A senior Russian diplomat confirms: “Russia is preparing for war” – is anybody listening?

The Saker

November 02, 2018

[This analysis was written for the Unz Review]

Andrei Belousov, deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department of Nonproliferation and Arms Control, has recently made an important statement which I shall quote in full and then provide a translation.

Original Russian text: “Тут недавно на заседании Соединенные Штаты заявили, что Россия готовится к войне. Да, Россия готовится к войне, я это подтверждаю. Да, мы готовимся защищать нашу родину, нашу территориальную целостность, наши принципы, наших людей. Мы готовимся к такой войне. Но у нас есть серьезные отличия от Соединенных Штатов Америки. И в лингвистическом плане это отличие заключается всего в одном слове, что в русском языке, что в английском языке: Российская Федерация готовится к войне, а Соединенные Штаты Америки готовят войну”

Translation: “Recently at a meeting the United States stated that Russia is preparing for war. Yes, Russia is preparing for war, I can confirm it.  Yes, we are preparing to defend our homeland, our territorial integrity, our principles, our values, our people. We are preparing for such a war.  But there is a major difference between us and the United States.  Linguistically, this difference is just in one word, in both Russian and English: Russia is preparing for war while the United States is preparing a war” (emphasis added).

We are so used to western diplomats and politicians saying more or less anything and everything (as the joke goes: when do you know that a politician is lying? When his lips move) that many of us stopped paying attention to what is being said. If tomorrow Trump or some “Congressperson” goes on national TV and declares “read my lips – up is down, dry is wet and yes means no” – most of us will just ignore it. The truth is that being exposed to that constant stream of empty, bombastic and always dishonest statements makes most of us immune to verbal warnings, even when they come from non-western political figures.

It is, therefore, crucial to fully realize that Russian official and diplomats carefully measure every word they say and that when they repeat over and over again that Russia is ready for war, they actually and truly mean it!

Of course, there have been those in the West who fully saw this danger and have been warning about it for years, I especially think of Prof. Stephen Cohen and Paul Craig Roberts here.  And I have been warning about this for four years now, beginning with the article “Obama just made things much, much worse in the Ukraine – now Russia is ready for war” posted on March 1st, 2014, followed by many more articles with the same warning since (see “The Russian response to a double declaration of war” on September 27th, 2014; “Did Russia just “gently” threaten the USA?” on November 12th, 2015; “Debunking popular clichés about modern warfare” on May 19th, 2016; “How Russia is preparing for WWIII” on May 26, 2016; “A Russian warning” on June 1st 2016; “Assessing the Russian Military as an Instrument of Power” on August 25th, 2016; “Progress report on the US-Russian war” on December 1st, 2017; “What price will mankind have to pay for the collapse of the Empire?” on April 13th, 2018; “Each “click” brings us one step closer to the “bang!” on April 20th, 2018).  But for all our efforts, we have been “voices crying in the wilderness” which is hardly surprising since even Putin’s blunt warning during his March 1st speech to the Russian Federal Assembly was quickly dismissed as “posturing” and quickly forgotten.  This is why two weeks following that historical speech I compared Russia to a peaceful rattlesnake (yes, they are peaceful creatures!) desperately trying to warn a drunk idiot to back-off but to no avail: the drunk idiot just boastfully declares “hold my beer and watch this” and tries to grab the snake.  I concluded by saying that:

May, Trump, Macron and Merkel, of course, but also their sycophantic presstitutes and the herds of zombified followers all believe in their invulnerability and superiority. The terrifying truth is that these folks have NO IDEA whom they are dealing with nor do they understand the consequences of pushing Russia too hard. Oh, in theory they do (yeah, yeah, Napoleon, Hitler, we know!). But in their guts, they feel safe, superior and just can’t conceive that they can die, and their entire society can just disappear.

Sadly, since then things have only gotten worse.  This is why a clearly disgusted and frustrated Putin recently declared that

“Any aggressor should know that retribution will be inevitable and he will be destroyed. And since we will be the victims of his aggression, we will be going to heaven as martyrs. They will simply croak and won’t even have time to repent,”

Needless to say, the western ziomedia interpreted this warning as a sign of “Russian aggression,” not as a desperate attempt to wake up a delusional and infinitely arrogant Empire.

By the way – something very similar has been happening between the USA and China with an increasing number of Chinese officials publicly declaring that the Chinese armed forces need to prepare for war (here is just the latest such warning).

Sadly, the Chinese warnings are as ignored and as dismissed as the Russian ones.  And that is truly frightening.

At least during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the entire world press was reporting about the confrontation minute by minute, and everybody knew that the danger of war was very real. In contrast today, hardly anybody gives the possibility of war much thought. In fact, the leaders of the AngloZionist Empire seem to be dead set on multiplying their provocations against Russia ranging from holding major military exercises right at the Russian border to giving the most prestigious EU human right prize to a convicted terrorist (the Poles, always so helpful, even suggested that Sentsov ought to be given the Nobel!). The EU also failed to notice the Ukronazi acts of piracy in the Sea of Azov but instead, condemned Russia for strictly enforcing her legal right to retaliate for the Ukronazi actions.

Such a level of hypocrisy is disgusting, of course.  But it is also very, very dangerous.

Frankly, considering the fantastic and genuinely heroic efforts of Putin and Xi to avoid a major (nuclear) war with the Empire, I would suggest that they, not convicted terrorists, be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (but I am not holding my breath here…)!

In sharp contrast to the western corporate media, the Russian media has been discussing the possibility of war with the US/NATO on a daily basis, and the discussion always revolves around the question “are they really crazy enough to actually attack us even though that would mean their certain destruction?!“. In fairness to the Russians, seeing folks like Nikki Haley or John Bolton, the question of “are they crazy?” is a logical one. But I think that it is also possibly misleading. Here is why:

While clearly some Neocons are truly batshit crazy, most are not. Stupid, ignorant, arrogant, hateful and evil – yes. But not necessarily insane. And for that reason, I don’t think that the AngloZionist leaders will stumble into a war against Russia as a result of their insanity. Besides, while US politicians are, indeed, amazingly stupid and ignorant, there are enough men in the US armed forces who remember the warning of Field Marshal and Viscount of Alamein Bernard Montgomery who famously declared to the House of Lords:

“Rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, is: “Do not march on Moscow”. Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good. That is the first rule. I do not know whether your Lordships will know Rule 2 of war. It is: “Do not go fighting with your land armies in China.” It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives“.

Most senior US military commanders must realize that war against Russia and/or China is a suicidal proposition.

