By Mike Gilligan

Like Paul Keating, Australians should be angry. Australia’s security is at risk. No other nation is so foolish, so self-delusional, so divorced from the basics of statecraft, nor so feckless with its citizens’ security in pursuit of America’s objectives. Shouldn’t we be white hot with rage at this government’s abdication of sovereignty? 

Australia’s security is in trouble, of our own leaders doing. The recent Labor Party conference confirmed our plight. We have been told that the dominating motive of Prime Minister Albanese is electoral success. All else, including national security, is subjugate. Dicey, especially when the malaise goes beyond politics, to ignorance.

When George Brandis, a former Attorney General and High Commissioner to London gratuitously dismissed Paul Keating’s criticism of NATO spreading its tentacles to Asia, as “intemperate”, he unwittingly demonstrated why we all should be angry. Despite Brandis’ lofty legal and geopolitical career he demonstrated unencumbered ignorance of the most profound risk to Australia’s security in observing:

“In the case of the ANZUS Treaty, that includes a defence guarantee analogous with Article 5 of NATO’s foundational document, the North Atlantic Treaty.” 

Analogous? The inclusion in ANZUS referred to by Brandis is the antithesis of the defence guarantee in Article 5. The words in ANZUS are designed to cover the fact that such a guarantee was specifically sought by Australia but rejected by the United States. ANZUS is a vehicle for wishful thinking and misrepresentation about the depth of American commitment to Australia’s security, exactly as exhibited by Brandis.

If someone as eminent as Brandis has not grasped that, it’s a safe bet that all of Australia’s leaders, at least over the last decade, are as uninformed. Before that, every Prime Minister from Gough Whitlam onwards adopted defence policy which dealt with the risk of relying on America. Because Australia had experienced its dangers, judged them unacceptable and chose self-reliance. Today, after forty years of clear-minded working to that end, it’s as if it never existed. We are at America’s pleasure.

Albanese informed the Labor conference: “We have to analyse the world as it is rather than how we would want it to be”. Indeed. There can be no room for wishful thinking in our security arrangements. But how else could it be that Australia joins in an American war against China knowing that the US has excluded us from the mutual security guarantee which it affords all thirty-two of its other major allies, across Asia and Europe?

Perhaps Albanese is merely ignorant. He does not know that the “world as it is” and has been for seventy years, is the US avoiding a security commitment to Australia. Which means he is just as ignorant that, for forty of those years, Australia’s defence policy had addressed the way to deal with it: through a tenacious focus on sovereignty. And ignorant also that it was only with Obama’s mission to PM Gillard in 2010, squired by failed Labor leader Kim Beazley, that our sovereignty and self- reliance began to be eroded. Ignorance of “the world as it is” is the most generous interpretation of Albanese’s fealty to America.

We should be angry because the government’s sellout is breathtakingly compounded by conceit. Defence Minister Marles has evoked the ghosts of past Labor prime ministers in self -serving allusion. What could be more arrogant than to cite Prime Minister John Curtin, who stood alone and defiant against Britain’s Churchill? Curtin saved our nation. Albanese is handing it over for America’s use and paying America for the act. For electoral gain. No word exists for such travesty.

We should be angry at the American government patronising us. Secretary of State Blinken on his recent visit to Australia, damned Australia with superlatives: “we have no greater friend, no greater partner, no greater ally than Australia.” Of course, no other nation has been so irresponsible. Left unsaid by Blinken is that US adoration flows freely from Australia not commanding a security obligation from the US, unlike its other major allies. Blinken well knows that no other nation is so foolish, so self- delusional, so divorced from the basics of statecraft, nor so feckless with its citizens’ security in pursuit of America’s objectives. That is why Australia has no peer as an ally.

We should be angry because we are paying for America’s war effort, at vast cost to our own security in multifarious ways. The AUKUS nuclear submarines are designed to hunt and kill Chinese submarines in their waters and to attack China’s high value land points. That is what they will be used for.

Australia is exploited by its AUKUS partners. US and UK enjoy mutual security guarantees. But neither offers Australia any surety. Britain already has demonstrated a flair for abandoning Australia. Abandonment by both AUKUS partners is a distinct risk, unaddressed by any government. In short Australia bears the risk for American and British objectives in AUKUS as well as the curdling cost.

