I think most of my readers are aware that most western think tank “experts” on Russia are not the sharpest tools in the shed. But based on this survey of opinion it appears that they’re both dumb and under the influence of psychedelic drugs. – Natylie

By Branko Marcetic, Responsible Statecraft, 6/28/23

In 1998, in the midst of a years-long U.S. campaign to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Gen. Anthony Zinni realized the United States had no actual plan for what would happen in the aftermath. Zinni filled this gap by commissioning a series of war games, which predicted that a post-Saddam Iraq would be plunged into bloody chaos. The analysis, largely ignored at the time, would prove prophetic in the ensuing years.

This is worth recalling now, after long-standing hopes that the Ukraine invasion would spell the end of Vladimir Putin’s rule were nudged closer to reality over the weekend, with Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin carrying out a mutiny against the Russian president. The episode brings up several questions: What exactly is America’s plan should the Russian state collapse? What would follow a post-Putin power vacuum? And what measures should the United States take to manage its relationship with the country in such a scenario?

We can get some sense of the foreign policy establishment’s thinking on the subject by looking at what influential think tanks have had to say.

Take the Center for a New American Security, an arms-manufacturer-funded think tank closely aligned with the Democratic Party and from which the Biden administration has drawn many of its top foreign policy appointees. Shortly before Prigozhin’s coup attempt, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of its Transatlantic Security Program, co-wrote a piece outlining several scenarios for a post-Putin Russia, drawing heavily on her testimony in a Senate hearing in May.

In one scenario, Kendall-Taylor writes, Putin retains power and eventually dies in office, succeeded by a weak technocrat who changes little from current Russian policy. In another — the course of action she prefers — a Ukrainian military victory triggers a “seismic shift” in the Russian political landscape and galvanizes “a groundswell that could dislodge him,” leading to “the possibility of a more hopeful future for Russia and for its relations with its neighbors and the West.”

Kendall-Taylor admits the odds of a more liberal, democratic Russia emerging from this are “low,” pointing to the 2011 Egyptian revolution that ultimately resulted in Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s brutal dictatorship. And she acknowledges that if Putin was removed by an armed insurgency, “not only would the aftermath be violent, but the odds of a new dictatorship coming to power would also be high.”

Yet despite the risks “of violence, chaos, and even the chance of a more hard-line government emerging in the Kremlin,” Kendall-Taylor nevertheless concludes that “a better Russia can be produced only by a clear and stark Ukrainian victory,” which will “enable Russians to shed their imperialist ambitions and to teach the country’s future elites a valuable lesson about the limits of military power.” Whatever leader follows, she argues, the West should avoid rushing to stabilize relations and instead demand Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine, the payment of reparations and the prosecution of war criminals, while aiming to “constrain Russia and its ability to wage aggression beyond its borders” in the long term.

Despite dismissing the risks, Kendall-Taylor is an outlier in acknowledging the potential for violence, instability, and a more hardline government. The Center for European Policy Analysis, another hawkish think tank, has published several pieces since the war began declaring that the possible collapse and disintegration of Russia “will be good for everyone” and that the U.S. goal “should be decolonization,” a popular new shorthand for encouraging its break-up.

Likewise, while insisting it is “essential to prepare” for a coup in Russia, Pavel K. Baev of the Brookings Institution explicitly refuses to consider what he calls the “distinct possibility” of “a catastrophic breakdown of Russia’s autocratic regime and the break-up of this deeply troubled state.” Instead, he asserts that the hardliners around Putin “have neither economic foundation nor public support” to escalate the war, and whoever takes power would simply dispose of them and look for “a way out of the accelerating catastrophe.”

This new leadership, Baev predicts, would make a “series of territorial concessions,” reassess Moscow’s dependence on its nuclear arsenal, and move to restart arms control and strategic stability talks with the United States. Belarussian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko would be replaced by “an unequivocally pro-European government” in the aftermath, in turn leading Moscow to rescind Putin’s September annexation and fully withdraw from Ukraine. Finally, sans Putin, Russia would be less inclined toward confrontation with the West, dealing China a major setback.

Similar predictions abound. Should Putin’s rule collapse, asserts Carl Bildt, co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, “the jingoists will be fighting an uphill battle” while democratic demands will gain steam. A decisive Ukrainian victory could usher in new leadership that “open[s] the door to revived economic partnership with the West,” William Drozdiak, founding executive director of the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Center, writes for the Wilson Center.

