Post by Wayne Hall on Sept 15, 2017 0:30:06 GMT -5
How close are we to nuclear war?
by Dimitrios Konstantakopoulos (*)
Most people (including politicians) do not believe (or do not want, or it does not suit them) to believe, that a nuclear war is possible.
Precisely this is one reason that a nuclear war is possible. When you do not believe that there is a threat, you don’t mobilize effectively to forestall it effectively.
Such a situation, let it be said in passing, is what made possible the first and second world wars. In the first case both sides expected that the other would back down. From “bluff” to “bluff” we ended up with the first of the great mass slaughters of the 20th century. Two decades later Paris, London and Moscow did not want to believe that Hitler was preparing to attack them. They deluded themselves that they could, in one way or another, come to an understanding with him. Not only did they not do anything to stop him but they made things easier for him with the policies they pursued. In 1940 France was occupied and disgraced itself by capitulating, the USSR was very nearly annihilated (a decisive contribution to that not happening was made by the resistance of the Greeks at that time to Fascism and by the Cretans who cut to pieces the German parachutists, something for which we are perhaps still paying today.) Britain survived, but was forced to give up forever what remained of its empire.
The opposite occurred in 1945. A powerful section of the US establishment was ready to go into the Third World War with the Soviet Union. At that time, and until 1949, Washington had the monopoly on nuclear weapons. Who stopped them? Not so much the weapons of Russia as the huge international prestige it enjoyed on the morrow of the victory over Nazism, the existence of armed popular mobilizations in wide sections of the European continent, often under the leadership of Communist resistance movements, along with the vivid awareness of all of humanity of what war means.
Unfortunately it is the global political conditions today that represent the greatest threat to peace. We are living through a fearful retreat of political awareness globally and a disintegration of politicized thinking – precisely what made it possible for a clown to present himself as a battler for peace (!) and to entrap so many people and political groupings in the United States and globally. .
China’s warning
At the beginning of August the Chinese leadership decided that enough was enough. The political appeasement of American aggressiveness and pressures on North Korea which was being implemented by China, as well as by Russia and Europe, was not having a deterrent effect. Quite the opposite: it made it more likely that there would be a war in South East Asia. China, like all the members of the United Nations Security Council, had already imposed harsh sanctions on Korea, despite the fact that everyone knows from previous examples (e.g. Yugoslavia or Iraq) that these sanctions always do more harm to the populations than to the regimes. They had not achieved the result they said they wanted and they are usually a prelude to a military attack against the state to be “punished”. But instead of this policy leading to some moderation of the American stance, it led to it becoming even more harsh, at the same time pushing North Korea into its only remaining strategy, the threat of Sampson: “I die myself but I take the Gentiles with me”. In any case, even if the North Korean leadership had its doubts, it knows very well what happened to Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and Assad when they “co-operated” with the demands for control of their armaments.
Trump and the Secretary for Defense Mattis (who is portrayed in the media as “moderate” and the “voice of reason” in the US government) at the beginning of August made unprecedented threats to “terminate” the North Korean regime and also to “destroy” its population. Information leaked to the American press indicated that B1 bombers are reading to take off from Guam and strike the country. On 8th August two B1s flew close to Korea.
Beijing has no inclination to get into conflict with the USA. It is said that Deng’s legacy to his compatriots is for them to have peace with the superpower for at least half a century. In Beijing in any case (as in Moscow) there is inevitably a strong lobby in favour of preserving, at all costs, good relations with the West, with significant social influence as it expresses the newly-formed bourgeois class of China. Behind the vague term “globalization” there is a totalitarian “Empire of Money” and that Empire is like a global party that is to be found in all the world’s political centres. As for Deng’s legacy, the problem is that peace requires two sides whereas war needs only one! If this was the viewpoint of Deng this does not necessarily mean that Washington will agree, that it will allow China to develop until it is the equal of the USA!
On 10th August Beijing decided to react. The newspaper Global Times, property of the “People’s Daily”, mouthpiece of the governing Communist Party of China, published an editorial of unusual clarity. It warned, among other things, the USA not to attack North Korea “without provocation” and not to attempt by military means to change the regime and the balance of power on the Korean peninsula because if they attempt to do any such thing, Beijing “will prevent them”. At the same time, it asked North Korea not to fire rockets which threaten “American territory” because if it does so, China will leave it undefended.