Minister Marles recently announced the acquisition of 200 Tomahawk cruise missiles – designed to attack land targets, precisely, by flying under and around air defences, preprogrammed, and guided from space. China’s territory is their object, to be attacked from our surface ships operating off China with the US Navy. And the purpose of Marles’ new anti-radiation missiles is to destroy China’s missile defences. All part of Australia moving to the “war footing” espoused by visiting Congressman Gallagher.

Such subsidy of America’s war effort is beyond sanity. None of this is cost-effective for the defence of Australia.

And we should be angry at the deceptiveness of the Albanese government’s policy writings on Defence. For decades our policy papers were frank and informative. The product of experience. The challenge was spelt out honestly. Marles’ Defence Strategic Review (DSR) gives an impression that we are creating an independent means to repel the superpower of China. Yet our military planning pursues integration with US forces to attack China. The contrived concept of holding an enemy at risk over distance is a mendacious cover for us combining with American forces against China. The implied asymmetry in power for us has never been addressed.

The DSR was drafted by an academic manicured by America, now part of the US influencers at Sydney University’s United States Studies Centre.

Next the government commissioned a review of our Navy’s fleet of surface ships. Led by a retired US Admiral. Scheduled to be revealed any day now. Shouldn’t we be white hot with rage at this government’s abdication of sovereignty – that the take- over is so flaunted?

And finally, like Paul Keating, we should be angry that our nation has been humiliated by its Government. Amongst President Biden’s fine words, when Prime Minister Albanese is toasted at the coming state dinner in Washington in October, no-one will expose the chump forsaking our nation’s interests to get there. That goes without saying.

https://johnmenadue.com/the-world-as-it-is-albaneses-fealty-to-america/

READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP.

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

And Managing Not to Notice

by David Bromwich and Tom Engelhardt Posted on August 31, 2023

Originally posted at TomDispatch.

A new war, a new alibi. When we think about our latest war – the one that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just six months after our Afghan War ended so catastrophically – there is a hidden benefit. As long as American minds are on Ukraine, we are not thinking about planetary climate disruption. This technique of distraction obeys the familiar mechanism that psychologists have called displacement. An apparently new thought and feeling becomes the substitute for harder thoughts and feelings you very much want to avoid.

Every news story about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest demand for American or European weaponry also serves another function: the displacement of a story about, say, the Canadian fires which this summer destroyed a forest wilderness the size of the state of Alabama and 1,000 of which are still burning as this article goes to press. Of course, there is always the horrific possibility that Ukraine could pass from a “contained” to a nuclear war, as out of control as those Canadian fires. Yet we are regularly assured that the conflict, close to the heart of Europe, is under careful supervision. The war has a neatly framed villain (Vladimir Putin) and – thanks to both the U.S. and NATO – a great many good people containing him. What could possibly go wrong?

A fantasy has taken root among well-meaning liberals. Ukraine, they believe, is the “good war” people like them have been searching for since 1945. “This is our Spain,” young enthusiasts have been heard to say, referring to the Spanish Republican war against fascism. In Ukraine in the early 2020s, unlike Spain in the late 1930s, the Atlantic democracies will not falter but will go on “as long as it takes.” Also, the climate cause will be assisted along the way, since Russia is a large supplier of natural gas and oil, and the world needs to unhook itself from both.

That theory got tested a year ago, with the underwater sabotage of Russia’s Nordstream natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. President Biden, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland all welcomed that environmental disaster. In an eventually deleted message the former Polish foreign minister and war advocate Radislaw Sikorski tweeted thanks to the U.S. for what he took to be a transparently American operation. The American media, however, treated the attack as an imponderable mystery, some reports even suggesting that Russia might have destroyed its own invaluable pipeline for reasons yet to be fathomed. Then, in a February 2023 article, the independent investigative reporter Seymour Hersh traced the attack to the U.S., and later Western reports would come halfway to his conclusion by assigning credit to Ukraine, or a pro-Ukrainian group. As of late summer, all reporting on the Nordstream disaster seems to have stopped. What has not stopped is the killing. The numbers of dead and wounded in the Ukraine war are now estimated at nearly half a million, with no end in sight.