But while the insanity of western leaders is unlikely to cause a war, I am afraid that their despair might.

Think of it: right now the USA is engaged in two parallel processes: on the one hand the USA is involved in sanctions and economic wars against most of the planet while on the other hand, the USA is withdrawing from one major international treaty after another (including arms control treaties). Ask yourself a simple question: is this the behavior of a country which is weak or strong? What does this “full-spectrum” policy of confrontation and self-isolation (because that is what withdrawing from so many agreements and treaties does: isolate the USA) mean? Does it signal the actions of a confident and strong power or one which is desperate and lashes out on all levels?

As this short post by Larchmonter445 reminds us, the current batch of US leaders are first and foremost *losers* and while they are still doing a pretty good job of window-dressing and flag-waving, it is becoming increasingly impossible to hide the magnitude of the multi-level slow-motion collapse of the AngloZionist Empire. I suppose that the band playing on the deck of the Titanic also played louder and louder, but the outcome of the show was never in doubt. The same is happening here and therein lies an enormous danger: the harder it becomes to conceal the magnitude of the unfolding disaster, the more the Empire lashes out, making the situation even worse which then makes it even harder to conceal the magnitude of the disaster. The Empire in general, and the USA specifically, is literally cracking on all levels and there is absolutely no reasonable and halfway viable way to reverse this trend because the one and only solution for the USA to survive is to give up the Empire and become a “normal” country – something US leaders are not even willing to contemplate. The Neocons, especially, seem to have a quasi-religious belief (or maybe it is just an uncontrolled knee-jerk reaction) that when one of their putative “clever” plans fail, the correct solution is to double-down. They seem to have fully internalized the German aphorism “wenn es mit Gewalt nicht geht, dann geht es mit mehr Gewalt!” (if violence can’t fix it, then even more violence will), forgetting that this belief did Germany no good against Russia. As for the general western public, it has been successfully turned into what I call “ideological drones“: brainwashed automatons who will wave their (Chinese made) flags to cope with any residual cognitive dissonance.  When their certitudes finally come crashing down, they will also lash out at everything and everybody in abject despair and impotent rage.

Right now the USA and the “global West” (aka the AngloZionist Empire) are on a direct collision course with Russia (and probably China too).  Right now, I see very few signs that anybody in the western elites is able (or willing) to admit that at the end of that road there is war and the destruction of the USA (and possibly much of Europe).  Right now, the leaders of the Empire appear to be firmly locked into what the French call the “fuite en avant” (which can roughly be translated as “flight forward”, or “headlong rush”, “panic-induced compulsion to further exacerbate a crisis or calamity” or even “unconscious mechanism that causes a person to throw himself/herself into a dreaded danger”). I suppose that there is a sad and tragic irony in the fact that the result of the US elites constantly conjuring up some completely imaginary Russian “interventions” (in the USA and elsewhere) might eventually result in a very real Russia intervention, in the form of devastating missile strikes, but this is hardly a consolation.

How likely is that to change in the foreseeable future?

Not very likely, I am afraid.

Will Putin and Xi be able to avert the looming war with the West?

Maybe.  But with each passing day bringing only further escalations and provocations from the “global West” their task is becoming harder and harder.

So far all the Russian and Chinese warnings have fallen on deaf ears and, frankly, I don’t believe that more warnings will do any good.

This might be the time for Russia and China to begin pushing back seriously. Everything else has failed, at least so far.

The Saker

Who profits from the end of the mid-range nuclear treaty?

October 26, 2018

by Pepe Escobar (cross-posted with The Asia Times by special agreement with the author)

The US move to shelve the Intermediate-range Nuclear-Forces treaty could accelerate the demise of the whole post-WWII Western alliance, and herald a bad remix of the 1930s

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its Doomsday Clock to only 2 minutes to midnight. It might be tempting to turn this into a mere squabble about arrows and olives if this wasn’t such a terrifying scenario.

US president Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, secretary-general of the USSR, signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1987.

The Arms Control Association was extremely pleased. “The treaty marked the first time the superpowers had agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals, eliminate an entire category of nuclear weapons, and utilize extensive on-site inspections for verification.”

Three decades later, the Trump administration wants to unilaterally pull out of the INF Treaty.

Earlier this week President Trump sent his national security adviser John Bolton to officially break the news to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

As they were discussing extremely serious issues such as implications of a dissolving INF Treaty, the perpetuation of anti-Russia sanctions, the risk of not extending a new START Treaty and the deployment, in Putin’s words, of “some elements of the missile shield in outer space”, the Russian President got into, well, arrows and olives:

“As I recall, there is a bald eagle pictured on the US coat of arms: it holds 13 arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other as a symbol of peaceful policy: a branch with 13 olives. My question: has your eagle already eaten all the olives leaving only the arrows?”

Bolton’s response: “I didn’t bring any olives.”

A ‘new strategic reality’?

By now it’s clear the Trump administration’s rationale for pulling out of the INF Treaty is due, in Bolton’s words, to “a new strategic reality”. The INF is being dismissed as a “bilateral treaty in a multipolar ballistic missile world”, which does not take into consideration the missile capabilities of China, Iran and North Korea.

But there is a slight problem. The INF Treaty limits missiles with a range from 500 km to 5,000 km. China, Iran and North Korea simply cannot pose a “threat” to the United States by deploying such missiles. The INF is all about the European theater of war.

So, it’s no wonder the reaction in Brussels and major European capitals has been of barely disguised horror.

EU diplomats have told Asia Times the US decision was a “shock”, and “the last straw for the EU as it jeopardizes our very existence, subjecting us to nuclear destruction by short-range missiles”, which would never be able to reach the US heartland.

The “China” reason – that Russia is selling Beijing advanced missile technology – simply does not cut it in Europe, as the absolute priority is European security. EU diplomats are establishing a parallel to the possibility – which was more than real last year – that Washington could nuclear-bomb North Korea unilaterally. South Korea and Japan, in that case, would be nuclear “collateral damage”. The same might happen to Europe in the event of a US-Russia nuclear shoot-out.

It goes without saying that shelving the INF could even accelerate the demise of the whole post-WWII Western alliance, heralding a remix of the 1930s with a vengeance.

And the clock keeps ticking

Reports that should be critically examined in detail assert that US superiority over China’s military power is rapidly shrinking. Yet China is not much of a military technology powerhouse compared to Russia and its state of the art hypersonic missiles.

NATO may be relatively strong on the missile front – but it still wouldn’t be able to compete with Russia in a potential battle in Europe.