Some urge more ambitious plans. William Courtney, senior fellow at the influential and Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation, suggests sanctions should only be eased if Russia withdraws its troops from both Ukraine and Belarus. Rather than draw down U.S. forces in Europe, as was done after the Soviet collapse, the United States should consider “augment[ing] its forces in Central and Eastern Europe” and keeping the door open to further NATO expansion, while engaging Russia’s new leadership on democratic reforms.

Surprisingly more conciliatory is the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a prominent establishment think tank that nonetheless recognizes the grave risks of violence and instability in a Russian power vacuum, and calls for a “careful confidence-building dance” and maintaining a pledge to “welcome back” Russia into Europe if it reforms. (In a less surprising turn, CSIS still insists on maintaining sanctions, continuing military aid to Ukraine and pursuing Russian war criminals in case of a complete Russian collapse.)

In some cases, the predictions and policy suggestions seem at odds. At an event sponsored by the German Marshall Fund last year, analysts reportedly came to a consensus that “a post-Putin Russia would be worse than it is today,” with the possibility of “an even more Stalinist state,” a civil war, and “the disintegration and fragmentation of Russia, with pockets controlled by militias and warlords.”

Yet more recently, the Fund’s nonresident Senior Fellow Bart M. J. Szewczyk has argued that NATO governments primarily “need to step up their efforts to help Ukraine win” without mentioning these dire warnings raised during last year’s event. He dismisses as a “fallacy” that reciprocal security guarantees for Russia are essential for a viable peace and urges using a Russian military defeat to “end the so-called frozen conflict in Moldova, dissolve the Russian puppet statelet of Transnistria, and help Belarus democratize,” as well as to find this generation’s Mikhail Gorbachev, a Russian “successor they can do business with.”

Some common themes stand out. Few consider that what may follow Putin is not just violence and the country’s dissolution, as several experts have warned, but a more hardline government led by hawks more inclined to escalate the war and even less open to rapprochement with the West — and those who do barely dwell on the prospect, sometimes treating the possible negative consequences as an acceptable risk. This is despite the fact that, as Prigozhin’s munity has viscerally reminded us, almost all of Putin’s Russian critics today are more extreme, even ultranationalist. The Atlantic Council only mentions these hawks to urge Russian elites to “move beyond today’s misguided imperialism,” as if it would simply be a matter of will.

Several view Russia’s collapse as less a risk than an opportunity, either to extract concessions from Moscow beyond a withdrawal from Ukraine, or to further weaken and contain Russia. It’s assumed that any instability will play to the West’s advantage, whether by producing a liberal democracy in Belarus or undermining a Chinese government that, it’s presumed, would simply stand by and watch events unfold.

Maybe most striking, there is no mention of how the West can try to resolve the long-simmering grievances that have fed into today’s Russian aggression, or even that it should. Some advocate doubling down on ignoring Russian concerns about NATO expansion. It’s implied such grievances are exclusive to Putin, even though CIA Director William Burns has explicitly said NATO enlargement is widely opposed in Russia, and Gorbachev himself and other Russian liberals have echoed many of Putin’s criticisms of Western foreign policy.

It’s fair to ask whether the U.S. and European foreign policy establishments are repeating the mistakes of Iraq, when overly rosy predictions about the aftermath of regime change left them blindsided by the cascading repercussions of Hussein’s ouster. Those included a civil war and long-running ethnic conflict; the renewal of corrupt, authoritarian rule; a boost to the regional influence of a U.S. adversary; and violence and instability that spread inside and beyond the country’s borders, necessitating more open-ended military commitments, undermining U.S. global standing, and entailing steep human and economic costs.

Similar outcomes would be magnitudes more disastrous in the case of Russia, which is several times larger than Iraq, is more central to the global economy, sits on the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, is located on Europe’s doorstep, and spans virtually all of Eurasia. We can only hope there’s more serious analysis inside the Pentagon than what’s coming out of Western think tanks.

Link here.

Here is the article discussing the survey of the number of Ukrainians who personally know someone who has been killed or wounded in the war. Mercouris makes reference to this survey more than once in the above video. – Natylie

Survey Reveals Impact of Russian War: Nearly 80 Percent of Ukrainians Affected by Loss and Suffering

Kyiv Post, 7/1/23

In a recent survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), the devastating toll of Russia’s war against Ukraine has come to light. {https://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=eng&cat=reports&id=1254&page=1]

The study found that an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents have close relatives and friends who have either lost their lives or suffered injuries as a direct consequence of Russian aggression.

On average, each of the interviewees named seven such people.

