Crisis in Ukraine: A Win for Putin’s Russia, or a Catastrophe for Us All?

It’s truly a crazy world these days. The pandemic. Runaway debt. The culture wars. Constant media lying. Institutional corruption. The war on Whites. Lawlessness, inflation, chaos. Systemic instability on a global scale. And now Cold War II? While I am no foreign policy or geopolitical expert and am very busy with other work, I feel compelled to chime in on the present conflict in Ukraine as the U.S. seemingly careens from one disaster to another in a manner so reckless as to endanger all life on the planet. The way I see it, the current conflict in Ukraine ends in one of two ways: Victory for Putin’s Russia, or catastrophe for us all. Ukraine is screwed either way. All freedom-loving people should be demanding a ceasefire immediately to stop the bloodshed. Below are excepts from two articles which provide much-needed perspective on this unfolding drama. — Dissident Millennial

WWII redux: The endpoint of US policy
by John Walsh | February 21, 2022

“This is not going to be a war of Ukraine and Russia. This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.” So spoke Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky just days after berating the US for beating the drums of war.

It is not hard to imagine how Zelensky’s words must have fallen on those European ears that were attentive. His warning surely conjured up images of World War II when tens of millions of Europeans and Russians perished.

Zelensky’s words echoed those of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on the other side of the world at the eastern edge of the great Eurasian landmass: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled flat.” We can be sure that Duterte, like Zelensky, had in mind World War II, which also consumed tens of millions of lives in East Asia.

The United States is stoking tensions in both Europe and East Asia, with Ukraine and Taiwan as the current flashpoints on the doorsteps of Russia and China, which are the targeted nations.

Let us be clear at the outset. As we shall see, the endpoint of this process is not for the US to do battle with Russia or China, but to watch China and Russia fight it out with their neighbors to the ruin of both sides. The US is to “lead from behind” – as safely and remotely as can be arranged.

To make sense of this and react properly, we must be very clear-eyed about the goal of the US. Neither Russia nor China has attacked or even threatened the US. Nor are they in a position to do so – unless one believes that either is ready to embark on a suicidal nuclear war.

Why should the US elite and its media pour out a steady stream of anti-China and anti-Russia invective? Why the steady eastward march of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization since the end of the first Cold War? The goal of the US is crystal clear – it regards itself as the Exceptional Nation and entitled to be the No 1 power on the planet, eclipsing all others.

This goal is most explicitly stated in the well-known Wolfowitz Doctrine drawn shortly after the end of the first Cold War in 1992. It proclaimed that the United States’ “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet union or elsewhere….”

It stated that no regional power must be allowed to emerge with the power and resources “sufficient to generate global power.” It stated frankly that “we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global power” (emphasis mine).

The Wolfowitz Doctrine is but the latest in a series of such proclamations that have proclaimed global domination as the goal of US foreign policy since 1941, the year before the US entered World War II. This lineage is documented clearly in a book by the Quincy Institute’s Stephen Wertheim, “Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy.”

Target No 1: China

China’s economy is No 1 in terms of PPP-GDP (gross domestic product based on purchasing power parity) according to the International Monetary Fund and has been since November 2014. It is growing faster than the US economy and shows no signs of slowing down. In a sense, China has already won by this metric, since economic power is the ultimate basis of all power.

But what about a military defeat of China? Can the US with its present vastly superior armed forces bring that about? Historian Alfred McCoy answers that question in the way most do these days, with a clear “no” . . .

Target No 2: Russia

If we hop over to the western edge of Eurasia, we see that the US has a similar “problem” when it comes to Russia. Here too, the US cannot defeat Russia in a conventional conflict, nor have US sanctions been able to bring it down. How can the US surmount this obstacle?

And as in the case of East Asia, the US faces another economic competitor, Germany, or more accurately, the European Union with Germany at its core. How is the US to deal with this dual threat?

One clue comes in the response of President Joe Biden to both the tension over Taiwan and that over Ukraine. Biden has said repeatedly that his administration will not send US combat troops to fight Russia over Ukraine or to fight China over Taiwan. But it will send materiel and weapons, and also “advisers.”

And here too the US has other peer competitors, most notably Germany, which has been the target of US tariffs. Economist Michael Hudson puts it succinctly in a penetrating essay: “America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies: The US aim is to keep them from trading with China and Russia.”

Postwar Rise to Power

Such “difficulties” for the US were solved once before – in World War II.

One way of looking at that conflict is that it was a combination of two great regional wars, one in East Asia and one in Europe. In Europe the US was minimally involved as Russia, the core of the USSR, battled it out with Germany, sustaining great damage to life and economy. Both Germany and Russia were economic basket cases when the war was over, two countries lying in ruins.

The US provided weapons and materiel to Russia but was minimally involved militarily, only entering late in the game. The same happened in East Asia, with Japan in the role of Germany and China in the role of Russia.

Both Japan and China were devastated in the same way as were Russia and Europe. This was not an unconscious strategy on the part of the United States. As Harry Truman, then a senator, declared in 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”

At the end of it all, the US emerged as the most powerful economic and military power on the planet. . .

The US was able to become the dominant power on the planet because all peer competitors were left in ruins by the two great regional wars in Europe and East Asia, wars that are grouped under the heading of World War II.