The supreme danger, in Doomsday Clock terms, is the obsession by certain US neocon factions that Washington could prevail in a “limited”, localized, tactical nuclear war against Russia.

That’s the whole rationale behind extending US first-strike capability as close as possible to the Russian western borderlands.

Russian analysts stress that Moscow is already – “unofficially” – perfecting what would be their own first-strike capability in these borderlands. The mere hint of NATO attempting to start a countdown in Poland, the Baltics or the Black Sea may be enough to encourage Russia to strike.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov starkly refuted Trump and Bolton’s claims that Russia was violating the INF Treaty: “As far as we understood, the US side has made a decision, and it will launch formal procedures for withdrawing from this treaty in the near future.”

As for Russia’s resolve, everything one needs to know is part of Putin’s detailed intervention at the Valdai Economic Forum. Essentially, Putin did not offer any breaking news – but a stark reminder that Moscow will strike back at any provocation configured as a threat to the future of Russia.

Russians, in this case, would “die like martyrs” and the response to an attack would be so swift and brutal that the attackers would “die like dogs”.

The harsh language may not be exactly diplomatic. What it does is reflect plenty of exasperation towards the US conservatives who peddle the absurd notion of a “limited” nuclear war.

The harsh language also reflects a certainty that whatever the degree of escalation envisaged by the Trump administration and the Pentagon, that won’t be enough to neutralize Russian hypersonic missiles.

So, it’s no wonder that EU diplomats, trying to ease their discomfort, recognize that this, in the end, is all about the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine and the necessity of keeping the massive US military-industrial-surveillance complex running.

Even as the clock keeps ticking closer to midnight.

Sins without Recourse, Beast without Remorse

October 26, 2018

by Norman Ball for The Saker Blog

“[W]e, as serious people, cannot examine the concrete problems that are thrown when the Russian Federation is accused of all mortal sins without recourse to the processes (norms) created for similar cases,” –from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s October 18th interview with RT France.

Russia labors under a West-imposed Original Sin that can obtain dispensation only with the former’s existential cessation. The root of this Sin is the root itself. Russia is Russia, after all. That cannot be rectified.

In light of this dead-stop, what can only be called an apriori –and fatal– naivete pervades much of the prescriptive analysis we read every day. If Putin would only hop or jump or swagger or dance (it differs from one sage to the next) then, we are assured, the properly calibrated gesture would elicit a jackpot of redemptive good will. Godot would pop over the horizon. The crisis would defuse.

Alas, this is an all-too-human read which, while perhaps befitting of a bygone era, falls short of the present moment’s activated spiritual Principalities.

Speaking of Godot, from the same interview that prefaces this essay, Lavrov resigns himself to a “serious, professional and non-propagandistic” discussion at some later time when the current “outbreak of political rage” abates. Whether or not he believes a terrestrial conclusion will arrive in time, we cannot know. He’s a poet. Is he a Christian? Lavrov, ever the consummate diplomat, is nonetheless obliged to sound the proper notes.

It remained for his boss, on the same day, to access otherworldly coordinates with the most astonishing rhetoric (Radio Free Europe called it, “more biblical than technical”) at a Sochi forum:

Putin is making the remarkable admission that if no honorable approach for Russia remains for recovering a constructive relationship with the West (and since crawling along a contritious path is out of the question), Heaven (or Hell) beckons in the wings for all parties.

For such a circumspect statesman to openly confess to The City of Man’s limitations in world affairs, and allow that God may have to sort it out on the other side, well, that’s a foreboding milestone. One shudders at what information he’s privy to as to warrant such a fatalistic statement of principle. Has the geopolitical tether truly run out?

Archetypes are the prefatory hoops through which all actions spring. With understandable forbearance (some armchair warriors would say belatedness), Putin has finally seized his end of the archetype of the apocalypse. (The gauntlet’s been lying on the ground for some time now; see the late Edward Edinger’s 2002 book of the same name). Nor can an utterances of this sort be retracted by secular communique. There it sits, in the global square, a white-hot psychic ember that must now be contended with.

My fellow prognosticators, this is not our parents’ geopolitics.

Know thy enemy. The snake never alters its stripes, though the prevailing terrain can at times abet its pattern. Like a boa constrictor, the implacable machine (Sartre) always awaits relaxation in its prey as a prelude to further tightening. Demonic eschatology continually splits the distance until it capitulates spasmodically within the claustrophobic space of the capstone. The pyramid is a progressively constricting geometry. There is no placating it. The Beast is an insistent geometric construct.

So it’s a form of madness to continually bemoan the rude particulars of the Beast’s blueprint. Would you kick a car for not being an airplane? The implacability is born of usury, an arithmetic pyramid that must have everything for itself.  Debt-money, eternally ravenous, is cursed to roam the earth paying its keep every minute of every day.

Don’t blame the debt-masters. Pity them. They’re the Machine’s most abject slaves. Witness their propensity for throwing themselves off buildings as a measure of unquenchable Babelian despair:

Master, come to my assistance!
Wrong I was in calling
Spirits, I avow,
For I find them galling,
Cannot rule them now.

–from The Sorceror’s Apprentice, Johann Goethe (tr. Paul Dyrsen)

What Russians must do, and admittedly it’s a problem, is to get out the way of their own country or else prostate themselves atop it. Andrei Fursov outlines the elite’s long-term interest in ‘Northern Eurasia’ (what amounts to Russia), as a post-apocalyptic, resource-rich life raft; what MacKinder might have called, the Heartland of the Heartland.

Mephistopheles comes by way of Sergie ‘the Snake’ Kudrin and his borrowed, if not outright mutinous, prescription.  (Scott Humor translates here):

“Therefore, today Russia’s foreign policy should be subordinated to the reduction of tension in our relations with other countries, and, at least, to the preservation or reduction of the sanctions regime, not to the build-up. Today I would measure the effectiveness of our foreign policy on this indicator.”

Of course selective subordination (of the foreign policy portfolio only) is tantamount to total capitulation further along. Ruslan Ostashko asks the obvious question rhetorically of Kudrin: “What will prevent the West from reinstating these sanctions back, after we make all those changes?” Well yes, what precedent –and please venture beyond Gorbachev’s unilateral dumping of the Brezhnev Doctrine for examples if you must– would compel anyone to think reciprocal accommodations ever arrive?