Furthermore, the survey revealed that 64 percent of Ukrainians have at least one close relative or friend who sustained injuries during the conflict, with an average of five wounded loved ones per respondent.

Equally poignant is the revelation that 63 percent of participants have experienced the loss of at least one close relative or friend, amounting to an average of three deceased loved ones per respondent.

Gee, this whole neoliberal elitism and disdain for the general population thing sounds awfully familiar. – Natylie

By Prof. Paul Robinson, Canadian Dimension, 6/18/23

Theatre director Konstantin Bogomolov likes to shock. At the end of May, he was at it again, publishing an article denouncing his one-time ideological allies in Russia’s liberal intelligentsia for their attitude towards the Russian people and towards the war in Ukraine. Bogomolov was obviously out to provoke. Still, beneath its insulting rhetoric, his article contained a germ of truth about the prospects for Russia ever turning into a liberal democratic state.

Offending people on a regular basis has made Bogomolov famous, but whereas once he targeted conservatives, Putin, and the Russian state, more recently he’s been targeting the West and Russian liberals. Aggrieved by Western political correctness, in 2021 Bogomolov took up arms against it in an article entitled “The Rape of Europe 2.0.” In this, the director complained that Western Europe was constructing a “new ethical Reich” dominated by an “aggressive mix of queer activists, fem-fanatics, and eco-psychopaths.” Then in November 2022, the Financial Times described a play that Bogomolov directed as “clearly heralding the start of a new era in Russian culture, with new people and new authoritarian values centre stage.” “The uproarious laughter of the audience at jokes about blackface and homophobic slurs was nauseating,” said the FT.

In his latest article, Bogomolov writes that Russia contains a “society within a society” made up of people who perceive themselves as special. This is the intelligentsia, 90 percent of whom “call themselves Europeans and enlightened liberals. But in the depth of their souls, they despise their insufficiently successful, insufficiently advanced compatriots.” These “special people” would never agree to listen to the ordinary people, says Bogomolov, because if they did, ordinary people would tell them that “empire is good, and a whole lot of other things that are simply unacceptable in civilized European society.” Consequently, “the people must be silent.”

The war in Ukraine has horrified liberal intellectuals, writes Bogomolov, but not because they dislike the bloodshed. What really bothers them, he claims, is that it has deprived them of the opportunity to get subsidies from the state to produce works saying how terrible the state is. Russia’s intellectuals lament the loss of their former lives in which they could “sit on two stools, be progressive thieves, intelligent murderers, corrupt philanthropists, uneducated aristocrats, actors with conscience (an oxymoron), Europeanized racists … and so on and so forth.” The war has deprived them of the ability to “live in luxury” and sip “pumpkin lattes.”

The intelligentsia wants to go back to its good old life, says Bogomolov. But, he concludes: “In February 2022 [when Russian invaded Ukraine], the past died. … There is no turning back. … It’s necessary to stop viewing one’s country and one’s people with contempt and to listen to the hum of history and the voice of the people. Because their opinion matters.”

While exaggerated, Bogomolov’s complaints will ring true among many Russians. The sad fact is that the social gulf dividing the liberal intelligentsia and the mass of ordinary Russians is enormous, and the two parties do indeed often view each other with undisguised contempt.

Take, for instance, Moscow professor Sergei Medvedev, author of the Pushkin Prize-winning book The Return of the Russian Leviathan. Medvedev writes that the Russian “mass consciousness” is “embittered, alienated and provincial,” “undeveloped,” “archaic and superstitious.” In liberal discourse, the masses are often described as having the “morals of slaves,” and as such compared unfavourably with the enlightened intelligentsia, a contrast that is sometimes referred to as the “Two Russias Theory.” As one-time liberal icon Boris Nemtsov put it in his book, Testament of a Rebel, before his murder in 2015: “The Russian people, for the most part, is divided into two uneven groups. One part is the descendants of serfs, people with a slavish consciousness. There are very many of them and their leader is V.V. Putin. The other (smaller) part is born free, proud and independent. It does not have a leader but needs one.”

As for the idea that what liberals really hate about the war in Ukraine is the loss of their pumpkin lattes, that too contains a tiny bit of truth, although the point of complaint is more often cheese than coffee, good European cheeses having disappeared from Russian shops as a result of the sanctions and counter-sanctions that followed the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Medvedev again provides an example, writing that “Among the losses of recent years—the free press, fair elections, an independent court—what has hurt especially hard has been the disappearance of good cheese. … a piece of brie, a bottle of Italian chianti and a warm baguette … drew him [the Russian] close to Western values and were acts of social modernization. … Striking against cheese was equivalent to a strike against the quasi-Western idea of normality.”