The Nordstream wreck was only one attention-getting catastrophe within the greater horror that a war always is. An act of industrial sabotage on a vast scale, it was also an act of environmental terrorism, causing the largest methane leak in the history of the planet. According to a report in Forbes, “The subsequent increase in greenhouse gases… was equivalent to as much as 32% of Denmark’s annual emissions.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an illegal and immoral act, but the adjective that usually follows illegal and immoral is “unprovoked.” In truth, this war was provoked. A contributing cause, impossible to ignore, was the eastward extension of NATO, always moving closer to the western borders of Russia, in the years from 1991 to 2022. That expansion was gradual but relentless. Consider the look of such a policy to the country – no longer Communist and barely a great power – which, in 2013, American leaders again began to describe as an adversary.

With the end of the Cold War in 1991 (the very global conflict that gave NATO its reason for being), the eastward projection of the alliance accelerateddramatically. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, all former members of the Soviet bloc, were brought into NATO in 1999; and 2004 witnessed an even richer harvest of former satellites of the USSR: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, all either near to or bordering on Russia. Then came the Bucharest Summit Declaration of April 2008: Georgia and Ukraine, the NATO heads of state announced, would be given the opportunity to apply for membership at some future date. If you want to know why Putin and his advisers might have considered this a security concern for Russia, look at a map.

Counterfeit Solidarity

The United States has supported Ukraine with copious donations of weapons, troop-trainers, and logistical and technical advisers left to work the interoperable targeting equipment we “share” with that country. Between 2014 and 2022, NATO drilled at least 10,000 Ukrainian troops per year in advanced methods of warfare. In the war itself, weapons supplies have climbed steadily from Stinger and Javelin missiles to Abrams tanks (whose greenhouse-gas environmental footprint is 0.6 miles per gallon of gas, or 300 gallons every eight hours of use), to cluster bombs, and most recently the promise of F-16s.

All this has put fresh wind in the sails of the weapons manufacturers of the American military-industrial-congressional complex. In May 2022, the CEO of Lockheed Martin thanked President Biden personally for his kindness. F-16s, after all, are big money-makers. As for the additional fuel that ordinary Ukrainians require, it is now being sequestered underground by Ukrainian commodities traders at enormous environmental risk.

Wars and their escalation – the mass destruction of human life that is almost invariably accompanied by destruction of the natural world – happen because preparations for war bring leaders ever closer to the brink. So close, in fact, that it feels natural to go on. That was certainly the case with Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, and the escalation that followed. Examples of such escalation are indeed the rule, not the exception in time of war.

Think of the invention, testing, and strategic planning that led to the dropping of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In Jon Else’s extraordinary documentary The Day After Trinity, the physicist Freeman Dyson offered a sober analysis of the momentum driving the decision to use the bomb:

“Why did the bomb get dropped on people at Hiroshima? I would say: it’s almost inevitable that it would have happened – simply because all the bureaucratic apparatus existed by that time to do it. The air force was ready and waiting. There had been prepared big airfields in the island of Tinian in the Pacific from which you could operate. The whole machinery was ready.”

In the same sense, all the apparatus was in place for the war in Ukraine. Joe Biden, a conventional cold warrior, has always had a temperament rather like that of President Harry Truman. The Biden of 2023, like the Truman of 1945, comes across as impulsive, not deliberate. He likes to pop off, thinks he is appreciated for taking risks, and fancies himself particularly good under pressure. This state of mind partly accounts for his decision to label Vladimir Putin a “war criminal”: never mind that such a description would apply with equal truth to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for launching the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a war that Biden, as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, supported unreservedly. His insistence that “this man [Putin] cannot remain in power for god’s sake” and his belief (as of mid-July 2023) that “Putin has already lost the war” exhibit the same pattern of effusive moralism accompanied by a denial of inconvenient facts.

A different perspective was offered by Anatol Lieven at the Responsible Statecraft website:

“We are repeatedly told that the war in Ukraine is a war to defend democracy and help secure it across the world. Our American, French and British ancestors (and even the Russians, from March to October 1917) were also told the same about the Allied side in the First World War. It did not quite work out that way, and nothing guarantees that it will happen that way in Ukraine.”

In the case of Ukraine, such false hopes have been pushed far more freely by the media than by the military. War is a drug, and they have chosen to be the dealers.