Anthropomorphic daydreams can never take the measure of the Beast. Left to themselves, human beings rest, commiserate, empathize and trade amicably among themselves with an innate sense of proportionality and fairness. The trouble is Paul’s Principalities, good and evil, never leave us to ourselves. Moreover these forces are vaulting increasingly to the fore as even Putin’s off-world meanderings reveal.

Faustian bargains are the West’s own jealous poison, thank you very much Mr. Kudrin. As such, they’re forever withheld from authentic Russian ingestion. Find your own poison in your own time, we might say, one civilization to another. To jump the tracks for ours would be a form of neo-Petrinism (manifested, in the present era, by doting Atlanticists like, well, Kudrin. Oswald Spengler would recognize him as Petrinism’s “artificial product made of stubborn material”.)

Spengler, more poet than historian, offers the penetrating eye of the stranger. His prescience for the Russian destiny is paraphrased by Kerry Bolton here:

The Russian soul is not the same as the Western Faustian, as Spengler called it, the ‘Magian’ of the Arabian civilization, or the Classical of the Hellenes and Romans. The Western Culture that was imposed on Russia by Peter the Great, what Spengler called Petrinism, is a veneer…The Russian soul expresses its own type of infinity, albeit not that of the Westerner’s Faustian soul, which becomes enslaved by its own technics at the end of its life-cycle.”

Many of those ‘technics’ fall under what Spengler called “money-thinking”. At the twilight of its life-cycle the West threatens to withhold its toxicity from all those who don’t ‘play fair’, plying its financial sanctions like an overused tool-set: fractional reserve banking, impudent debt-money that arrives ex nihilo seeking its keep from God-knows-where, leverage that belabors ever-narrowing denominators of intrinsic value.

When the Beast cannot steal, its existing purloined cache is re-leveraged, pacing frenetically until it can steal again. Somewhere in the bowels of the NY Fed behind iron-clad doors, guarded by an ogre, sits a Leverage Machine, Chartered Accountant to the Beast. The lights are flashing red. How do we know this? Because the 24/7 Russian Demonization Campaign tells us so. The manically repetitive narrative is an audio loop cued to the red-lit console.

The West’s sanctions subtract from its own beleaguered base. The ‘cure’, ever more green-fields, serves only to postpone the patient’s demise. The demands are satanic and mutually self-negating:  If you don’t bleed like me, I promise I will kill you.

The various sanctions regimes harbor no rapprochements and coax no favored outcomes. They are nihilistic in spirit and anti-Christian by design. Spengler spoke of Russia’s peculiar historic mission. Could that mission be Armageddon itself?

The stakes, as we like to say, are incalculably high. The potential recoil, fatal. But then, People of the Book already know this.

Might the intelligence complex incite WW3 as a diversionary alternative to exposure and dismantlement? That’s a reasonable bet. After all, where on this planet today are rumors of wars not breaking out in earnest?

There’s a well-ensconced clique on the planet that views WW3 as the crucial next step. Putin seems to have joined them. In lieu of elaborate WMD contexts perpetrated on a sanguine populace, war planners might prefer a war that’s over almost before it starts. Inhuman velocity curtails the need for consensus-building.

NATO’s provocations are endless. However conventional force border-posturing is simply the aperitif. Nuclear escalation will occur with lightning speed.

In his grim but essential work, Eric Zuesse speaks to the current provocations in Ukraine and its Donbass region and the toss-up potential of a nuclear first strike being strategically ‘rationalized’ and perpetrated by either the Americans or the Russians. How perilous and frightening is that? Both sides are strategically obliged go nuclear first, although Putin seemed to remove a Russian first-strike from the table last week, a very noble and statesman-like assertion, to be sure. Who fully understands the dynamic between he and his Defense Minister? Sergei Shoigu might, on strictly military grounds, beg to differ.

Here’s Zuesse:

“Either way would likely produce from Russia a nuclear blitz-attack to eliminate as many of America’s retaliatory weapons as possible, so as to beat the US to the punch. In military terms, the side that suffers the less damage ‘wins’, even if it’s a nuclear war that destroys the planet. The side that would strike first in a nuclear war would almost certainly suffer the less damage, because most of the opponent’s retaliatory weaponry would be destroyed in that attack. Trump is playing nuclear “chicken” against Putin.”

Nuclear Primacy had been America’s post-MAD doctrine since 2006. (Here are the same two idiot-savants, Drs. Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, on paper, proving once and for all that intelligence is a circle.) The Russian nuclear detection system is horribly antiquated and, in an effort to tamp down the reigning madness, US officials are talking naval blockades and preemptive first strikes. Language is always the first bullet fired. America’s nuclear arsenal is to be upgraded over the next thirty years at an estimated cost of $1.2 trillion (October 2017 CBO report).

Paranoid much? You’d have to be a fool not to be. In fact you’d have to be an irreligious fool not to think thermonuclear exchange isn’t poised to occur in some demented parody of well-considered premeditation and forethought.

It’s the midnight after midnight and Doomsday’s tired of walking around the block. The Beast wants Russia either polishing boots in Basel or moving its Orthodox frontage to Mars. There is no middle ground. There is no dialectical accommodation. People are a temporary impediment to the wealth beneath their feet. Bankers eat birthrights for breakfast.

The inestimable trove of raw goodies under Eurasia must be secured or else the leverage-cubed that’s holding up the leverage-squared is going to collapse in a calamitous heap of non-real numbers and exhausted exponentiality.

Before he exited Stratfor, some say for a surfeit of candor, George Friedman laid out the last hundred-years of the game-plan. Mind you (and our German friends too), it’s nothing personal. It’s primordial, which is to say, quite equally of the future, an ‘interest’ that will not abate.

As Shiekh Iman Hosein insists, the repatriation of Crimea represents a huge and rare setback for the Beast’s cordon sanitaire strategy of containment (constriction?) Sixteenth-century Rabbi Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman (popularly known as the Vilna Gaon) acknowledged much the same:

“When you hear that the Russians have captured the city of Crimea, the ‘Times of the Messiah’ have started, that his steps are being heard”

There are not enough dimension frankly to deploy the appropriate chess game. But then we’re not in a chess game. We’re in an end-game. Finesse is an Enlightenment affectation. In a kingdom of hammers the adroit tactician is just another nail.

So enough please of rehabilitative measures, improved behaviors and well-considered countermeasures. No behavior under the sun will do until nuclear winter blots the sun from the sky. We’ve been staring down the barrel of Oppenheimer’s Shiva ever since some vanguard of Molochian butt-worshippers decided there’s life for them on the back-end of nihilistic cessation.