Similarly, in a 2015 article Masha Gessen lamented the loss of Western cheeses in Russia due to sanctions, but found consolation in the fact that they could still be purchased at the Caviar House & Prunier Seafood Bar in a departure lounge at London’s Heathrow Airport. As she wrote:

“It’s my first time in Europe after all that’s happened,” the journalist and filmmaker Inna Denisova, a critic of the annexation of Crimea, wrote on her Facebook page …. “And of course it’s not seeing the historic churches and museums that has made me so emotional—it’s seeing cheese at the supermarket. My little Gorgonzola. My little mozzarella. My little Gruyère, chèvre and Brie. I held them all in my arms … and headed for the cash register.” There, Ms. Denisova wrote, she started crying.

Suffice it to say that the non-brie eating, non-Chianti sipping majority has a rather different perspective. While sentiments such as those above might not be the norm, their occasional expression has given Russian liberals a serious image problem.

Bogomolov’s article thus draws our attention to something quite important. Russian liberalism can never hope to gain power without finding some common ground with the Russian people, or at least of a sizeable section of it. But liberals and the rest of the population are so far removed from one another that this seems impossible. Doing what Bogomolov recommends—listening to the people—would mean accepting the unacceptable, including the war in Ukraine. Liberals don’t want to do this. Instead, they pin their hopes on the war going so badly for Russia that the Russian people changes its point of view. But that means wishing for their own country’s defeat in war, a stance that alienates them even further from the public. Frankly, it’s hard to see how they can escape from this conundrum. For now, all they can do is wait and pray for a miracle.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.

By Rick Sterling, Antiwar.com, 6/27/23

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is arguably the key person driving US foreign policy. He was mentored by Hillary Clinton with regime changes in Honduras, Libya and Syria. He was the link between Nuland and Biden during the 2014 coup in Ukraine. As reported by Seymour Hersh, Sullivan led the planning of the Nord Stream pipelines destruction in September 2022. Sullivan guides or makes many large and small foreign policy decisions. This article will describe Jake Sullivan’s background, what he says, what he has been doing, where the US is headed and why this should be debated.

Background

Jake Sullivan was born in November 1976. He describes his formative years like this:

“I was raised in Minnesota in the 1980s, a child of the later Cold War – of Rocky IV, the Miracle on Ice, and ‘Tear down this wall’. The 90s were my high school and college years. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Iron Curtain disappeared. Germany was reunified. An American-led alliance ended a genocide in Bosnia and prevented one in Kosovo. I went to graduate school in England and gave fiery speeches on the floor of the Oxford Union about how the United States was a force for good in the world.”

Sullivan’s education includes Yale (BA), Oxford (MA) and Yale again (JD). He went quickly from academic studies and legal work to political campaigning and government.

Sullivan made important contacts during his college years at elite institutions. For example, he worked with former Deputy Secretary of State and future Brookings Institution president, Strobe Talbott. After a few years clerking for judges, Sullivan transitioned to a law firm in his hometown of Minneapolis. He soon became chief counsel to Senator Amy Klobuchar who connected him to the rising Senator Hillary Clinton.

Mentored by Hillary

Sullivan became a key adviser to Hillary Clinton in her campaign to be Democratic party nominee in 2008. At age 32, Jake Sullivan became deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning when she became secretary of state. He was her constant companion, traveling with her to 112 countries.

The Clinton/Sullivan foreign policy was soon evident. In Honduras, Clinton clashed with progressive Honduras President Manuel Zelaya over whether to re-admit Cuba to the OAS. Seven weeks later, on June 28, Honduran soldiers invaded the president’s home and kidnapped him out of the country, stopping en route at the US Air Base. The coup was so outrageous that even the US ambassador to Honduras denounced it. This was quickly overruled as the Clinton/Sullivan team played semantics games to say it was a coup but not a “military coup.” Thus the Honduran coup regime continued to receive US support. They quickly held a dubious election to make the restoration of President Zelaya “moot”. Clinton is proud of this success in her book “Hard Choices.”

Two years later the target was Libya. With Victoria Nuland as State Department spokesperson, the Clinton/Sullivan team promoted sensational claims of a pending massacre and urged intervention in Libya under the “responsibility to protect.” When the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing a no-fly zone to protect civilians, the US, Qatar and other NATO members distorted that and started air attacks on Libyan government forces. Today, 12 years later, Libya is still in chaos and war. The sensational claims of 2011 were later found to be false.