China has only one means to “prevent” the Americans from attacking North Korea and changing the internal situation on the Korean peninsula. That is its armed forces.
But military engagement between China and the USA in Korea entails increased risk of a global nuclear conflict.
As early as the beginning of the decade of 2000 (in the interregnum between Clinton and Bush junior, probably so that neither would have to take responsibility for it) the Pentagon conducted some theoretical exercises on the scenario of a war between the Chinese and US governments in the Pacific in 2017, including limited use of nuclear weapons.
The Chinese replaced the personnel handling Korean matters following the Global Times publication. President Xi telephoned Trump and asked him to avoid inflammatory declarations and actions. The Chinese Foreign Minister telephoned his Russian counterpart and told him, according to the press release, that China and Russia cannot allow any outside party to do whatever they like those two countries’ backyard.
An alliance between Russia and China is a powerful factor for curbing the excesses of the superpower. But the question is whether the practical functioning of “anti-hegemonic” alliances does not sometimes clash against the desire of each “pole” not to come into conflict with the superpower except when its own vital interests are threatened. Beijing kept a very low profile, for example, in the Middle Eastern conflicts, but these were also the prelude to the Korean crisis it is now facing. The alternative poles of the international system, aggregated, have a much greater power than the Superpower, but the advantage of the latter is that, unlike its opponents, it has a comprehensive global - not a partial and regional - strategy.
The Global Times warning reminded some analysts, mutatis mutandis, of the analogy that Zhou Enlai addressed to President Truman in August 1950, again on the subject of Korea. Truman called it a “bluff” and the Americans couldn’t believe their eyes when in October 1950 the Chinese army intervened in the Korean peninsula and one of the most savage wars in history commenced, with the United States Air Force flattening every single Korean city without exception. “It made me sick what I saw in Korea,” General MacArthur confessed to Congress. It is said that he himself requested that atomic bombs should be used , but political conditions did not permit this.
Trump – a sudden coming-down-to-earth
Before being elected, Trump was portrayed by his followers, both in the US and throughout the world, as a friend of Russia, an isolationist, an opponent of wars, reserved if not dismissive of NATO, and much else besides.
Already, just in the first six months of his term in office, the possibility of a nuclear confrontation with Russia and/or China has surfaced three times! Before today’s crisis with Korea, in April, we had the American bombardment of Syria, where Russian forces are stationed, Tillerson’s threats to Moscow – “with us or with Assad” and the reminder from Russia of the readiness of its strategic nuclear forces, not to mention the preceding incident in April against North Korea.
Not bad for six months. And more so if we add to it the beginning of preparations for war against Iran (declaration of President Trump that Iran is not adhering to the agreement on nuclear weapons), Trump’s threat to intervene militarily in Venezuela, the testing of new destabilizing weapons by the USA , both conventional and atomic, capable of striking the shelters of the leaders of enemy countries, the threats of the Defense Secretary of the Trump government that it will arm Ukraine with heavy , clearly offensive, weapons, the predominance of the neocons over the views of the leadership of the United States armed forces, with the result of Mosul being occupied and flattened.
People can think what they like about Trump. It is not the object of the present article to analyze the incredible nonsense that has been put forward – and continues to be – about what this man is, the election of whom probably represents one of the greatest and most dangerous conspiracies and fraud in world history. The difference between intelligent people and the rest isn’t that they don’t make mistakes, sometimes even very serious mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Mistakes are not only unavoidable but also in a way “desirable”, because they can be part of an educational process. “My greatest teacher has been my mistakes”, said Peter the Great. The difference between intelligent people and…. others is to be found in their capacity to realize their mistakes quickly, correct them, as much as possible, and learn from them. .
What is happening in front of our eyes, in fact, and that is what counts, is that in the days of Mr. Trump what is being pursued is the well-known and decades-long publicized strategy of the “Party of War” and the neo-Conservatives, which includes the destruction of nearly all the regimes of the Middle East, along with North Korea, and is nothing more than an exercise in encirclement and neutralization, finally, in one way or another, of Russia, China and ultimately even Europe, as a potential.. One politician closely linked to the “vision“ of the neo-Conservative, Mr. Netanyahu, said it openly in his first statement after the bombing of Syria in April. Having congratulated the Americans, he added that he hoped Teheran, North Korea and “others” had “got the message”.