There is a war on against what Spengler termed, “the world-historical fact of Russia itself”. Putin seems finally to have risen to the existential occasion.

قمة بوتين ترامب بعد التدهور السعودي

أكتوبر 24, 2018

ناصر قنديل

– رغم المواعيد والاستحقاقات التصعيدية المتزاحمة التي تبشر بالمزيد من جولات التصعيد الأميركية بوجه روسيا، بقي مستشار الأمن القومي الأميركي جون بولتون ليومين إضافيين في موسكو بانتظار لقاء الرئيس الروسي فلاديمير بوتين وطلب التوافق على عقد قمة عاجلة تجمع بوتين بالرئيس الأميركي دونالد ترامب، وصولاً لتحديد الموعد في غضون أسبوعين مقبلين. فما هو السبب لهذا الاستعجال على عقد القمة في ذروة الذهاب نحو مواجهة، رغم الحديث عن الانسحاب الأميركي من معاهدة الصواريخ الاستراتيجية الموقعة عام 1987، ورغم التحضير الأميركي لاعتبار تاريخ الرابع من تشرين الثاني المقبل موعداً فاصلاً لدخول ما تسمّيه واشنطن بالحزمة الحاسمة من العقوبات على إيران ومنعها من بيع النفط والغاز، ورغم اللغة العالية السقوف التي تقودها واشنطن بوجه موسكو.

– السعي لعقد القمة الروسية الأميركية لم يكن روسياً وما كان ليكون، فيما روسيا تتلقى إشارات التصعيد الأميركية، ومنها التصريحات التي تصف القرار الروسي بنشر شبكات دفاع جوي روسية متطوّرة في سورية بالعمل الخطير، ومنها اتهامات واشنطن لموسكو برفض التعاون لإخراج إيران وحزب الله من سورية، لكن السؤال يبقى حول كيفية المواءمة بين المسار التصعيدي الذي يشكّل خطاً بيانياً جامعاً للخطوات الأميركية في الملفات المشتركة مع موسكو، وبين السعي لقمة عاجلة تضمّ الرئيسين ترامب وبوتين، وله إحدى وظيفتين، إما توجيه إنذار أخير لموسكو قبل الدخول في مواجهة كبرى شاملة، وتبيان حجم النيات الأميركية الجدية في خوض المواجهة، لتكون القمة الفرصة الأخيرة المتاحة أميركياً لتراجع روسي يمهّد لتفادي المواجهة، ورسم توازن يمنح واشنطن اليد العليا في ملفات الخلاف، وإما أن تكون نيات واشنطن هي التراجع والتأقلم مع معادلات جديدة، وفتح الباب لتفاهمات وتسويات، لا تشبهها لغة التصعيد ولا عناوينها.

– التمهّل الروسي في تحديد موعد لقاء بولتون مع بوتين، كان استكشافاً لخلفيات طلب عقد القمة العاجلة، والأهداف منها، خصوصاً أن موسكو كانت دائماً ترفض قمة علاقات عامة لا تنتج تفاهمات، وتصرّ لقبولها عقد القمة وضوح الفرص للخروج بتسويات وتفاهمات. وهذا يعني انتفاء فرضية كون القمة التي تمّ التفاهم على عقدها خلال أسبوعين، الفرصة الأخيرة ما قبل المواجهة الشاملة، وترجيح كونها قمة فتح الباب للتسويات، ووضع التصعيد الأميركي في خانة الرسائل الإعلامية التي تريد واشنطن إرسالها إلى موسكو لطرح القمة كمخرج من التصعيد، لكن ذلك يستدعي الإجابة على سؤال، هل فقدت واشنطن الثقة بفاعلية خطواتها التصعيدية، وتخشى فقدان هيبة الذهاب للمزيد من التصعيد عندما تدخل مساراً عملياً لخطوات تصعيدية أنفقت وقتاً وجهداً وهي تبشر بها؟

– يطرح السؤال على أبواب دخول العقوبات ضدّ إيران ما وصفته بالحزمة الحاسمة، وعلى أبواب تبلور وضع جديد في سورية يعبر عنه توازن الردع الجوي لـ»إسرائيل»، مسار إدلب الذي يمهّد لإنهاء صيغ التقسيم في سورية ويطرح مستقبلاً جديداً وصيغاً جديدة للحل السياسي تحت سقف روسي واضح، ويستدعي من واشنطن الاختيار بين التأقلم مع هذا المتغير الكبير في سورية أو قرار مواجهته بما في ذلك خطر الدخول في مواجهة عسكرية، لكن الأهم أنه يُطرح بينما واشنطن تستشعر التراجع الاستراتيجي في مصادر قوة حليفيها الرئيسيين في المنطقة «إسرائيل» والسعودية، يوازيه تراجع في فرص نجاح رؤيتها للمواجهة السياسية المنفردة مع إيران التي تمثلها صفقة القرن بعد الفشل السعودي في تأمين الشريك الفلسطيني في الصفقة، وتفكك في الحلف التقليدي لواشنطن الذي تشكل أوروبا وتركيا وباكستان ركائز رئيسية فيه، ويشكل التفاهم النووي الإيراني أكبر اختباراته.

– ما تشهده الحال السعودية يبدو المتغير الرئيس الذي فرض استحقاق القمة العاجلة، والرئيس ترامب لم يخف اعتماده على الرياض كحليف رئيس بوجه إيران، والعطب السعودي يشكل عقب أخيل الذي أصاب الآلة الأميركية بالعطل، وخلق وقائع لا يمكن تجاهلها تفرض التفاهم مع موسكو كخيار حتمي لا يمكن إدارة الظهر له، ولو بتسويات تهدئ التصعيد في الظاهر، لكنها تمهّد لتفاهمات عميقة في الجوهر يتم الكشف عنها تباعاً بسلاسة وبتوقيت مناسب.

– قمة ما بعد التدهور السعودي ليست كما قبلها.

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Russia’s Poised to Reap the Rewards of the West’s Fallout with Saudi Arabia

By Andrew Korybko

Source

Russian strategists must be rubbing their hands with glee as they watch the West sacrifice its strategic and highly profitable relationship with Saudi Arabia all because of Jamal Khashoggi, knowing full well that their country is more than capable of replacing its rivals in every single sphere of cooperation that they pull out of with Riyadh, which would resultantly reinforce Russia’s position as the supreme “balancing” force in 21st century Eurasia.

