U-R War: 100 Seconds to Midnight
Current situation: 60 seconds to midnight
The current state of the Ukraine-Russia War remains dire as in the recent reports, troops and arms continue to amass along the borders east and north of Ukraine. According to updates by retired veterans, such as Douglas MacGregor, who served as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense under the Trump administration, these troops are ready to pour into Ukraine once given the orders, and they will fire at whatever they are told to. The set up is particularly dangerous should there be any kind of false-flag incident.
President Zelensky has allowed his army to be comprised of unwilling conscripts, ex-inmates, mercenaries and volunteers. If any of these take their unhappy aim on one of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, this could be the false flag which officially sets off global thermonuclear catastrophe. As of January 20, 2022, The Bulletin‘s Doomsday-Clock was set at 100 seconds to midnight. No update has been provided, however a logical guess is that it’s actually well under that right now.
The Doomsday Clock is pretty much the brainchild of the nuclear scientist establishment community, who while arguing against the bomb, nevertheless fully supported the Cold War. In fact, for a base comparison with the Ukraine crisis, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists notes that during the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962, the hands were not moved.
“They were not moved during the 10-day crisis because too little was known at the time about the circumstances of the standoff or what the outcome would be. In fact, after the crisis, US and Soviet leaders installed a direct telephone line for communication, and within months signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty outlawing underground nuclear weapons testing—the first treaty addressing the nuclear weapons threat. On the basis of these steps, The Bulletin set the clock back from seven minutes to midnight to 12 minutes to midnight in 1963.”
Can we not see how close the writing is on the wall? How wrong President Biden is to try to compare with 1962, when the Doomsday Clock was still at seven minutes?
Right now, hundreds of thousands of Russia’s troops are poised for a massive attack scheduled for later this fall, when the ground becomes hard as ice, the ideal situation for the Russian troops, who have regularly practiced and lived through arctic winter-time conditions. Yet the Western adamancy should make the average public citizen white with concern: The Bulletin‘s November 2022 digital magazine theme is problematizing Putin as the obstruction for the regime change needed.
When “No Putin, No Russia!” is the cry, can there be room for negotiation, for new Minsk Accords, for compromise and consideration in the multilateral world of mercantilism?
Biden identifies China and Russia as enemy nations
As geopolitical analysts have noted, after the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and the official end of the war, the war on terrorism is now shifting to policing the Indo-Pacific region, namely containing China, while continuing to constrain Russia. As stated in the White House press release of the Biden-Harris National Security Strategy:
“The most pressing strategic challenge we face as we pursue a free, open, prosperous, and secure world are from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy. We will effectively compete with the People’s Republic of China, which is the only competitor with both the intent and, increasingly, the capability to reshape the international order, while constraining a dangerous Russia.”
Nevermind the possible misreading of intentions, the official report details what is envisioned in the future for China and Russia with respect to U.S. interests, even though that may be confusing given the number of transnational corporations (TNCs) continuing to tap into the cheap human slave labor and robotic manufacturing technologies of China. While the U.S. promises to invest, align, and compete responsibly with China, using the shadow of the great military might to “backstop” any diplomatic issues, the regime change in Russia already seems like a foregone conclusion. The document lists a litany of Russian infractions against the West claiming that Moscow has rejected attempts at negotiation. Without mincing words, the White House asserts that whatever is coming to Russia, including crushing blows, are for its own good:
“Alongside our allies and partners, America is helping to make Russia’s war on Ukraine a strategic failure. Across Europe, NATO and the European Union are united in standing up to Russia and defending shared values. We are constraining Russia’s strategic economic sectors, including defense and aerospace, and we will continue to counter Russia’s attempts to weaken and destabilize sovereign nations and undermine multilateral institutions. Together with our NATO Allies, we are strengthening our defense and deterrence, particularly on the eastern flank of the Alliance. Welcoming Finland and Sweden to NATO will further improve our security and capabilities. And we are renewing our focus on bolstering our collective resilience against shared threats from Russia, including asymmetric threats. More broadly, Putin’s war has profoundly diminished Russia’s status vis-a-vis China and other Asian powers such as India and Japan. Moscow’s soft power and diplomatic influence have waned, while its efforts to weaponize energy have backfired. The historic global response to Russia’s war against Ukraine sends a resounding message that countries cannot enjoy the benefits of global integration while trampling on the core tenets of the UN Charter.”