The Media Airbrush

War propaganda can be delivered in picturesque as well as popular ways. A prime example of the former approach was Roger Cohen’s August 6th front-page New York Times story, “Putin’s Forever War,” based on a recent visit. (“I spent a month in Russia.”) The apologetic intent here is underscored in the headline, which picks up an epithet once applied to the disastrous American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and slyly transfers it to Russia. The coverage is all in the same key, over six full pages of the paper Times, bulked out with color photographs of cheerleaders, churches, dank stairways, military processions, statues, tombs, and models on a fashion shoot.

From the start, Cohen adopts the voice of a prophetic observer of a new war, even as he makes it sound a good deal like the old war with the Soviet Union. “Along the way,” he writes,

“I encountered fear and fervid bellicosity, as well as stubborn patience to see out a long war. I found that Homo sovieticus, far from dying out, has lived on in modified form, along with habits of subservience. So with the aid of relentless propaganda on state television, the old Putin playbook – money, mythmaking and menace of murder – has just about held.”

The name Putin appears with great regularity as the article proceeds, doing extra duty for the historical analysis and exposition that are mostly absent.

“I first visited Moscow,” writes Cohen, “four decades ago, when it was a city devoid of primary colors eking out existence in the penury of Communism.” But Moscow has changed and the reason is Putin: “He opened Russia, only to slam it shut to the West; he also modernized it, while leaving the thread to Russia’s past unbroken.” So here, as in many Western accounts, the problem turns out to be not just Putin but the fact that he embodies a backward, naturally vengeful, country and its irretrievable past. The people of Russia are lost and – a few courageous dissidents excepted – they are given over to primitivism, hopeless nostalgia, and of course aggression. Putin is their epitome.

He “governs from the shadows” – no point in skipping the vampire trope – “unlike Stalin, whose portrait was everywhere. There is no cult of the leader of the kind Fascist systems favored. Yet mystery has its own magnetism. The reach of Mr. Putin’s power touches all.” There is, in other words, a cult of personality without either the personality or the display that belong to such a cult: “Putinism is a postmodern compilation of contradictions. It combines mawkish Soviet nostalgia with Mafia capitalism, devotion to the Orthodox Church with the spread of broken families.” It did not take a month in Russia to write those sentences. A day at the New York Times would have sufficed.

The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev finally emerges as the hero of this story. Nowhere quoted, however, is the Gorbachev who, between 2004 and 2018, contributed eight op-eds to the New York Times, the sixth of which focused on climate change and the eighth on the perilous renewal of a nuclear arms race. Gorbachev was deeply troubled by George W. Bush’s decision to withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (which Putin called a “mistake”) and Donald Trump’s similar decision to pull out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Does anyone doubt that Gorbachev would have been equally disturbed by the Biden administration’s virtual severance of diplomatic relations with Russia?

In an October 25, 2018, op-ed, Gorbachev summed up the American tendency throughout the preceding two decades: “The United States has in effect taken the initiative in destroying the entire system of international treaties and accords that served as the underlying foundation for peace and security following World War II.” Notice that the bellicose American “initiative” began well before the ascent of Vladimir Putin and, according to Gorbachev, it possessed – like the expansion of NATO – a dynamism that operated independently of developments inside Russia.

Return to Earth

The major news of the summer, besides the apparent lack of success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, has been Russia’s sudden cancellation of the Black Sea grain deal – a decision prompted in some measure by a July 17th Ukrainian drone attack on the Kerch Bridge. This is the bridge that has served to connect Russia to Crimea, after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014; and the drone strike was part of a  continuing Ukrainian-NATO effort to undermine – by sanctions, among other means – Russia’s export of its own grain. A typical Western media report about these developments in the Washington Post declined to associate the two events; as if the Ukrainian attack had occurred by coincidence just “hours before” the Russian termination of the deal and its own attacks on Ukrainian grain storage facilities. The events are referred to as “twin developments,” and that is all.

In a recent article at TomDispatch, Michael Klare recalled the public shame that never properly attached to U.S. energy companies for “choosing to perpetuate practices known to accelerate climate change and global devastation. Among the most egregious, the decision of top executives of the ExxonMobil Corporation – the world’s largest and wealthiest privately-owned oil company – to continue pumping oil and gas for endless decades after their scientists warned them about the risks of global warming.”

