, I listen. You should too. This being Monday morning, I baulk at recommending another long video, forty-two minutes in this case. Should you have time, you’ll find it rewarding. Besides his customary lucidity, unfailing courtesy and scrupulous eschewing of the sensational, if you’re one of the two million Brits who’ve signed the petition that Starmer hand back the keys to No. 10 you’ll enjoy his quiet line of questioning as to which planet its occupant truly resides on.
And if you haven’t a spare 42 minutes? You could just take my word for it that John does not discount Scott’s WW3 fears as baseless – only a fool would do that – but tempers them with the same observations I made in Five things to know about Kiev’s ATACMS.
Yes, NATO crossed the reddest of red lines last week:
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.
And, yes, Russia responded with Friday’s Oreshkin strike on a military-industrial site in Dnipro. As Andrew Korybko said three days ago in Putin is finally climbing the escalation ladder:
… 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. 1
This leads us back to Professor Mearsheimer. In that 42 minute video he makes the point, lost on an infantilised Western public, that Mr Putin has long faced domestic criticism for being too appeasing in the face of decades of Western provocation. Both – provocation, and domestic criticism – make the situation every bit as dangerous as Scott suggests. However, as I noted in Five things …
… 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
… and in any case:
Russia has options other than the thermonuclear … she now has escalatory dominance at all levels bar the nuclear (and parity on that) …. 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.
Or as the prof puts it in yesterday’s video, Putin is in the escalatory driver’s seat. Whatever you think of the man – and what most in the propaganda-blitzed West think of him is seldom what we might call informed; rather, a textbook case of weak opinions strongly held – from a species survival perspective, that’s A Good Thing.
* * *
- This is outside this post’s remit but, also today, both Caitlin Johnstone and Simplicius the Thinker – she with characteristic forthrightness of tone, he more nuanced – point to Trump’s latest cabinet picks as signalling intent to play hardball on Ukraine. I think the situation more intricate; that Trump – who, like Putin, has home audiences to placate – is in sabre-rattling ‘escalate to de-escalate’ mode. But who can be sure, given both the fix we’re in and the president-elect’s unpredictability? Watch this space.
One of the key points Mearsheimer makes early on in this video is the inability of the Collective West to comprehend* that the Ukraine conflict is an existential issue for Russia.
Whilst that’s an accurate and valid point, it seems reasonable to observe that the existential issue of this conflict is not limited to Russia.
Simplicus has this….
https://x.com/FromSteveHowell/status/1860581239876399469
……Fox news clip of Lindsey Graham embedded in his latest Sit Rep, which underlines a number of key points in that video featured on this site yesterday.
Not least of which is Larry Jonson’s point about following the money. A point which also links in to the multi faceted features of the wider conflict in which the Collective West – or, to be more precise, the elites who make the decisions in the Collective West – are escalating in other areas such as imposing 100% sanctions on anyone who does business with Russia whilst at the same time sending out clear signals that it will not tolerate any interstate trading payment systems other than the dollar.
And that is additional to the very clear threats about unconditional support for a Zionist project in Israel which is apparently about to annex the West Bank; the sabre rattling against China; and the arrest of a key allay of India’s Modi.
The point being that there is a lot more to the two options discussed in that video from yesterday – Capitulation of Nuclear War.
What would, for example, capitulation mean for China, Iran, the BRICS, and the Global South in general in terms of a strategic defeat of Russia?
The Global majority permanently locked into a system of Global colonisation of their resources and effective slavery of their populations in the service of a tiny minority of sociopaths who see even their own Western populations as exploitable and expandable objects to with as they please.
That’s as existential a threat as you can get not just for Russia but nalso for the entire Glbal South and Global Majority.
Switching to the other side of the binary: in a context in which there exists a recognition that the elites making the decisions in the Collective West are increasingly divorced from the viewsand interests of their wider populations the question occurs as to just who, when talking about the West, would be doing the capitulating – as well as what that means in terms of the West?
Lindsey Graham’s argument, along with the actions detailed in yesterday’s video regarding the US stated aim to maintain hegemony at any cost – which involves destroying the BRICS project – provides an insight to both the above questions.
Which is that the Ponzi scheme upon which the Western Oligarchy is dependent upon is rapidly running out of road. To continue, the elites of the Collective West need the resources of the Rest of the Planet at any cost.