The United States is calling all nations to join its efforts and standby the West in its support for Ukraine, defense of NATO territories, deter aggression, and prevent any nuclear strike from Russia. The most skeptical geopolitical analysts can take this to mean that it is allowing for the use of U.S. pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Russia, according to the doctrine of pre-emption developed by the GW Bush administration during the run-up to the Iraq war. This would take the Doomsday Clock down to 10 seconds, far below the limit for any human anti-ballistic missile defense possibilities.
Identify vs. Designate, Multilateral vs. Multipolar
The saving grace to the murky policy report is that there are just enough ambiguities built in for possible positive paradigm-shifts, afterall, identifying nations as “challenges” still is not the same as designating said nations as “enemies.” Per William Blum and other experts, the U.S. cannot escape its reputation as operating the world’s largest rogue state, whereby heads of nations who refuse to align sufficiently will be deposed by some clever move or other tragedy, by the U.S. deep state or its counterparts.
The transnationals and public citizens rely on China for the multilateral manufacture of goods; China has demonstrated its goodwill by investing huge sums of its dollar credits not so much in national security but ensuring the improvement for the movement of goods ie. transportation infrastructure. It did so not for the sake of return in multipolar investment but for building out a circular economy, and developing a new energy-and-development security architecture. Somewhat in line with the early vision of Lyndon LaRouche, the One-Belt-One-Road Initiative embraces and develops many alternative means of transporting goods, with the intention of instilling flexible time-lines in preparation of future oil shortages around the world.
As one minister pointed out recently, good friendships are also good partnerships which believe in and reward growth potential. That is the essence of a genuine meritocracy, such as the public education system was intended to be. China’s vision is a global one, but not for world takeover—that is impossible really–rather, it is for the sake of international business development especially from the perspective of the huge number of TNC’s based in Asia today. For the U.S. to step in and play policeman, when China had been allowed to develop quite independently for millennia, is much more money being thrown into the bathwater: there are such huge needs for equally essential infrastructure investment here inside the United States. In fact, that was supposed to be the original basis for the Biden Build Back Better agenda, focused upon U.S. physical infrastructure and fulfilling campaign promises on all kinds of new rail, bridges, hydropower, reservoir development, water conveyance, flood retention, plus solar and wind power. The New Deal promised everyone a shovel who wanted to work.
All that appears to have been set aside, never mind the capitalist projected energy cliff or the (corruption-driven) liquidity crisis. The United States and many Western nations are totally dependent on global trade: we are deeply entrenched in multilateralism. TNCs are fleeing enmasse to the developing world irregardless, but the Asian nations are happy to accept all the business it can; nothing is built or shipped anymore that is not involved somehow in the globalist trade paradigm.
Multipolar world may be more justice served
In fact, the number of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) founded or led by Russia and China have steadily grown over the past thirty years. What began as regional cooperative alliances based upon security needs has expanded or increased to include economics, finance, water management, development, trade, and investment. For instance, what began as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in 2001 for non-Western multilateral governance has paved the way for the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) founded in 2015, now with 56 state members. In the post-Soviet space, what began as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in 2002 strengthened the possibilities for the Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) which launched in 2006. The network of IGOs emanating from Moscow and Beijing has become quite dense, and especially providing the foundation for Sino-Russian formulation of BRICS, a post-Western alternative global economic policy group consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
These groupings provide a leverage against the formalist demands of the U.S. hegemony while enabling them to nevertheless adopt practices similar to, and cooperating with the World Bank. Naturally this causes leaders in the West to bristle at the possibilities of IGOs working outside their framework, yet there is nothing illegal about these new networks. Nations have formed their own bilateral trade relations and multilateral trade organizations for centuries. It is the scale, scope, strength, and power of the Russia and China partnerships which alarm some in the West, even when the new global infrastructure and investment initiatives are attractive for a growing number of partners.