Even more important than what Trump believes or doesn’t believe, whether he is being manipulated and if so by whom , whether he wants to do whatever he likes or is being pushed into it, is what his government is doing. And his government is racing full speed ahead towards a global conflict, or at least is threatening such a conflict, if we base our judgement on facts, on what is happening and not on what we think, what we want to think or what it is expedient for us to think is happening.
The question of war and imperialism in any case is not one of the personal inclinations of this or that leader. Personalities play a very important part and can make the difference at critical points in historical development. But for as long as the profound, many-sided crisis of the global system is upon us and the more acute it becomes, without political forces, societies, leaderships, intellectuals, consciously assuming the duty of creating reliable alternative solutions, the possibility of a global catastrophe will also be very much with us.
Τhe 10th August article in the Global Times is of interest because it identifies and analyses a mechanism where by the USA and North Korea could become embroiled through miscalculation in a game that is beyond their power to control, leading them without their having any such intention, to war.
What the article does not examine is the probability of there being a “hidden Alcibiades” in the system (in the sense of a determined minority, like the one that finally secured the majority in the Athens Assembly in favour of the Sicilian Expedition, as has been immortalized by Thucydides) which needs there to be a nuclear war somewhere, because only by frightening humanity will it be able to attain its goals. This is where, in its extremism, the logic of the Strategy of Chaos is leading us. Absolute fear would perhaps be a way of bringing people to accept the idea of a global dictator, albeit with the reward of their temporary survival as slaves.
It is at any rate absolutely clear already that the programme of the military overturn of the regimes of Iran and North Korea, which from the outset has been included in the strategy of the Party of War and the neo-Conservatives, cannot be achieved by conventional military means. It leads inevitably to the use of nuclear weapons.
Even if nuclear weapons are not used soon in Korea, some collateral, but still very significant, damage from the present crisis is that global public opinion will become accustomed to the idea of nuclear weapons being used, something taboo in the period after 1945. When monstrous threats are uttered against a country and hardly anyone in the world reacts, that legitimates them.
The Silence of the Public
Τhe worse of it is not even what Washington is doing under Trump. The worst is that nobody is moving a muscle anywhere in the world. In February 2003 when the United States was preparing its invasion of Iraq, together with the British, the Australians and the Poles, millions of demonstrators came out onto the streets everywhere to stop them. The “last of the Gaullists”, the Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin became the symbol for all of civilized humanity when, in his historic speech at the Security Council, he denounced the United States for the invasion of Iraq it was then planning. Afterwards, it is true, that both President Chirac and Chancellor Schroeder frightened themselves with the courage they had displayed and changed tack, thus contributing to the situation of there not being the slightest trace of independence in the European states and of half the Middle East being destroyed, and to our being threatened now not only with terrible conventional wars but also with nuclear wars!
In all of the post-1945 historical period there was a strong anti-war and anti-nuclear peace movement. It prevented a third world war between 1945 and 1949, when Moscow still did not have nuclear weapons. It also made a decisive contribution to the creation of a rudimentary arms control structure between the USA and the USSR, which prevented the US from using atomic weapons in Korea and Vietnam. The wars in Algeria and Vietnam were won equally on the battlefields and in the streets of big European and American cities. A number of distinguished intellectuals such as Albert Einstein and many others came out against War. De Gaulle disagreed with the war in Vietnam. When it was proposed to him that he should arrest Jean-Paul Sartre at the height of the war in Algeria, the General is said to have replied “one does not arrest Voltaire”. In Germany Willy Brandt opened the way for Ostpolitik.
Today there are no intellectuals and the “politicians” have been transformed into (frequently blackmailable) bank officials. The antiwar movements and all the movements of dissent are non-existent or very limited in size and influence. A degenerated “Left” often comes out in defence of “its own” imperialism, using arguments, correct or incorrect, against the regime of another country to make possible military interventions everywhere in the world. We are living in a period, therefore, of unprecedented retreat of human consciousness.
