This policy seems inconsistent. It has maintained its focus
on a State that is no longer officially Communist at the same time that hardline
Communist China has been developing her own ‘perches’ in the Pacific, Africa
and South America as part, we assume, of a plan to displace the US as Top
Nation. John Mearsheimer, who in 2015 judged the West responsible for the crisis
in Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
, now says that the US partnership with China was a huge blunder and we should
settle with Russia in order to ‘pivot’ and deal with the Middle Kingdom instead
https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/U.S.-engagement-with-China-a-strategic-blunder-Mearsheimer . Seeing how the US has fed the Chinese dragon for
decades and thereby weakened its own economy, it may be too late.
Nevertheless, the signs
are that the unipolar (and monocular) ambition has not been abandoned, even
though it is and has long been insanely dangerous. Next October will mark sixty
years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, which all over a certain age will remember,
yet many will not connect this confrontation with the fifteen Russia-targeted US
nuclear missiles set up and made operational at Izmir, Turkey in the preceding
February; which was a factor in Khrushchev’s decision to assent to Castro’s
request to position US-targeted missiles in Cuba. From Izmir to Moscow is about
1,500 miles; from Kyiv, merely 500; no wonder Russia has become so nervous
about NATO’s creeping-up game of ‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ Had it not
been for the restraining hand of a Russian naval officer in 1962 https://web.archive.org/web/20210710213948/https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cold-war/sovietsbomb.htm
most of us would have died long ago, or never been born.
When two parties get into a fight, at least one has
miscalculated. In a timely and startling article on Substack https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/people-ideas-machines-ii-catastrophic?s=r
, Dominic Cummings shows that the West’s assumption that Russia would not dare
to escalate from conventional to nuclear war was mistaken:
‘After the 1991 collapse some
scholars went to talk to those actually in charge in Russia. They read
documents. They discovered that we’d been wrong in crucial ways all along.
‘Actually the Soviets planned
early and heavy use of nuclear weapons in many scenarios including outbreak of
conventional war in Europe.’
In 1963, on the night President Kennedy was shot, British
tank transporters rumbled past our front door (literally) in North Germany, on
their way to what we now know would have been nuclear obliteration. Today, Russia
and the US have between them over 11,000 nuclear warheads, some 3,000 of which
are ready to be deployed. https://sofrep.com/news/100-seconds-to-midnight-a-glance-at-the-worlds-nuclear-weapons/
Cummings claims that our decision makers do not take the
danger seriously. After he was grudgingly allowed three hours to elaborate on
our military unpreparedness, the Prime Minister told him ‘What a waste of my
time.’
Western war planners think they are dealing with rational
actors and know all the play variations, but seem not to understand the romance
of death. CD says that as Japan faced defeat in 1945 their General Anami was proposing
to see his nation destroyed ‘like a beautiful flower.’ Churchill himself
stiffened the spines of his Cabinet in 1940 with a moving speech that had them
beating the table with their fists: ‘If this long island story of ours is to
end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood
upon the ground.’ The old soldier was utterly serious – I remember reading how
his wife handed their daughter a large knife against the day the Germans
invaded.
So far, awful as they are, the more reliable statistics for
the Ukraine conflict https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/03/ukraine-civilian-casualty-update-20-march-2022
show a policy of limited aggression with the possibility of negotiated peace.
We can do without a Fourth Estate fanning the flames of hysteria and a
leadership more engaged in winning the next election – probably soon, once the
Fixed Term Parliaments Act is abolished https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-fulfil-manifesto-commitment-and-scrap-fixed-term-parliaments-act
- than heeding the dreadful warning. https://www.flashlyrics.com/lyrics/the-watersons/christmas-is-now-drawing-near-at-hand-50
So proud and lofty is some sort of
sin
Which many take delight and pleasure
in
Whose conversation God doth much
dislike
And yet He shakes His sword before He
strike
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