According to Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon in Exit from Hegemony it is self-defeating for the United States to adopt a defiant, militaristic stance against what will in all likelihood eventually develop into a multipolar world order. Already the new multilateral groupings have spawned new alliance mechanisms in Latin America as well as an imitation of BRICS among a cluster of second-world nations called MIST (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Turkey). A Trumpean-type of oligarchic pushback, retraction and U.S. withdrawal from global governance organizations such as from the G7 and the United Nations would be folly, and would tend to only reinforce the sorts of populist authoritarianism hastening the demise of public infrastructure or its co-optation by privatization oligarchs and kleptocrats.
Examples of what privatization tends to lead to include huge cost overruns such as with certain industries inside the U.S. military industrial complex; bankruptcy and restructuring such as happened with Detroit, Michigan; and complete outsourcing of local government such as in U.K.’s Northamptonshire county, East Sussex, or Barnet near London. Pulverization of the public local government infrastructure for the sake of squeezing profit margins lead to collapses in social services, pension funds, public housing, public transportation, and even basic subsistence services such as provision of drinking water, garbage collection, and maintenance and upkeep of storm sewers. This is not even including the deliberate collapse of local media especially of print newspapers so that people must suffer under the yoke of oppression because news cannot get out on the demise of the public trust.
All of this is good enough reason why at least as of this date, China offers the world a different vision with its focus on a more people-centered, people-focused socialist-accountable economy. The more the United States and NATO persecute China and Russia, the more the emerging nations will amalgamate and devise ways to escape the strangehold that the Western powers represent in demanding cultural and economic dependency. This is why Cooley and Nexon conclude:
“What we can say with greater confidence is that the United States will no longer be able to exercise global hegemony, and that it will need to accommodate other powers to a much greater extent than it is used to. At the same time, the pathways that we identified will continue to transform the ecology of the institutions, rules, and norms that shape international political life…Devising a pragmatic, responsible, and publicly articulated strategy to cope with the different pathways comprising this international transition—-as opposed to denial or maintaining a mystical American exceptionalism—-remains the most important and urgent challenge confronting United States foreign policy.”
It is natural for the dominant hegemony to hold onto its old ways of co-optation, exploitation, war and regime change. But short of the end of the World War II, no Marshall Plan awaits the United States to become the supreme global superpower that it was able to become from the ash heaps in Europe. Instead, in the age of world globalization and a host of rising powers, it is incumbent upon the U.S. leadership to become more the graceful accommodator, because the more it pushes back with belligerency, sanctions and bloodshed, the faster the propulsion by other nations to join BRICS, formulate ways to leave the petro-dollar, and create more multipolarity. This could be why even Saudi Arabia has recently applied to join BRICS, which must be of great concern to U.S. financial regulators, so much so that it is not even covered by Western mainstream news.
By now, Western leaders are totally captured by the satellite of billionaire-led capitalism, even throwing unionized working-class citizens under the bus. Everywhere this is raising hackles and causing social unrest along with continued displacement. In the final blow for Europe, the constant wrangling may finally result in the sort of political undermining leading to balkanization. Imagine the world’s richest speculator, BlackRock, licking its chops over opportunities for yet more asset consolidation. World policemen, such as the United States, are mere foot soldiers for the multinational billionaire class. The lackey nation is free to conduct its wars in the name of democracy, yet never quite finishing up its work nor leaving the distant state autonomous and liberated. This is why even our wars must be mopped up by the likes of the United Nations, who continue to send in their crews to provide food and aid distribution, pick over its refugees to select those suitable for immigration, and coordinate among the many contractors eager and willing to help rebuild the nation again back better.
This is why the UN observers are so integral for the moral forces to ensure that children and women are not exploited. Instead UN-peacekeepers are now even openly connecting with human traffickers and pedophile-obsessed bureaucrats and perverse businesspersons. This is why the final tab on Ukraine is decades down the pipeline, especially every day that the war continues. This is why the United Nations is certainly derelict to not step up its deliberations. Every day that there is no ceasefire in the Ukraine-Russia War is everyday that there must be a special emergency session given top-priority without any adjournment, surpassing all other global priorities, because of the imminent growing danger of nuclear war.
Photo by AGN @ Kennedy Center for Shen Yun 2016