But even between nuclear powers, the existence of a nuclear balance is a necessary in the long term as a condition for deterrence of nuclear war, it is not sufficient. We know now that in the meeting on Cuba that decided whether or not there would be a global nuclear war, all of the participants were in favour of war apart from two people, President Kennedy and his brother. But their existence there cannot be considered a matter of chance. They reflected the ideology, the political atmosphere, the views, the social forces, of the capitalism of 1960 and not what we have today.
The revenge of politics
The invention of nuclear weapons modified but did not refute Clausewitz’s aphorism that war is the continuation of politics by other means.
Societies are not inorganic matter. Their course is not prescribed deterministically. Behind every decision for use of a weapon there is a human will. And humans are capable of rational, but also entirely irrational, behaviour, of wisdom and of folly.
For nuclear deterrence to work a modicum of rationality is required in the international system. Otherwise the existence of nuclear weapons can lead to mutual destruction. And what we see today in the international system is the gradual extinction of rationality, a symptom of societies that cannot solve their problems.
Marx said that people and communities set themselves the questions they can solve. Obviously they do not set themselves the questions they cannot solve. Or they set them in the wrong, destructive and misleading way (as happened with the totalitarianisms in the interwar period or with Trump and Lepen today).
The President of the United States himself, for example, openly challenges the findings of science, i.e. science itself, on the major, decisive issue for the survival of life: the problem of climate change.
American officials liken Putin to Hitler, or in other words inform Russian analysts that they are preparing nuclear war against Russia. What will happen tomorrow if there is a mistake in the early warning systems, as has happened so many times in history? Those who have to take the decisions will be influenced not only by what they see on their radar screens, but also what they regard as likely to happen. The more so when it will be happening in a cyberspace environment of dispersed information at speeds and in quantities that defy the capacity of the human mind to evaluate them.
The Cold War rhetoric initiated by Mrs. Clinton and continued, in deeds rather than in words, by Trump, destroys the lowest common denominator of rules for acceptable behaviour, the minimum basis for shared comprehension of the world, between the nuclear powers. The same applies for the abolition of the ABM agreement on antiballistic missile systems, demolishing the foundations for arms control imposed, indeed, by the US itself so as to avert the danger of an unexpected first strike.
Today in the United States they do not discuss the policies of their country or the policies of Russia and China. They don’t even discuss what Clinton’s e-mails contain or don’t contain or what Trump is really doing. They talk about whether or not the Russians intercepted the e-mails. They attempt, in other words, to equate an essentially peace-oriented power such as Russia with a President whose economic and social policy comes into conflict with vast sectors of American society. These sectors objectively could be “allies” with Russia in the project of overturning global military adventurism, as to a considerable extent occurred in all the postwar period, because this adventurism is not in their interest. (1)
Only the reappearance of politics can stop the drive towards war – the balance of terror is not enough. Only prompt awareness of the dangers and global mobilization to avert them, in public opinion and among politicians, can halt the slide to war. In the long term, in any case, it is impossible to combat the symptoms without combating the cause. Only the emergence of a serious, comprehensive alternative to a world “prehistoric and barbarous” in economics, in social and international relations, in culture, an alternative vision to the ideology of global finance capital which predominates today, only the mobilization of great social forces, of intellectuals and states, can solve the problem of war and the survival of humanity.
Note
1. What is interesting is that the advent of the outlandish Trump has objectively done serious damage to the image in Russian public opinion of America as “enemy” . When the Moskovsky Komsomolets can write, for example such incredible nonsense as that the election the election of Trump to the White House is like the occupation of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks (!!!), the confusion it generates leads the percentage of Russians who perceive – correctly – the US as the enemy, to fall from the already rather low 42% to 8%.
If there is a constant in Russian history is that this country cannot be occupied by means of an attack. It can be destroyed only if it confuses its friends and enemies. In addition to being destroyed in 1941 through this mechanism, the USSR was eventually destroyed by the same method in 1991. One reason that the power of the Communist Party has survived in China is that the state’s doctrinal policy has always retained the image of the West as enemy.
In any case, the stability of the internal situation in Russia is inseparably linked with the way in which the elite and public comprehend the issues of external policy and the international situation.