Suiciding A Slew Of Strategic Partnerships

It almost looks at this point like the West wants Russia to replace its strategic role in Saudi Arabia, at least judging by the self-inflicted damage that they’ve done to their own interests over the past couple of weeks since Jamal Khashoggi’s killing in his country’s Istanbul consulate. The circumstances surrounding it are unclear, but it’s looking ever more likely that a hostile “deep state” faction was behind his murder just like the author surmised in his earlier piece titled “Khashoggi Mystery: Rogue Killers Or Rogue Royals?”, though that still can’t be known for certain. Even so, it’s interesting to observe how many Western countries and companies decided to pull out of the Kingdom’s upcoming Future Investors Initiative, which is regarded as the so-called “Davos in the Desert”.

Even more stunning is the fact that many influential voices on both sides of the Atlantic are now calling for a suspension of their already agreed-upon weapons deals with Saudi Arabia, although Trump has thus far has been impervious to this pressure on the basis that one dead dissident isn’t worth sacrificing $110 billion worth of deals and potentially half a million jobs at home. The EU thinks differently, however, and Merkel announced that she’ll freeze arms shipments to Saudi Arabia as well as encourage her partners in the bloc to follow suit. All of this has combined to contribute to an environment of uncertainty where the Kingdom is no longer sure whether it can rely on its decades-long strategic partners, especially in respect to the military sphere.

Russia To The Rescue

Trump will probably hold firm and do whatever he can to retain his country’s strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia, but the ruling royals must realize at this point that he could always change his mind depending on domestic political considerations, to say nothing of overall international considerations. The Saudis don’t seem interested in making the first move away from America but will undoubtedly find a way to asymmetrically retaliate if the US ends up sanctioning it after the midterms. Bearing this backdrop in mind, the only responsible thing for Saudi Arabia to do is seek to strengthen its much more reliable relationship with its newfound non-traditional Russian partners, with whom it’s in the midst of a fast-moving and full-spectrum rapprochement.

Russia’s desire to become the 21^st century’s supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia has seen it clinch a variety of military, energy, economic/investment, and diplomatic deals with Saudi Arabia in spite of the two previously being heated rivals during the 1980s War on Afghanistan and the early 2010s War on Syria, but both Great Powers have pragmatically matured to the point of understanding the need to turn the page on their storied relationship and start anew in the New Cold War. So close have they become in recent years that President Putin even agreed to provide Saudi Arabia with S-400 anti-aircraft missile systems, as well as Kornet-EM anti-tank missile systems, TOS-1A “Buratino” heavy flame systems, AGS-30 grenade launchers, and Kalashnikov AK-103 assault rifles during King Salman’s historic visit to Moscow in October 2017.

No Yielding Over Yemen

It doesn’t matter much to Russia that most of these munitions will probably be used in the War on Yemen since Moscow supports the Saudi position and is solidly behind the internationally recognized Yemeni government of President Hadi, which it still backs despite his unpopularity and purely because of the international legal principle of being against the Houthis’ militant overthrow of his government. Russia, unlike Western states, doesn’t place any political conditions on the purchase of its military equipment such as prohibiting their use in Yemen since Saudi Arabia’s activities there aren’t under UNSC sanctions. Moscow has expressed concern over mounting civilian casualties and is in favor of a political solution, but it has no interest imposing its desired vision on any of the warring parties.

Think what one may about that position, it’s nevertheless consistent with international law, for better or for worse. No resolutions were ever passed by the UNSC forbidding the sale of military equipment to Saudi Arabia, so while one may disagree with the ethics of doing so, there’s nothing “illegal” about it even though a convincing argument can be made that the entire War on Yemen is illegal and that the UNSC should have sanctioned Saudi Arabia and its allies because of it. Be that as it may, they didn’t, which is why Russia has no qualms about possibly expanding its weapons sales to Saudi Arabia to replace any contracts that the Kingdom might end up cancelling with its unreliable so-called “Western partners”, but it’s not all about Moscow making a quick buck.

“Military Diplomacy”, OPEC+, And Big Business Investments

Russia considers “military diplomacy” to be part and parcel of its envisioned 21^st-century “balancing” act, to which end it regularly sells arms to competing pairs of countries such as Armenia & Azerbaijan, India & China, and China & Vietnam in order to maintain the strategic equilibrium between them that could hopefully prevent one side from gaining an edge over the other and aggressively commencing a war because of it. This contrasts with the US’ position of deliberately benefiting one side at the expense of another in order to spark this scenario to the benefit of its preferred regional partner. Considering the Mideast’s complicated geopolitics, it makes sense from Russia’s perspective why its strategists would like to include Saudi Arabia in its “military diplomacy” network for replicating this model between it and Iran.

Moving beyond the military realm and into the energy one, Russia and Saudi Arabia are already dominating the global oil market through their OPEC+ partnership, but this will increasingly come under threat as the US continues its rise as a formidable challenger to both of them. In regards to the economic/investment sphere, the large-scale exodus of Western participants from the forthcoming “Davos in the Desert” bodes extremely well for Russia because it allows the country’s businessmen to stand apart from the pack and draw attention to the fact that there aren’t any political strings attached to their prospective deals. This is extremely important because it could reassure Riyadh that whatever agreements it reaches with Russia would be respected no matter what happens inside of the Kingdom itself.

“Sword Dancing” For The S-400s?

The Russian President’s Special Representative for the Middle East and Africa, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, said as much at the beginning of this week when he remarked that

“the situation around the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi does not affect the planning of contacts between Moscow and Riyadh, including at the top level.”

Accordingly, it’s only natural that presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed that “preparations for the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to Saudi Arabia are ongoing” after the Russian leader was invited to travel to the Kingdom by King Salman last year, where he last visited in 2007 when he received the prestigious Order of King Abdulaziz that was later also bestowed upon the likes of Obama and Trump.

President Putin is probably holding off on his visit until a number of big-ticket deals are officially clinched between the two Great Powers to serve as a productive reason for him to go there, such as finalizing the S-400 agreement and possibly even winning the bid to construct 16 nuclear power plants in the Kingdom. Furthermore, given the intense backchannel diplomacy between Russia and Saudi Arabia over Syria, it can’t be precluded that President Putin might be waiting for the fruits of their efforts to lead to a breakthrough in the Arab Republic that he can celebrate with King Salman, though it’s unlikely that he’d allow the media to capture him on camera performing a “sword dance” like Trump did if he was invited by his jubilant host to do so.