Which means that the outcome of what is taking place across multiple vectors – conflicts in Eastern Europe aimed at Balkanising Russia and the Eurasian Heartland, the Near East and the Rimland along with the simmering one in the Pacific; financial sanctions and the very obvious threats to dismember the BRICS initiative of alternative trade payment systems – is existential for the maintenance and continuation of and for the economic, financial, social and cultural system of Western Oligarchies and their control of that system.
Capitulation on any of those vectors means the end of that system and the 1% who control it in the West.
It seems reasonable to surmise that, despite not specifically articulating the matter in those terms, Scott Ritter implicitly recognises that from the point of view of the Western Oligarchy there are only those two choices.
The third option being sought only exists for the majority populace within the Collective West. Which is to permanently and irrevocably remove that Oligarchy and those who serve it or have it removed by whatever means is the safest in terms of avoiding escalation to a nuclear exchange. That can occur internally, externally or a combination of both. Whichever, it will by necessity be ugly, simply because it’s an us or them existential matter.
* Probably because, being sociopaths, the !% in the West don’t care. The Russians, the Chinese, the populace of the “Jungle” are just another form of Palestinian to this parasitic group.
Good points all. Early on I and others – Bryan Gocke for instance – made the point that for Russians this war is existential, for the Westerner public it is not, and for the Western elites it is, for the Ponzi reason you give, also existential.
As regards interlinked fates we are at a point where despite superficially differing interests, no member of the axis of resistance – which at a conservative estimate takes in China, the DPRK, Iran and the Russian Federation – can now afford to see any of the others weakened. To take one example, the US Neocon (and Greater Israel) agenda of regime change in Iran threatens both Russia and more especially China, half of whose oil comes through the Hormuz Strait.
On the specifics of the Oreshkin strike, there’s an excellent piece out today by Yves Smith on Naked Capitalism. As ever with NC, BTL comment is good too.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11/sputnik-2-0-oreshnik-and-the-western-military-capabilities-gap.html
This below the line contribution on that nc piece catches the eye:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11/sputnik-2-0-oreshnik-and-the-western-military-capabilities-gap.html#comment-4137371
“re: Martyanov and Oreshnik as game changer:
As I am trying to gather the reasons why Oreshnik is a game changer the way Zircon/Kinzhals are not (hypersonic attributes would come with all of the models) – Martyanov in his latest video has a helpful example and that is destruction of army units assembling before attacks.
i.e. that Oreshnik basically replaces tactical nukes.
12.000 men e.g. could be wiped out in this particular example judging from the area destroyed in Dnepro.
Of course it would be “interesting” to know how much area 36 munition items (with 6 warheads and 6 sub-munitions) could cover at maximum in such a fashion on the surface.
TC 17:00-21:00
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2024/11/there-is-issue-with-physics.html
Before that he briefly shows Bremerhaven as a landing spot of eminent importance to US logistics that too would be wiped out without nukes.
This is the true nature of the game changing term. And I assume it is only the beginning as yield and power/might are concerned.
Eventually, do nukes with all their harmful side effects become obsolete?
Those aspects that forbid their use?
“Clean”, “surgical” nukes with minium fallout and civilian casualties was one intention behind US nuclear first strike/counterstrike strategies as first publicly laid out by Lieber & Press in 2006 and made widely known through informing the public about the super-fuze.
a.k.a. “US nuclear primacy and the end of MAD”. A short lived assumption apparently. Wonder if Stratcom will understand.
Which would have made nuclear war admissible.
However – and forgive me for over-stretching here – if a final stage of a new “clean” weapons system would replace nukes even on a strategic level that would have implications, not only good ones.
Because what made one uneasy already with Tridents that could be super-accurate and therefore be “not a problem” would apply here too.
It would make the use of non-nuclear super-bombs an easy moral decision.
We are approaching the scenarios known from Sic-Fi movies (“THE CREATOR” e.g.) and computer strategy games of the 1990s, like the “Command & Conquer” series where a Western US-led NATO clone had a super-weapon that could pulverize anything with laser-accuracy on a large scale. With a weapon safely stationed in space – god-like powers.
What if the US will acquire this not in 20-30 years time? But much earlier.”