(*) Former Special Advisor in the office of Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, responsible for issues of arms control and East-West relations, former director of the Athens Press Agency in Moscow
[/i]
by Dimitrios Konstantakopoulos (*)
Most people (including politicians) do not believe (or do not want, or it does not suit them) to believe, that a nuclear war is possible.
Precisely this is one reason that a nuclear war is possible. When you do not believe that there is a threat, you don’t mobilize effectively to forestall it effectively.
Such a situation, let it be said in passing, is what made possible the first and second world wars. In the first case both sides expected that the other would back down. From “bluff” to “bluff” we ended up with the first of the great mass slaughters of the 20th century. Two decades later Paris, London and Moscow did not want to believe that Hitler was preparing to attack them. They deluded themselves that they could, in one way or another, come to an understanding with him. Not only did they not do anything to stop him but they made things easier for him with the policies they pursued. In 1940 France was occupied and disgraced itself by capitulating, the USSR was very nearly annihilated (a decisive contribution to that not happening was made by the resistance of the Greeks at that time to Fascism and by the Cretans who cut to pieces the German parachutists, something for which we are perhaps still paying today.) Britain survived, but was forced to give up forever what remained of its empire.
The opposite occurred in 1945. A powerful section of the US establishment was ready to go into the Third World War with the Soviet Union. At that time, and until 1949, Washington had the monopoly on nuclear weapons. Who stopped them? Not so much the weapons of Russia as the huge international prestige it enjoyed on the morrow of the victory over Nazism, the existence of armed popular mobilizations in wide sections of the European continent, often under the leadership of Communist resistance movements, along with the vivid awareness of all of humanity of what war means.
Unfortunately it is the global political conditions today that represent the greatest threat to peace. We are living through a fearful retreat of political awareness globally and a disintegration of politicized thinking – precisely what made it possible for a clown to present himself as a battler for peace (!) and to entrap so many people and political groupings in the United States and globally. .
China’s warning
At the beginning of August the Chinese leadership decided that enough was enough. The political appeasement of American aggressiveness and pressures on North Korea which was being implemented by China, as well as by Russia and Europe, was not having a deterrent effect. Quite the opposite: it made it more likely that there would be a war in South East Asia. China, like all the members of the United Nations Security Council, had already imposed harsh sanctions on Korea, despite the fact that everyone knows from previous examples (e.g. Yugoslavia or Iraq) that these sanctions always do more harm to the populations than to the regimes. They had not achieved the result they said they wanted and they are usually a prelude to a military attack against the state to be “punished”. But instead of this policy leading to some moderation of the American stance, it led to it becoming even more harsh, at the same time pushing North Korea into its only remaining strategy, the threat of Sampson: “I die myself but I take the Gentiles with me”. In any case, even if the North Korean leadership had its doubts, it knows very well what happened to Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and Assad when they “co-operated” with the demands for control of their armaments.
Trump and the Secretary for Defense Mattis (who is portrayed in the media as “moderate” and the “voice of reason” in the US government) at the beginning of August made unprecedented threats to “terminate” the North Korean regime and also to “destroy” its population. Information leaked to the American press indicated that B1 bombers are reading to take off from Guam and strike the country. On 8th August two B1s flew close to Korea.
Beijing has no inclination to get into conflict with the USA. It is said that Deng’s legacy to his compatriots is for them to have peace with the superpower for at least half a century. In Beijing in any case (as in Moscow) there is inevitably a strong lobby in favour of preserving, at all costs, good relations with the West, with significant social influence as it expresses the newly-formed bourgeois class of China. Behind the vague term “globalization” there is a totalitarian “Empire of Money” and that Empire is like a global party that is to be found in all the world’s political centres. As for Deng’s legacy, the problem is that peace requires two sides whereas war needs only one! If this was the viewpoint of Deng this does not necessarily mean that Washington will agree, that it will allow China to develop until it is the equal of the USA!
On 10th August Beijing decided to react. The newspaper Global Times, property of the “People’s Daily”, mouthpiece of the governing Communist Party of China, published an editorial of unusual clarity. It warned, among other things, the USA not to attack North Korea “without provocation” and not to attempt by military means to change the regime and the balance of power on the Korean peninsula because if they attempt to do any such thing, Beijing “will prevent them”. At the same time, it asked North Korea not to fire rockets which threaten “American territory” because if it does so, China will leave it undefended.