When the Libyan government was overthrown in Fall 2011, the Clinton/Sullivan State Department and CIA plotted to seize the Libyan weapons arsenal. Weapons were transferred to the Syrian opposition. US Ambassador Stevens and other Americans were killed in an internecine conflict over control of the weapons cache.

Undeterred, Clinton and Sullivan stepped up their attempts to overthrow the Syrian government. They formed a club of western nations and allies called the “Friends of Syria.” The “Friends” divided tasks who would do what in the campaign to topple the sovereign state. Former policy planner at the Clinton/Sullivan State Department, Ann Marie Slaughter, called for “foreign military intervention.” Sullivan knew they were arming violent sectarian fanatics to overthrow the Syrian government. In an email to Hillary released by WikiLeaks, Sullivan noted “AQ is on our side in Syria.”

Biden’s Adviser During the 2014 Ukraine Coup

After being Clinton’s policy planner, Sullivan became President Obama’s director of policy planning (Feb 2011 to Feb 2013) then national security adviser to Vice President Biden (Feb 2013 to August 2014).

In his position with Biden, Sullivan had a close-up view of the February 2014 Ukraine coup. He was a key contact between Victoria Nuland, overseeing the coup, and Biden. In the secretly recorded conversation where Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine discuss how to manage the coup, Nuland remarks that Jake Sullivan told her “you need Biden.” Biden gave the “attaboy” and the coup was “midwifed” following a massacre of police AND protesters on the Maidan plaza.

Sullivan must have observed Biden’s use of the vice president’s position for personal family gain. He would have been aware of Hunter Biden’s appointment to the board of the Burisima Ukrainian energy company, and the reason Joe Biden demanded that the Ukrainian special prosecutor who was investigating Burisima to be fired. Biden later bragged and joked about this.

In December 2013, at a conference hosted by Chevron Corporation, Victoria Nuland said the US has spent five BILLION dollars to bring “democracy” to Ukraine.

Sullivan Helped Create Russiagate

Jake Sullivan was a leading member of the 2016 Hillary Clinton team which promoted Russiagate. The false claim that Trump was secretly contacting Russia was promoted initially to distract from negative news about Hillary Clinton and to smear Trump as a puppet of Putin. Both the Mueller and Durham investigations officially discredited the main claims of Russiagate. There was no collusion. The accusations were untrue, and the FBI gave them unjustified credence for political reasons.

Sullivan played a major role in the deception as shown by his “Statement from Jake Sullivan on New Report Exposing Trump’s Secret Line of Communication to Russia.”

Sullivan’s Misinformation

Jake Sullivan is a good speaker, persuasive and with a dry sense of humor. At the same time, he can be disingenuous. Some of his statements are false. For example, in June 2017 Jake Sullivan was interviewed by Frontline television program about US foreign policy and especially US-Russia relations. Regarding NATO’s overthrow of the Libyan government, Sullivan says, “Putin came to believe that the United States had taken Russia for a ride in the UN Security Council that authorized the use of force in Libya…. He thought he was authorizing a purely defensive mission…. Now on the actual language of the resolution, it’s plain as day that Putin was wrong about that.” Contrary to what Sullivan claims, the UN Security Council resolution clearly authorizes a no-fly zone for the protection of civilians, no more. It’s plain as day there was NOT authorization for NATO’s offensive attacks and “regime change.”

Planning the Nord Stream Pipeline Destruction

The bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, filled with 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, was a monstrous environmental disaster. The destruction also caused huge economic damage to Germany and other European countries. It has been a boon for US liquefied natural gas exports which have surged to fill the gap, but at a high price. Many European factories dependent on cheap gas have closed down. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.

Seymour Hersh reported details of How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline. He says, “Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.” A sabotage plan was prepared and officials in Norway and Denmark included in the plot. The day after the sabotage, Jake Sullivan tweeted

“I spoke to my counterpart Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe of Denmark about the apparent sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines. The U.S. is supporting efforts to investigate and we will continue our work to safeguard Europe’s energy security.”

Ellerman-Kingombe may have been one of the Danes informed in advance of the bombing. He is close to the US military and NATO command.

Since then, the Swedish investigation of Nord Stream bombing has made little progress. Contrary to Sullivan’s promise in the tweet, the US has not supported other efforts to investigate. When Russia proposed an independent international investigation of the Nord Stream sabotage at the UN Security Council, the resolution failed due to lack of support from the US and US allies. Hungary’s foreign minister recently asked,

“How on earth is it possible that someone blows up critical infrastructure on the territory of Europe and no one has a say, no one condemns, no one carries out an investigation?”