Such environmental indifference, as Klare rightly notes, persisted long after the reality of climate disruption was recognized by the polluters. No less irresponsible has been the choice to perpetuate the war habit even as we recognize the inseparable role wars have always played in the destruction of the planet. The Ukraine war was launched by Russia in an exertion of brutal short-term opportunism, but it was also provoked by the United States as one of a long series of wars and regime-change operations that were meant to give the U.S. uncontested leadership of a unipolar world.

All of us now inhabit a war planet threatened in other devastating ways as well. Our escape will not be achieved through a new “norms-based” international order in which NATO, with the U.S. at the helm, replaces the United Nations as the global authority presiding over war and peace. The “next war on the horizon,” whether in the Baltic Sea, the Persian Gulf, or Taiwan, is a matter of grave interest to the citizens on all those horizons who may want anything but to serve as its field of exercise. Meanwhile, the lesson for the United States should be simple enough: the survival of the planet cannot wait for the world’s last superpower to complete our endless business of war.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

David Bromwich, a TomDispatch regular, is the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, has written on the Constitution and America’s wars for The New York Review of Books and The Huffington Post and is the author of American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us.

https://original.antiwar.com/david-bromwich/2023/08/30/living-on-a-war-planet/

READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP.

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

INTRODUCTION

America’s war against Russia started on 25 July 1945, when the new U.S. President, Harry S. Truman, accepted the advice of his hero, General Dwight Eisenhower, to accept the viewpoint of the UK’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill (an admirer and follower of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes), who was saying that the U.S. Government, in an alliance with the UK Government, ought to take control over the Soviet Union, or else the Soviet Union would take control over the entire world. Here’s the way that Eisenhower put it in his 1948 memoir, Crusade in Europe (page 442), where he described his advice to Truman at the Potsdam Conference, regarding whether the United States should work with the Soviet Union to end World War Two by conquering Japan, or, instead, the U.S. should do it alone (at that time, Soviet forces, as had been agreed previously with U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were massed in Manchuria, prepared to swarm into and conquer Japan to help the U.S. to conquer Japan): “I deprecated [to Truman] the Red Army’s engaging in that war. I foresaw certain difficulties arising out of such participation and suggested that, at the very least, we ought not to put ourselves in the position of requesting or begging for Soviet aid [which wouldn’t have been actually ‘begged’ for, because it was already massed there and expecting to — and DID, on August 9th — invade Japan in support of the U.S. to conquer Japan; so: Ike was blatantly lying there.]. It was my personal opinion that no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war [that “the Red Army” already actually were in] unless victory [by the U.S. alone] could come before they could get in.” This was Ike’s way to persuade Truman, who already hated the Soviet Union and despised FDR for having allied America with the Soviet Union, that Churchill was right, that after WW II, the UK and U.S. must work together to defeat the Soviet Union, which under FDR was actually America’s ally. Truman believe Ike that if the U.S. wouldn’t take over the world, then the Soviet Union would. Eisenhower’s advice to reverse FDR’s policy was exactly in line with that anti-FDR position from Churchill.

Here is how Truman expressed the matter to his wife, Bess, on the night of 25 July 1945, after Truman had told Stalin that day, that America would never accept the governmental legitimacy of any of the communist governments that were taking control there after the Soviet victory against their previous Hitler-controlled governments: “There are some things we can’t agree to. Russia and Poland have gobbled up a big hunk of Germany and want Britain and us to agree. I have flatly refused. We have unalterably opposed the recognition of police governments in the German Axis countries. I told Stalin until we had free access to those countries and our nationals had their property rights restored, so far as we were concerned ther’d never be recognition. He seems to like it when I hit him with a hammer.” But actually, Stalin was stunned by the new American President’s hostility toward Russia. Truman showed himself to Stalin that day as the anti-FDR. That was the beginning of the Cold War, and of the Rhodes-planned “Special Relationship” between the UK and America (to take over the world, now under the leadership of the U.S. instead of the UK), and thus the transformation of the Founders-created U.S. War Department with no standing army, into the new ‘Defense’ Department with a standing (permanent) army, and of FDR’s OSS into Truman’s CIA. Ever since 25 July 1945, it has been the war to conquer Russia, that almost all Presidents since then have been waging, and that Biden now is aiming to complete by placing U.S. missiles into Ukraine just five minutes from Moscow.

AMERICA’S ALLIES TO CONQUER RUSSIA:

According to Wikipedia’s “List of military aid to Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian War”, the following countries have donated weapons and other assets to Ukraine in order to defeat Russia in the war there: Albania, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Montenegro, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK, and U.S.