If Europe is plunged into a war of Russia against the EU powers with the US “leading from behind” with materiel and weapons, who will benefit? And if East Asia is plunged into a war of China against Japan and whatever allies it can drum up, with the US “leading from behind,” who will benefit?

It is pretty clear that such a replay of World War II will benefit the US. In World War II, while Eurasia suffered tens of millions of deaths, the US suffered about 400,000 – a terrible toll certainly but nothing like that seen in Eurasia. . .

And with the economies and territories of Eurasia, East and West, in ruins, the US will again emerge on top, in the catbird seat, and able to dictate terms to the world. World War II redux.

But what about the danger of nuclear war growing out of such conflicts? The US has a history of nuclear “brinksmanship,” going back to the earliest post-World War II days. It is a country that has shown itself willing to risk nuclear holocaust.

Are there US policymakers criminal enough to see this policy of provocation through to the end? I will leave that to the reader to answer.

The peoples of East and West Eurasia are the ones who will suffer most in this scenario. And they are the ones who can stop the madness by living peacefully with Russia and China rather than serving as cannon fodder for the US. . .

Given the power of modern weaponry, this impending world war will be much more damaging than World War II by far. The criminality that is on the way to unleashing it is almost beyond comprehension.

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Source: Asia Times

Putin’s War
by Gilad Atzmon | March 13, 2022

Putin is not a military general. He is a modernist leader, a trained spymaster and strategist who understands that war is a continuation of politics by other means (Clausewitz). Accordingly, if we want to grasp Putin’s motives we should refrain from trying to assess Russia’s military campaign in terms of ‘strict military objectives.’ We should instead look at the military campaign as a political instrument that is set to mobilize a global and regional geopolitical shift and on a mammoth scale.

It is clear that Putin’s army is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties. It uses siege tactics as opposed to the barbarian American ‘Shock and Awe’ doctrine. Furthermore, the Russian military works hard not to dismantle the Ukrainian military. Instead it encircles cities and is cutting out the Ukrainian army in the East and South of the country. The Russian military has dismantled Ukraine’s ability to regroup, let alone counter attack. Western military analysts have agreed that clear evidence of the Ukrainian army’s growing disability is that Ukraine’s army didn’t manage to seriously damage the 60 km Russian convoy on its way to Kyiv despite the fact that the convoy stood still for more than 10 days. In the last 24 hours, Russia has made it clear to the West that any Western military supply to Ukraine will be treated as a legitimate military target. In other words, the elite Ukrainian army in the East is now a defunct military force; it can defend the cities, it can mount guerrilla attacks on stretched Russian military logistics but it cannot regroup into a fighting force that can alter the battleground.

Putin’s army, as military experts agree, enjoys massive firepower. It is hardly a secret that Russia’s artillery is a deadly force and there is no force that can match it anywhere in the world. The military rationale for this is plain. The USSR never trusted the quality and the loyalty of its foot soldiers. While it counted on the soldiers’ mass impact, their sheer numbers, it also invented the means, the technology, the tactics and the doctrine to win the battle from afar in preparation for the masses to move in. It was Red artillery that knocked down the 3rd Reich Army. Similarly, flattening enemy cities is something the USSR and modern Russia are famous for. Russia enjoys this power, but it has refrained, so far, from deploying this ability in Ukraine. Russia has displayed this capability rather than deploying it. According to military analysts, Russia hasn’t even begun to utilize its superior air power other than assuring its total air superiority over Ukraine.

The Russian army’s tactic has been to mount pressure on cities’ outskirts, demonstrating Russian military might and then opening corridors for humanitarian convoys. And this is the trick. Russia is creating a flood of refugees to the west. Due to the Ukrainian government ban on men 18-60 leaving the country, we are talking about women and children. So far there are about 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees but this number could increase dramatically. And the question follows: will Germany be happy to accept another million refugees that aren’t a working force? What about France and Britain, the USA, Canada, all those countries that pushed Zelensky and Ukraine into a war but were quick to leave the Ukrainian people to their fate?

Sooner or later, Putin believes, Europe will accept his entire list of demands and will lift the list of sanctions, and may even compensate him for his losses on oil sales all in a desperate attempt to stop the tsunami of Ukrainian refugees. By the time the guns cool down, many Ukrainians may actually prefer to stay in Germany, France, Britain and Poland. This will lead, at least in Putin’s mind, to a demographic shift in the ethnic balance in favor of the Russian ethnic groups in Ukraine. Within the context of such a shift, Putin will be able to dominate the situation in his neighbour state by political and even democratic means. . .

The main question is how is it possible that our Western political and media elite are clueless about Putin and Russia’s moves? How is it possible that not one Western military analyst can connect the dots and see through the fog of this horrid war? The reason is obvious: no gifted people see a potential career in military or public service these days. Gifted people prefer the corporate world, banks, high tech, data and media giants. The result is that Western generals and intelligence experts are not very gifted. The situation of our Western political class is even more depressing. Not only are our politicians those who weren’t gifted enough to join the corporate route, they are also uniquely unethical. They are there to fulfil the most sinister plans of their globalist masters and they do it all at our expense.

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Source: Gilad Atzmon’s Webpage