While the corporate media’s flashing you constant images of 2016 presidential candidates and the tragic Charleston massacre, don’t let it cloud your focus on the rising conflict that won’t end well: the U.S. challenging both China and Russia – all three nations possessing and increasing nuclear arms. Let’s call the growing tensions NukeBuild.
Peculiar Progressive wrote recently of the growing belligerence between Washington and Beijing: “China, the U.S. and Looming War”. We stressed how the U.S. is planning a 30-year, $1 trillion rebuilding of its nuclear arsenal. How China knows this. And how this, President Obama’s effort to solidify his “Asian Pivot” with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Pentagon’s war words about controlling the South China Sea and Pacific have all led China to publicly voice its own global military action plan.
Meanwhile, last week Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a smaller modernizing of Moscow’s nuclear arms. Not a lot. Just enough to incinerate and/or poison the planet:
Mr Putin said that “more than 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) able to overcome even the most technically advanced anti-missile defence systems” would be added to Russia’s nuclear arsenal this year…
…The president also announced that the military was beginning testing a new system of long-range early warning radar “to monitor in the western direction”.
After Mr Putin’s address, Russia’s deputy defence minister Anatoly Antonov told Russia Today his country was being “pushed into an arms race” by NATO.
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is heavily funded and influenced by Washington, which supported the fascist overthrow and replacement of a democratically elected government in Ukraine – a voter-selected regime supporting Moscow, and also corrupt.
That regime change and the move by the eastern Ukraine region of Crimea to secede and be annexed by Russia has led NATO’s effort to move troops closer to Russia’s borders. NATO’s foreign ministers in April 2014 announced they would “suspend all practical civilian and military cooperation between NATO and Russia.”
This chess-playing with Ukraine lives also led Washington to push the European Union to agree on U.S.-EU economic sanctions against Russia. The EU just extended those sanctions through the end of 2015.
All this has led Moscow to begin expanding its military and nuclear strength.
China, U.S. Meet This Week
China and the U.S. on Monday, June 22 began its seventh annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington, three days of banter about serious issues which will come to a head in September when China’s President Xi Jinping travels to the U.S. capitol to meet with President Obama.
The two sides feel they can expand some issues of mutual agreement. But the reality is this: China continues to grow as an equal economic power with the U.S., and Washington is trying to find ways to prevent that. Meanwhile China and Russia are growing closer while both are experiencing deep disagreements and distrust with the U.S. and its military threats. Both sides have been involved in cyber warfare.
According to Channel NewsAsia:
The two sides will try to ease tensions by stressing areas of cooperation, including climate change, shared concerns about Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programmes, the fight against Islamist militancy, and support for global development.
‘We have agreed with the Chinese that we are going to try to expand those areas where our interests overlap and expand cooperation in those areas,’ the [unnamed] US official said. But the aim was not to ‘paper over’ contentious issues, or to ‘agree to disagree,’ but to narrow differences to avoid miscalculations.
It’s those “miscalculations” which concern Peculiar Progressive, seeing the belligerent dialogue and military “shoving” by the three powers as the dangerous buildup grows toward war, and even nuclear war. And we’re not alone.
Roberts Sees ‘Armageddon’
Paul Craig Roberts was an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan, and was part of the brain trust in forming Reaganomics. He realizes the Washington neocons’ shoutings are efforts at activating Reagan’s hawkish actions toward Russia — only without Reagan’s willingness to negotiate. And he basically said so in a speech to the Conference on the European/Russian Crisis, in Delphi, Greece this past weekend. The talk’s title: “Washington is Impotent to Prevent Armageddon”.
Roberts, tracing the American attitude of exceptionalism and efforts to build empire, opens his talk with this:
The United States has pursued empire since early in its history, but it was the Soviet collapse in 1991 that enabled Washington to see the entire world as its oyster.
The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in the rise of the neoconservatives to power and influence in the US government. The neoconservatives have interpreted the Soviet collapse as History’s choice of “American democratic capitalism” as the New World Order.
He moves on to discuss the Wolfowitz Doctrine and its chief priority of hegemony. The two chief enemies of the doctrine are Russia and China he says, adding:
We come to the bottom line. Washington’s position is not negotiable. Washington has no interest in compromising with Russia or China. Washington has no interest in any facts. Washington’s deal is this: ‘You can be part of our world order as our vassals, but not otherwise.’
European governments and, of course, the lapdog UK government, are complicit in this implicit declaration of war against Russia and China. If it comes to war, Europeans will pay the ultimate price for the treason of their leaders, such as Merkel, Cameron, and Hollande, as Europe will cease to exist.
War with Russia and China is beyond Washington’s capability. However, if the demonized “enemy” does not succumb to the pressure and accept Washington’s leadership, war can be inevitable.
He also notes, “The agenda of American hegemony serves the interests of Wall Street and the mega-banks.”
You can read Roberts’ entire speech here. Perhaps it will help urge you to get organized, get educated, and get active in changing the destructive dynamic we’re all being drawn into.
Originally published in The Clyde Fitch Report, now in my book The Vital Realities for 2020 and Beyond:
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