China has only one means to “prevent” the Americans from attacking North Korea and changing the internal situation on the Korean peninsula. That is its armed forces.
But military engagement between China and the USA in Korea entails increased risk of a global nuclear conflict.
As early as the beginning of the decade of 2000 (in the interregnum between Clinton and Bush junior, probably so that neither would have to take responsibility for it) the Pentagon conducted some theoretical exercises on the scenario of a war between the Chinese and US governments in the Pacific in 2017, including limited use of nuclear weapons.
The Chinese replaced the personnel handling Korean matters following the Global Times publication. President Xi telephoned Trump and asked him to avoid inflammatory declarations and actions. The Chinese Foreign Minister telephoned his Russian counterpart and told him, according to the press release, that China and Russia cannot allow any outside party to do whatever they like those two countries’ backyard.
An alliance between Russia and China is a powerful factor for curbing the excesses of the superpower. But the question is whether the practical functioning of “anti-hegemonic” alliances does not sometimes clash against the desire of each “pole” not to come into conflict with the superpower except when its own vital interests are threatened. Beijing kept a very low profile, for example, in the Middle Eastern conflicts, but these were also the prelude to the Korean crisis it is now facing. The alternative poles of the international system, aggregated, have a much greater power than the Superpower, but the advantage of the latter is that, unlike its opponents, it has a comprehensive global - not a partial and regional - strategy.
The Global Times warning reminded some analysts, mutatis mutandis, of the analogy that Zhou Enlai addressed to President Truman in August 1950, again on the subject of Korea. Truman called it a “bluff” and the Americans couldn’t believe their eyes when in October 1950 the Chinese army intervened in the Korean peninsula and one of the most savage wars in history commenced, with the United States Air Force flattening every single Korean city without exception. “It made me sick what I saw in Korea,” General MacArthur confessed to Congress. It is said that he himself requested that atomic bombs should be used , but political conditions did not permit this.
Trump – a sudden coming-down-to-earth
Before being elected, Trump was portrayed by his followers, both in the US and throughout the world, as a friend of Russia, an isolationist, an opponent of wars, reserved if not dismissive of NATO, and much else besides.
Already, just in the first six months of his term in office, the possibility of a nuclear confrontation with Russia and/or China has surfaced three times! Before today’s crisis with Korea, in April, we had the American bombardment of Syria, where Russian forces are stationed, Tillerson’s threats to Moscow – “with us or with Assad” and the reminder from Russia of the readiness of its strategic nuclear forces, not to mention the preceding incident in April against North Korea.
Not bad for six months. And more so if we add to it the beginning of preparations for war against Iran (declaration of President Trump that Iran is not adhering to the agreement on nuclear weapons), Trump’s threat to intervene militarily in Venezuela, the testing of new destabilizing weapons by the USA , both conventional and atomic, capable of striking the shelters of the leaders of enemy countries, the threats of the Defense Secretary of the Trump government that it will arm Ukraine with heavy , clearly offensive, weapons, the predominance of the neocons over the views of the leadership of the United States armed forces, with the result of Mosul being occupied and flattened.
People can think what they like about Trump. It is not the object of the present article to analyze the incredible nonsense that has been put forward – and continues to be – about what this man is, the election of whom probably represents one of the greatest and most dangerous conspiracies and fraud in world history. The difference between intelligent people and the rest isn’t that they don’t make mistakes, sometimes even very serious mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Mistakes are not only unavoidable but also in a way “desirable”, because they can be part of an educational process. “My greatest teacher has been my mistakes”, said Peter the Great. The difference between intelligent people and…. others is to be found in their capacity to realize their mistakes quickly, correct them, as much as possible, and learn from them. .
What is happening in front of our eyes, in fact, and that is what counts, is that in the days of Mr. Trump what is being pursued is the well-known and decades-long publicized strategy of the “Party of War” and the neo-Conservatives, which includes the destruction of nearly all the regimes of the Middle East, along with North Korea, and is nothing more than an exercise in encirclement and neutralization, finally, in one way or another, of Russia, China and ultimately even Europe, as a potential.. One politician closely linked to the “vision“ of the neo-Conservative, Mr. Netanyahu, said it openly in his first statement after the bombing of Syria in April. Having congratulated the Americans, he added that he hoped Teheran, North Korea and “others” had “got the message”.