That’s 49 countries which have helped Ukraine in its war-effort against Russia. In addition, there have been about $3 billion of weapons provided by the European Union, including a half-billion of “lethal weapons” under its Euroean Peace Facility, which is an off-budget EU financing instrument.

Maybe it currently all totals around a half-trillion dollars, to defeat Russia.

On 3 May 2023, Britain’s Economist magazine headlined “How much is Russia spending on its invasion of Ukraine? By historical standards, it’s a puny amount. That tells you three big things”. They wrote that

in consultation with various experts, and using our own analysis, we have come up with a figure. In essence this involved taking the Russian government’s pre-invasion forecast of what it would spend on defence and security, and comparing that with what it is actually spending. That would put the cost of its invasion at 5trn roubles ($67bn) a year, or 3% of GDP.

That is, by historical standards, a puny amount. We compiled estimates of spending on other wars — some involving Russia, some not (see chart). At the peak of the second world war the USSR spent 61% of GDP on the war effort. Around the same time America spent about 50% of GDP on its military forces.

So, Russia is spending only around one seventh as much on the war in Ukraine as its enemies are.

WHAT RUSSIA’S ENEMIES ARE FIGHTING FOR IN UKRAINE

On the U.S.-and-allied side, the goal is to add Russia to the American empire that commenced on 25 July 1945. Against it, on Russia’s side, the goal is to prevent that from happening. The Ukrainian and very hot phase of America’s war to grab Russia — the culmination to Truman’s Coold War — started in America’s (Obama’s) 2014 coup that grabbed control over Ukraine and turned it against Russia.

The war in Ukraine started in 2014, when the U.S. Government under Barack Obama perpetrated a coup d’etat that replaced a democratically elected and neutral Ukrainian President by a U.S.-chosen regime that was rabidly anti-Russia. Obama did it because Ukraine has the Russian border that’s the closest to The Kremlin, just 300 miles and five minutes of missile-flying time away from blitz-nuking it and so eliminating Russia’s central command far too fast for Putin to push the button to release Russia’s retaliatory weapons. As NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said, “You have to remember that the war didn’t start in 2022” but  instead “The war started in 2014.” However, Western media pretend that it started on 24 February 2022 when Russia finally invaded Ukraine in order to prevent America from being able to position its missiles 300 miles away from The Kremlin. Those 49 countries side with the U.S. regime against Russia, to help the U.S. regime to grab Russia, after it had grabbed Ukraine via a coup in 2014.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

https://theduran.com/who-are-americas-allies-in-its-long-war-to-add-russia-to-its-empire/

READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP. READ FROM TOP.

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

In the wake of communist collapse we have been presented with a new paradigm in international affairs. No, it is not a tinkering with the standard communism versus democracy we have had to tolerate for more than half a century of war. By strange twist of fate it is democracy which is seen as creating the danger.

Take the world we see around us.

In the US, and Australia, we have seen an amazing transformation of political alignments.

It is the so-called Left that is clamouring for increased military expenditures.

Partly because of the Left obsession over good versus evil, and its inability to decide who is the enemy if he is not communist. So it lashes out regardless, at Uighur cotton pickers, for example.

Another factor is the pressure within America to persuade the military to set up bases within one’s state – one for certain, two or three if possible, and to expand the US empire.

So we have the extraordinary sight of state offices clamouring to increase already bloated Pentagon budgets by twenty or thirty billion apiece.

In the process Republicans, apart for Trumpists perhaps, are neatly wedged. They are inured to hate communism. But some times, under Trump, they have sparks of personalist realism. Even so they are not going to oppose higher Budgets.

And so yet another unnecessary war gets underway.

Bloated budgets have to be spent.

In Australia the process is much simpler. Bring out the China threat and give it a few AUKUS whacks. Promise donations to strapped Leftist parties, the troops and commentators will fall into line.

No questions asked whether Liberal, Liberal or Conservative.

Even to ask questions is a sign of enemy sympathies, whether it is Vietnam or over Afghanistan.

The war fever seems destined to continue till mutual exhaustion or nuclear armageddon takes over.

Donations to political parties by the military-industrial complex should be banned.

https://johnmenadue.com/war-fever-and-the-military-industrial-complex/

READ FROM TOP.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....