Concluding Thoughts

Russia is poised to reap the rewards of the West’s self-inflicted damage to its strategic and highly profitable relationship with Saudi Arabia, which has been unprecedentedly undermined by the killing of a single dissident even though they ignored the deaths of thousands of civilians in Yemen. The trans-Atlantic divide between the US and the EU couldn’t be sharper in this context because Trump is doing all that he can to resist “deep state” and grassroots pressure to cancel his country’s $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia while Merkel is leading the way in trying to get all EU countries to immediately suspend their weapons contracts with the Kingdom. The unexpected political instrumentalization of these agreements has put Saudi Arabia on edge and prompted it to strengthen ties with its non-traditional partners in Russia instead.

To its pragmatic credit, Russia hasn’t once interfered with any of the many controversial events that characterize Saudi domestic politics, instead consistently remaining loyal to its policy of political non-interference in domestic affairs unless the interests of its compatriots are at stake. While this stance might have earned it heavy criticism in some corners for supposedly “turning a blind eye to Saudi crimes”, it’s nevertheless proven its strategic effectiveness by attracting Saudi Arabia’s attention as Riyadh seeks to replace many of its former “Western partners” with Russia after the sudden rift that developed between them. If the current trajectory continues, then the two Great Powers might very well be on their way to clinching a formal strategic partnership that could see President Putin travel to Riyadh as part of a victory lap for signing the most symbolic agreements.

Striking a Strategic Balance – Putin’s Preventive Response

Striking a Strategic Balance – Putin’s Preventive Response

October 23, 2018

By Rostislav Ishchenko
Translated by Ollie Richardson and Angelina Siardcross posted with http://www.stalkerzone.org/rostislav-ishchenko-striking-a-strategic-balance-putins-preventive-response/
source: https://ukraina.ru/opinion/20181022/1021492985.html

I think that Vladimir Putin at Valdai not at all incidentally started talking about the increased danger of nuclear war, repeated the axiom about the readiness of Russia to take away the whole world with itself, and discussed the existence of the right to make a preventive strike.

Concerning the latter issue experts immediately started a discussion about whether or not the president of Russia meant a nuclear preventive strike, and if yes, then how does it correlate with his statement about not being the first to strike a nuclear blow.

We will answer briefly.

Firstly, it does match, since a preventive strike is considered by international law as a response to aggression that became already inevitable. You, however, need to prove that the aggression was inevitable. But it is unlikely that someone will be interested in proof after nuclear war. The one who wins will be the one who survives, and not many will survive (if any survive at all). And it will be individuals and/or communities, and not states or international organisations. So if the Russian leadership receives information about the inevitability in the next few hours of a massive nuclear attack on Russia, it has the right (and is even obliged) to strike a preventive nuclear blow, and this doesn’t mean being the first to use a nuclear weapon.

Secondly, this isn’t important at all, since even if a preventive blow will be struck with conventional precision weapons, it will be aimed against regions of basing where the nuclear weapon carriers and anti-missile defense systems threatening Russia are deployed. From the point of view of the military doctrines of both the USSR and Russia, a massive attack of strategic nuclear objects by non-nuclear forces is equated to the beginning of nuclear war and grants the right for a nuclear response. The Americans approach this matter in exactly the same way.

So in principle it doesn’t make any sense to discuss whether or not Vladimir Putin meant a preventive or exclusively reciprocal nuclear or non-nuclear strike by Russia. He absolutely clearly highlighted the sharp increase in the level of danger of a nuclear confrontation. And this is the most important thing, because “who started it first” won’t be important, and nobody will learn or know about it.

So the question that interests us most sound as follows: “Why did the president of Russia start talking about the threat of a nuclear catastrophe right now, when we are passing through not the deepest aggravations of the Syrian and Ukrainian crises, and on the Korean peninsula Seoul and Pyongyang show an unprecedented level of friendliness, seriously discussing the denuclearisation of the peninsula within the framework of the development of inter-Korean dialogue and economic cooperation between the North and the South?”

I am sure that it was a preventive response to the decision of the US to withdraw from the INF Treaty that was announced one day later.

Why did this decision cause such a sharp reaction? After all, the INF Treaty signed in Washington by Gorbachev and Reagan on December 8th, 1987 came into force in June, 1988, and by June, 1991 it had already been implemented. I.e., all complexes falling under the ban were destroyed by both Russia and the US. Moreover, the development of military equipment over the last 30 years allows to assign tasks that were previously being solved by complexes that were destroyed under the Treaty to other systems that, without formally violating the Treaty, are even more effective.

The Treaty forbids the production and deployment of land-based rockets with a range of 500 to 5000 kilometers. But today Russia has in its arsenal the “Iskander” complexes (up to 500 km) and the air/sea-based “Kalibr” cruise missiles have been deployed (they don’t fall under the restrictions of the Treaty, which the Americans insisted on in the past). The declared range of these rockets can reach 1500 kilometers. At the same time certain sources speak about 2000-2500 kilometers. The range of the “Kinzhal” complex (including the range of the carrier) placed on a Tu-22М3 reaches 3000 kilometers. But this is if we bear in mind the combat radius of the aircraft at supersonic. In a mixed regime [using both subsonic and supersonic – ed] the combat radius of the aircraft increases from 1500 to 2500 kilometers, respectively, thus the range of the complex together with the rocket can reach 4000 kilometers.

I.e., without formally violating the Treaty, with the help of the latest developments Russia is capable of solving tasks that last century were completable only by average-range missiles. Moreover, the latest developments that must come to troops in the next 10-12 years in general possess an arbitrary range, i.e., in principle there are no inaccessible targets on planet Earth for them.

I will also remind that Russia in the past declared the possibility of it withdrawing from the INF Treaty should the Americans withdraw from the ABM Treaty. I think that a withdrawal indeed didn’t happen because it was more effective to develop and adopt new high-precision weapons that allowed to not violate the Treaty and at the same time to not be especially tied down from a strategic point of view.

In 30 years Russia simply turned the situation on its head. At the time that the INF Treaty was concluded, the US had an overwhelming advantage in non-nuclear precision weapons that still back then were capable of striking Soviet (and later Russian) strategic missiles within the first disarming massive non-nuclear strike. The USSR countered these classes of American missiles (including air/sea-based “Tomahawks”) with its own average-range missiles, in the production of which it had a technological advantage. The US withdrew sea/aviation-based cruise missiles from the Treaty (having promised that they would only be a part of the armaments of non-nuclear equipment), but at the same time they completely deprived the USSR/Russia of a whole class of strategic armaments in exchange for the elimination of their analogous intermediate-range nuclear forces, which weren’t important for them.