Even more important than what Trump believes or doesn’t believe, whether he is being manipulated and if so by whom , whether he wants to do whatever he likes or is being pushed into it, is what his government is doing. And his government is racing full speed ahead towards a global conflict, or at least is threatening such a conflict, if we base our judgement on facts, on what is happening and not on what we think, what we want to think or what it is expedient for us to think is happening.
The question of war and imperialism in any case is not one of the personal inclinations of this or that leader. Personalities play a very important part and can make the difference at critical points in historical development. But for as long as the profound, many-sided crisis of the global system is upon us and the more acute it becomes, without political forces, societies, leaderships, intellectuals, consciously assuming the duty of creating reliable alternative solutions, the possibility of a global catastrophe will also be very much with us.
Τhe 10th August article in the Global Times is of interest because it identifies and analyses a mechanism where by the USA and North Korea could become embroiled through miscalculation in a game that is beyond their power to control, leading them without their having any such intention, to war.
What the article does not examine is the probability of there being a “hidden Alcibiades” in the system (in the sense of a determined minority, like the one that finally secured the majority in the Athens Assembly in favour of the Sicilian Expedition, as has been immortalized by Thucydides) which needs there to be a nuclear war somewhere, because only by frightening humanity will it be able to attain its goals. This is where, in its extremism, the logic of the Strategy of Chaos is leading us. Absolute fear would perhaps be a way of bringing people to accept the idea of a global dictator, albeit with the reward of their temporary survival as slaves.
It is at any rate absolutely clear already that the programme of the military overturn of the regimes of Iran and North Korea, which from the outset has been included in the strategy of the Party of War and the neo-Conservatives, cannot be achieved by conventional military means. It leads inevitably to the use of nuclear weapons.
Even if nuclear weapons are not used soon in Korea, some collateral, but still very significant, damage from the present crisis is that global public opinion will become accustomed to the idea of nuclear weapons being used, something taboo in the period after 1945. When monstrous threats are uttered against a country and hardly anyone in the world reacts, that legitimates them.
The Silence of the Public
Τhe worse of it is not even what Washington is doing under Trump. The worst is that nobody is moving a muscle anywhere in the world. In February 2003 when the United States was preparing its invasion of Iraq, together with the British, the Australians and the Poles, millions of demonstrators came out onto the streets everywhere to stop them. The “last of the Gaullists”, the Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin became the symbol for all of civilized humanity when, in his historic speech at the Security Council, he denounced the United States for the invasion of Iraq it was then planning. Afterwards, it is true, that both President Chirac and Chancellor Schroeder frightened themselves with the courage they had displayed and changed tack, thus contributing to the situation of there not being the slightest trace of independence in the European states and of half the Middle East being destroyed, and to our being threatened now not only with terrible conventional wars but also with nuclear wars!
In all of the post-1945 historical period there was a strong anti-war and anti-nuclear peace movement. It prevented a third world war between 1945 and 1949, when Moscow still did not have nuclear weapons. It also made a decisive contribution to the creation of a rudimentary arms control structure between the USA and the USSR, which prevented the US from using atomic weapons in Korea and Vietnam. The wars in Algeria and Vietnam were won equally on the battlefields and in the streets of big European and American cities. A number of distinguished intellectuals such as Albert Einstein and many others came out against War. De Gaulle disagreed with the war in Vietnam. When it was proposed to him that he should arrest Jean-Paul Sartre at the height of the war in Algeria, the General is said to have replied “one does not arrest Voltaire”. In Germany Willy Brandt opened the way for Ostpolitik.
Today there are no intellectuals and the “politicians” have been transformed into (frequently blackmailable) bank officials. The antiwar movements and all the movements of dissent are non-existent or very limited in size and influence. A degenerated “Left” often comes out in defence of “its own” imperialism, using arguments, correct or incorrect, against the regime of another country to make possible military interventions everywhere in the world. We are living in a period, therefore, of unprecedented retreat of human consciousness.