Economic Plans Devoid of Reality

Ten weeks ago Jake Sullivan delivered a major speech on “Renewing American Economic Leadership” at the Brookings Institution. He explains how the Biden administration is pursuing a “modern industrial and innovation strategy.” They are trying to implement a “foreign policy for the middle class” which better integrates domestic and foreign policies. The substance of their plan is to increase investments in semiconductors, clean energy minerals and manufacturing. However the new strategy is very unlikely to achieve the stated goal to “lift up all of America’s people, communities, and industries.” Sullivan’s speech completely ignores the elephant in the room: the costly US Empire including wars and 800 foreign military bases which consume about 60% of the total discretionary budget. Under Biden and Sullivan’s foreign policy, there is no intention to rein in the extremely costly military industrial complex. It is not even mentioned.

US Exceptionalism 2.0

In December 2018 Jake Sullivan wrote an essay titled “American Exceptionalism, Reclaimed.” It shows his foundational beliefs and philosophy. He separates himself from the “arrogant brand of exceptionalism” demonstrated by Dick Cheney. He also criticizes the “American first” policies of Donald Trump. Sullivan advocates for “a new American exceptionalism” and “American leadership in the 21^st Century.”

Sullivan has a shallow Hollywood understanding of history: “The United States stopped Hitler’s Germany, saved Western Europe from economic ruin, stood firm against the Soviet Union, and supported the spread of democracy worldwide.” He believes “The fact that the major powers have not returned to war with one another since 1945 is a remarkable achievement of American statecraft.”

Jake Sullivan is young in age but his ideas are old. The United States is no longer dominant economically or politically. It is certainly not “indispensable.” More and more countries are objecting to US bullying and defying Washington’s demands. Even key allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are ignoring US requests. The trend toward a multipolar world is escalating. Jake Sullivan is trying to reverse the trend but reality and history are working against him. Over the past four or five decades, the US has gone from being an investment, engineering and manufacturing powerhouse to a deficit spending consumer economy waging perpetual war with a bloated military industrial complex.

Instead of reforming and rebuilding the US, the national security state expends much of its energy and resources trying to destabilize countries deemed to be “adversaries”.

Conclusion

Previous national security advisers Henry Kissinger and Zbignew Brzezinski were very influential.

Kissinger is famous for wooing China and dividing the communist bloc. Jake Sullivan is now wooing India in hopes of dividing that country from China and the BRICS alliance (Brazil,Russia, India, China, South Africa).

Brzezinski is famous for plotting the Afghanistan trap. By destabilizing Afghanistan with foreign terrorists beginning 1978, the US induced the Soviet Union to send troops to Afghanistan at the Afghan government’s request. The result was the collapse of the progressive Afghan government, the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and 40 years of war and chaos.

On 28 February 2022, just four days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, Jake Sullivan’s mentor, Hillary Clinton, was explicit: “Afghanistan is the model.” It appears the US intentionally escalated the provocations in Ukraine to induce Russia to intervene. The goal is to “weaken Russia.” This explains why the US has spent over $100 billion sending weapons and other support to Ukraine. This explains why the US and UK undermined negotiations which could have ended the conflict early on.

The Americans who oversaw the 2014 coup in Kiev, are the same ones running US foreign policy today: Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan. Prospects for ending the Ukraine war are very poor as long as they are in power.

Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be contacted at RSterling1@gmail.com.

Apparently Sergey Karaganov is doubling down on his crazy idea of Russia potentially using nuclear weapons to get the US to act more rationally. His latest article can be found here.

Emphasis via bolding is mine. – Natylie

Fyodor Lukyanov is the editor-in-chief of the journal “Russia in Global Affairs”, Chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (SVOP)

By Fyodor Lukyanov, Profil, 6/21/23 (translation to English via Google Translate)

Sergey Karaganov’s article “The Use of Nuclear Weapons Can Save Humanity from a Global Catastrophe” caused a violent reaction, which was probably part of the author’s plans. Public discussion about the permissibility of the use of nuclear weapons has been taboo, in fact, since the moment when their sole use by the United States against Japan led to certain consequences.