I.e., at that moment the US could resolve strategic issues without using average-range missiles, but Russia couldn’t, therefore it was favorable to Washington to destroy these missiles. Now, to the big chagrin of the Americans, it became clear that concerning high-precision weapons (including cruise and ballistic missiles) Russia seriously surpassed them and will increase this superiority in the near future. Moreover, Moscow can do it without formally violating the INF Treaty.

Thus, Washington needed the restoration of armaments in the class of average-range missiles only so that its technological lag behind Moscow didn’t turn into a factor of its strategic helplessness. After all, you and I understand that the T-90 tank can destroy the T-34 tank, even without coming within range of its aimed turret fire (not to mention effective blows). And this applies to missiles too. It’s not just the missile that is important, its tactical-technical data is also important.

But just like how an outdated tank can destroy its super modern counterpart if it appears to be in rather close proximity for an effective strike, the shortcomings of the missile weapon can be compensated for by the proximity of its placement.

And it is indeed here that the danger lies. If the US hasn’t yet lost the production technology of those average-range missiles that served in their arsenal during the 1980’s, then they can rather quickly mass-produce hundreds of this same “Pershing II”. The next question: where will they be deployed? They won’t reach the territory of Russia from the territory of the US. There are three options: Europe, Japan, and South Korea. It’s not a fact that Seoul will agree to participate in a new round of the arms race, taking into account its honeymoon with Pyongyang and the frank fears of being thrown by the US into the line of fire of North Korean or Chinese retaliatory missile strikes. And from the Korean peninsula and Japanese islands it is only possible to shoot at the Far East, where targets for these missiles are, frankly speaking, few and far between but very well covered.

Last time, the main regions of basing of average-range missiles were deployed by the US in Western Europe (Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Denmark). Back then the flight time of “Pershing” to Smolensk was 6 minutes, and to Moscow — up to 10 minutes. This sharply reduced the time for decision-making in a crisis situation and increased the probability of a conflict incidentally appearing. It is precisely for this reason that back then the Soviet leadership, like today’s Russian one, warned that the US had started a dangerous game fraught with slipping into an uncontrollable conflict that can instantly develop into a full-scale nuclear war.

Now it’s far from being a fact that the Americans will succeed to base missiles in the same countries that they were based in during the last century. So far it is only Great Britain that has unambiguously supported the US, having stated that it doesn’t consider itself as being tied down by the INF Treaty any more. Germany and Italy won’t be thrilled if they will receive such a proposal. Besides this, Trump started an economic war against the EU, the spearhead of which is aimed precisely at Old Europe.

But there is a New Europe. Who can guarantee that Poland, the Baltics, and the Ukraine that joined them will longly deliberate after receiving from the US the proposal to base “Pershing” (or something similar) on their territory? But after all, then the flight time of missiles to Moscow will total no more than 3-4 minutes, and even less to St. Petersburg – 1.5 minutes.

It is indeed a situation where any fortuity can provoke a preventive strike. Moreover, in a situation when a strike is applied to the launching sites of American nuclear missiles, it is possible without philosophising to immediately launch intercontinental missiles at Washington too. Anyway, the sliding of the conflict into a full-scale nuclear exchange will be a matter of a few minutes, or in the best-case scenario – several hours.

And it is this that Putin spoke about at Valdai, when he promised aggressors that we will enter paradise, and they will simply die.

The system of international treaties designed to ensure nuclear stability relied on the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, SALT I and SALT II, START I, START II, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, START III, and the INF Treaty.

The Missile Technology Control Regime and the Non-Proliferation Treaty practically turned into meaningless pieces of paper. Having spat on them, India and Pakistan obtained nuclear weapons. Israel, the possibilities of which are estimated at 100-200 tactical nuclear warheads, informally is also a nuclear power, but the “civilised world” pretends that it isn’t aware that permanently warring country is violating this Treaty. Well, and after the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was not only able to realise its nuclear program, but also with the help of the technologies that it received from Ukraine it was able to create all classes of missiles, including intercontinental ones, it’s senseless to speak about the efficiency of the Missile Technology Control Regime and the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Everyone whose international weight is somewhat larger than Swaziland’s or Lesotho’s will be able to do what Kim Jong-un managed to do. As is known, the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

SALT I limited strategic arsenals at the levels reached by the end of 1972 (and this is tens of thousands of carriers). SALT II didn’t come into force, because the US Senate blocked its ratification in connection with the entrance of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. START I and the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty aren’t actual, because they were replaced by START III, which slightly reduced the total number of deployed carriers in comparison with the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. START II (which forbade the equipping of missiles with separable individually guided warheads) was signed in 1993, ratified by the State Duma in 2000, and in 2002 Russia withdrew from it in connection with the US’ withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Thus, today after the US declared its withdrawal from INF Treaty, from the entire system of international treaties that regulate the system of strategic potentials, only START III actually works, but it means little in the context of the developing arms race.

Perhaps the US wants to repeat its successful blackmail attempt that took place in the 1980’s, which forced the USSR to make concessions and finally assisted in its final collapse. But the situation now differs radically. Firstly, Russia has the corresponding experience and knows that it must take a gentlemen’s word and the contracts that they sign at face value. Secondly, if Russia so far has moved along the line of ascent both in politics and in the economy, then concerning the US it is possible at best to speak about stagnation. However, Trump prefers to speak about a crisis that he wants to overcome and to “make America great again”. Thirdly, in respect of military technologies, during the last century the USSR was catching up with the US, but now it is the US that plays catch up. Fourthly, stories about 5th generation fighter jets, as well as the latest destroyers and littoral ships, demonstrate the blatant inefficiency of the US’ military-industrial complex, when huge money is being spent but results are absent. Fifthly, over the past century all the world’s centers of force (the US, the EU, China, and Japan) were against the USSR, which was forced to stretch its meagre military, political, financial, economic, and diplomatic resources to cover its standoff with all. Now even Japan doesn’t absolutely unconditionally support the US. In Europe the US only has Great Britain – which is torn apart by internal contradictions – and some of the destitute limitrophes. The US’ confrontation with China is tougher than the one it has with Russia, and now America starts to also speak about imposing sanctions on India.

In general, if to proceed from the US’ actions being a blackmail attempt, then this attempt is doomed to fail. But this doesn’t cancel the military danger of such games. If to fry shish kebabs on a barrel of gunpowder, it will sooner or later explode. So there will be an obligation to develop a new system of international treaties for the purpose of restricting, reducing, and, ideally, disposing of nuclear arsenals. But to start with the US needs to realise its place in the new world and to accept it.