But even between nuclear powers, the existence of a nuclear balance is a necessary in the long term as a condition for deterrence of nuclear war, it is not sufficient. We know now that in the meeting on Cuba that decided whether or not there would be a global nuclear war, all of the participants were in favour of war apart from two people, President Kennedy and his brother. But their existence there cannot be considered a matter of chance. They reflected the ideology, the political atmosphere, the views, the social forces, of the capitalism of 1960 and not what we have today.
The revenge of politics
The invention of nuclear weapons modified but did not refute Clausewitz’s aphorism that war is the continuation of politics by other means.
Societies are not inorganic matter. Their course is not prescribed deterministically. Behind every decision for use of a weapon there is a human will. And humans are capable of rational, but also entirely irrational, behaviour, of wisdom and of folly.
For nuclear deterrence to work a modicum of rationality is required in the international system. Otherwise the existence of nuclear weapons can lead to mutual destruction. And what we see today in the international system is the gradual extinction of rationality, a symptom of societies that cannot solve their problems.
Marx said that people and communities set themselves the questions they can solve. Obviously they do not set themselves the questions they cannot solve. Or they set them in the wrong, destructive and misleading way (as happened with the totalitarianisms in the interwar period or with Trump and Lepen today).
The President of the United States himself, for example, openly challenges the findings of science, i.e. science itself, on the major, decisive issue for the survival of life: the problem of climate change.
American officials liken Putin to Hitler, or in other words inform Russian analysts that they are preparing nuclear war against Russia. What will happen tomorrow if there is a mistake in the early warning systems, as has happened so many times in history? Those who have to take the decisions will be influenced not only by what they see on their radar screens, but also what they regard as likely to happen. The more so when it will be happening in a cyberspace environment of dispersed information at speeds and in quantities that defy the capacity of the human mind to evaluate them.
The Cold War rhetoric initiated by Mrs. Clinton and continued, in deeds rather than in words, by Trump, destroys the lowest common denominator of rules for acceptable behaviour, the minimum basis for shared comprehension of the world, between the nuclear powers. The same applies for the abolition of the ABM agreement on antiballistic missile systems, demolishing the foundations for arms control imposed, indeed, by the US itself so as to avert the danger of an unexpected first strike.
Today in the United States they do not discuss the policies of their country or the policies of Russia and China. They don’t even discuss what Clinton’s e-mails contain or don’t contain or what Trump is really doing. They talk about whether or not the Russians intercepted the e-mails. They attempt, in other words, to equate an essentially peace-oriented power such as Russia with a President whose economic and social policy comes into conflict with vast sectors of American society. These sectors objectively could be “allies” with Russia in the project of overturning global military adventurism, as to a considerable extent occurred in all the postwar period, because this adventurism is not in their interest. (1)
Only the reappearance of politics can stop the drive towards war – the balance of terror is not enough. Only prompt awareness of the dangers and global mobilization to avert them, in public opinion and among politicians, can halt the slide to war. In the long term, in any case, it is impossible to combat the symptoms without combating the cause. Only the emergence of a serious, comprehensive alternative to a world “prehistoric and barbarous” in economics, in social and international relations, in culture, an alternative vision to the ideology of global finance capital which predominates today, only the mobilization of great social forces, of intellectuals and states, can solve the problem of war and the survival of humanity.
Note
1. What is interesting is that the advent of the outlandish Trump has objectively done serious damage to the image in Russian public opinion of America as “enemy” . When the Moskovsky Komsomolets can write, for example such incredible nonsense as that the election the election of Trump to the White House is like the occupation of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks (!!!), the confusion it generates leads the percentage of Russians who perceive – correctly – the US as the enemy, to fall from the already rather low 42% to 8%.
If there is a constant in Russian history is that this country cannot be occupied by means of an attack. It can be destroyed only if it confuses its friends and enemies. In addition to being destroyed in 1941 through this mechanism, the USSR was eventually destroyed by the same method in 1991. One reason that the power of the Communist Party has survived in China is that the state’s doctrinal policy has always retained the image of the West as enemy.
In any case, the stability of the internal situation in Russia is inseparably linked with the way in which the elite and public comprehend the issues of external policy and the international situation.
(*) Former Special Advisor in the office of Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, responsible for issues of arms control and East-West relations, former director of the Athens Press Agency in Moscow
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