The relations of the nuclear superpowers in the last century were based on the presumption that any use would lead to total atomic war and the destruction of civilization. Confidence in the inevitability of such a scenario, fear of its implementation, made the nuclear bomb not a battlefield weapon, but a deterrent – both the enemy and the “hotheads” at home. And when someone dares to raise the question of the need to return the nuclear component to the status of conventional weapons, albeit incredibly powerful, it causes shock and indignation.

Your humble servant is not an expert on nuclear weapons and the principles of deterrence and does not pretend to be. But the topic raised by a senior colleague affects everyone, so I will venture to speculate from the position of an informed layman.

Deterrence as a child of its time

Everyone is free to evaluate Sergey Karaganov’s arguments in their own way, especially since they range from applied to religious. You can’t argue with one thing – today the risk of nuclear war is higher than at any time since the early 1960s. The reasons for this are the general increase in aggressiveness in international politics, and strategic frivolity as a result of thirty years of peace under American hegemony, and disbelief that a full-fledged nuclear war can really happen, that is, the departure of existential fear . The latter serves as a starting point. Only the return of the real fear of a nuclear apocalypse can sober up Western elites, who are ready to impose supremacy on the rest of the world by force, no matter what.The goal stated in the article is to “break the will” of the collective West, forcing it to abandon the desire for superiority. The last resort is a nuclear strike on a “group of targets in a number of countries.”

Let’s leave aside the moral aspect, with which everything is clear, the author himself recognizes the enormity of the proposed action. Let’s focus on the conceptual scheme, how effective it could be for “sobering up”.

Nuclear deterrence and the principle of mutually assured destruction (HLG) is a product of the political and technological development of the second half of the twentieth century, the era after World War II. It was a unique period of relative orderliness of international relations, based on a system of institutions – organizations and norms of varying degrees of formalization. Thanks to this orderliness, it was possible to regulate the interaction of the main players, primarily the two superpowers.

The presence of an approximate military-political, economic and ideological balance was cemented by the nuclear factor – first the appearance of atomic weapons in the USSR, then the achievement of Soviet-American parity. The degree of orderliness should not be exaggerated, but it was greater than ever before, and probably ever in the future.

A crisis of the old order

The end of the Cold War meant the disappearance of balance in most respects, but the institutional framework remained unchanged. It was assumed that there was no need to rebuild it, because in the absence of confrontation, the institutions would finally work as they should. The nuclear factor also remained unchanged – the principle of the HLG was preserved even during the period of Russia’s maximum weakness in the first years after the collapse of the USSR.

In practice, the viability of the institutions created in the last century and working effectively then began to decline rapidly – their mechanism was intended for a different alignment of forces and interests. Theoretically, it would be necessary to discuss the other infrastructure of international organizations and agree on their structure. But the victorious West did not consider it necessary. After all, the very system of institutions, starting with the UN, initially embodied American ideas. The Soviet Union agreed to them after World War II, because it had no doubt that it would play a leading role in any design.In other words, the stability of the world order of the second half of the last century was determined by Western design and the presence of a balance of power within it, which was provided by the USSR.

Without balance, the structure staggered and began to crumble. Hence the dysfunction of structures, from the United Nations to many sectoral and regional institutions, including those that were purely Western, such as the WTO, which arose on the basis of the GATT. They cannot cope with the heterogeneity of the world. Against this background, other types of associations are beginning to take shape, less formalized, including a smaller number of participants, designed for a more flexible approach. A fixed world order is not expected in the foreseeable future – it will not be possible to regulate multi-level international strife without a qualitative simplification of the picture. And it is just not expected, if you do not consider catastrophic scenarios.

Deterrence as an institution

Nuclear deterrence is one of the fundamental institutions of the second half of the last century. It did not take shape immediately, for the first decade and a half of the existence of atomic weapons, America and the USSR probed possible boundaries by provoking exacerbations. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the leaders of the two nuclear superpowers faced that very fear. And they finally fixed the inadmissibility of direct conflict.

Nuclear weapons are indeed capable of destroying humanity, and the institution of deterrence was considered almost unshakable. You can play different games, but you can’t put the existence of the planet on the line. Yes, no one will. The same Sergei Karaganov wrote a few years ago: the depth and scale of international contradictions are such that in former times they would have led to a world war long ago, only the presence of nuclear stops weapons. Now he comes to a different conclusion. The United States is not afraid to unleash a full-fledged war against a nuclear superpower, albeit by proxy.There is only one step before a world war, it will be universal thermonuclear, it may turn out that the only way to avoid it is to arrange a preventive nuclear war, but a local one.

Here it is reasonable to ask the question: why a nuclear attack against another state / bloc possessing nuclear weapons will not lead to a rapid escalation to the very thermonuclear universal, that is, an exchange of strikes between Russia and the United States? The entire system of relations in the nuclear sphere, as noted by theorists of deterrence, is built primarily not on strategy and technology, but on psychology. And this psychological game should discourage the enemy from even the thought of a possible nuclear attack.

The use of nuclear weapons means the end of the game and, in fact, nullifies its special role, turning it into a very powerful means of destruction. And competition in the means of destruction is a “normal” war, only in this case of a cyclopean scale. Mutually assured destruction may not happen, but the all-encompassing damage will be such that the participating countries and the world as a whole will change dramatically in horrific ways.

Is it possible to go back to basics?

Sergey Karaganov emphasizes that nuclear strikes are a last resort, and expects that the movement along the “ladder of escalation” itself will force the opposite side to realize the level of threat and move on to a conversation on the merits – how to start getting out of the clinch and remove contradictions. That is, he believes it is possible to return to the original institutional meaning of nuclear weapons – the production of absolute fear that limits the behavior of participants.

But, as mentioned above, at that time it was part of the overall system of balanced management of international processes. Yes, we can say that the existence of that system was largely determined by the presence of nuclear weapons, but it was not limited to this factor. And when other elements of the structure began to fall off after the Cold War, it turned out that nuclear deterrence as such was not enough to provide the previous behavioral limitations.

It is assumed that with the help of fear, on the escalation of the terminal threat, it is possible to recreate a system of mutually acceptable rules. This logic was applied at a lower level in December 2021, when Russia put forward ultimatums on long-term security guarantees, threatening “military-technical measures” in case of refusal. The nature of the measures manifested itself with the start of a special military operation on the territory of Ukraine and shocked the Western elites, who treated the ultimatum with disdain. This, however, did not lead to a willingness to enter into a discussion with Russia about its concerns, the effect was the opposite.

It can be argued: the comparison is incorrect, since the NWO does not pose a direct threat to the United States and its NATO allies, and nuclear escalation does. But this is where the very elites whose irresponsibility Sergei Karaganov complains about come into play. No matter how you treat them, but so far they demonstrate skill in managing public opinion and mobilizing in support of their policies. Even though objectively this policy is to the detriment of the welfare and security of their citizens.

It turns out that the plan is to return nuclear deterrence to the status it had in the second half of the twentieth century by inflating the level of threat. And to return the elites of the type that were in power at that time. Something romantic-nostalgic. It is not clear where such personnel could be obtained today – just look at alternative forces in the leading Western countries. Moreover, apart from everything else, legitimizing the use of nuclear weapons in someone’s eyes outside the obvious situation described in doctrinal documents (a threat to the existence of the state) looks like an impossible task.

Are we going to bang?

Immediately after the Americans detonated the atomic bomb in 1945, George Orwell wrote a short essay, “You and the Atomic Bomb.” He had no doubt that some others (at least the Russians and the Chinese) would acquire these weapons, and if they remained at the level of not only super-destructive, but also difficult to obtain and very expensive, then they could be useful: “For an indefinite period, it will put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of establishing” a world that will not be peace. That is, Orwell understood from the very beginning that the meaning of this invention is not in application, but in availability. According to Orwell, turning it into another “mere weapon”

Now nuclear weapons are becoming more and more accessible both technologically and materially. Are reflections on the likelihood of using the prerogative of only Russian minds looking for a way out of a difficult military-strategic situation? Of course not. Arguments on this subject are gradually filling the world public space. This confirms what has been said above – the institution of deterrence, like other institutions of the last century, is in crisis. A sharp increase in the degree of discussion does not lead to the strengthening of the institution, but to its final collapse. And the application will not be a way to make you come to your senses, but a formal removal of the general taboo with unpredictable consequences.Further actions will no longer be dictated by calculations of one kind or another, but by reactions to each next step of the other side. Playing nuclear peers is a gambling activity. But in the event of a breakdown, the net damage will multiply any hypothetical benefits for everyone.

The taboo on the use of nuclear weapons is undoubtedly weakening. You need to prepare for everything. And rational behavior here is not to break the taboo completely, preventively, but to try to preserve it as at least some kind of limiter. This does not mean that the topic itself cannot be touched, quite the opposite. It is sanctimonious to shy away from the very thought of application – an ostrich approach. In this sense, Sergey Karaganov should be thanked for such a direct statement of position. Its discussion should become part of the development of a new understanding of strategic stability to replace the one that can no longer be restored.