The Martyrdom of Julian Assange

Another important dispatch from The Greanville Post. Be sure to share it widely.


by Chris Hedges


Supporters of Julian Assange gather outside Westminster Court after Assange’s arrest. (AFP/WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto)


[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he arrest Thursday of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities, embraced by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments, in the seizure of Assange are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by corporate states and the global ruling elite will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and entertainment. The arrest of Assange, I fear, marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives.

Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate Julian Assange’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy—diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory—to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister Theresa May order the British police to grab Assange, who has never committed a crime? Under what law did President Donald Trump demand the extradition of Assange, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States?

I am sure government attorneys are skillfully doing what has become de rigueur for the corporate state, using specious legal arguments to eviscerate enshrined rights by judicial fiat. This is how we have the right to privacy with no privacy. This is how we have “free” elections funded by corporate money, covered by a compliant corporate media and under iron corporate control. This is how we have a legislative process in which corporate lobbyists write the legislation and corporate-indentured politicians vote it into law. This is how we have the right to due process with no due process. This is how we have a government—whose fundamental responsibility is to protect citizens—that orders and carries out the assassination of its own citizens such as the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. This is how we have a press legally permitted to publish classified information and a publisher sitting in jail in Britain awaiting extradition to the United States and a whistleblower, Chelsea Manning, in a jail cell in the United States.

Britain will use as its legal cover for the arrest the extradition request from Washington based on conspiracy charges. This legal argument, in a functioning judiciary, would be thrown out of court. Unfortunately, we no longer have a functioning judiciary. We will soon know if Britain as well lacks one.

Assange was granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense allegations that were eventually dropped. Assange and his lawyers always argued that if he was put in Swedish custody he would be extradited to the United States. Once he was granted asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship the British government refused to grant Assange safe passage to the London airport, trapping him in the embassy for seven years as his health steadily deteriorated.

The Trump administration will seek to try Assange on charges that he conspired with Manning in 2010 to steal the Iraq and Afghanistan war logsobtained by WikiLeaks. The half a million internal documents leaked by Manning from the Pentagon and the State Department, along with the 2007 video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters journalists, provided copious evidence of the hypocrisy, indiscriminate violence, and routine use of torture, lies, bribery and crude tactics of intimidation by the U.S. government in its foreign relations and wars in the Middle East. Assange and WikiLeaks allowed us to see the inner workings of empire—the most important role of a press—and for this they became empire’s prey.

U.S. government lawyers will attempt to separate WikiLeaks and Assange from The New York Times and the British newspaper The Guardian, both of which also published the leaked material from Manning, by implicating Assange in the theft of the documents. Manning was repeatedly and often brutally pressured during her detention and trial to implicate Assange in the seizure of the material, something she steadfastly refused to do. She is currently in jail because of her refusal to testify, without her lawyer, in front of the grand jury assembled for the Assange case. President Barack Obama granted Manning, who was given a 35-year sentence, clemency after she served seven years in a military prison.

Once the documents and videos provided by Manning to Assange and WikiLeaks were published and disseminated by news organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian, the press callously, and foolishly, turned on Assange. News organizations that had run WikiLeaks material over several days soon served as conduits in a black propaganda campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks. This coordinated smear campaign was detailed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch and dated March 8, 2008. The document called on the U.S. to eradicate the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and destroy Assange’s reputation.

Assange, who with the Manning leaks had exposed the war crimes, lies and criminal manipulations of the George W. Bush administration, soon earned the ire of the Democratic Party establishment by publishing 70,000 hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and senior Democratic officials. The emails were copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State, to the Clinton Foundation. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. It exposed Clinton’s repeated mendacity. She was caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton campaign’s efforts to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Trump was the Republican nominee. It exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. It exposed Clinton as the primary architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs, should have remained hidden, but they can’t then call themselves journalists.

The Democratic leadership, intent on blaming Russia for its election loss, charges that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian government hackers, although James Comey, the former FBI director, has conceded that the emails were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary. Assange has said the emails were not provided by “state actors.”

WikiLeaks has done more to expose the abuses of power and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. In addition to the war logs and the Podesta emails, it made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency and their interference in foreign elections, including in the French elections. It disclosed the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. It intervened to save Edward Snowden, who made public the wholesale surveillance of the American public by our intelligence agencies, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow. The Snowden leaks also revealed that Assange was on a U.S. “manhunt target list.”

A haggard-looking Assange, as he was dragged out of the embassy by British police, shook his finger and shouted: “The U.K. must resist this attempt by the Trump administration. … The U.K. must resist!”

We all must resist. We must, in every way possible, put pressure on the British government to halt the judicial lynching of Assange. If Assange is extradited and tried, it will create a legal precedent that will terminate the ability of the press, which Trump repeatedly has called “the enemy of the people,” to hold power accountable. The crimes of war and finance, the persecution of dissidents, minorities and immigrants, the pillaging by corporations of the nation and the ecosystem and the ruthless impoverishment of working men and women to swell the bank accounts of the rich and consolidate the global oligarchs’ total grip on power will not only expand, but will no longer be part of public debate. First Assange. Then us.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers.

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Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917–2017

Petrograd workers drill on Palace Square. State Museum of the Political History of Russia, St. Petersburg.(The Bolsheviks in Power, p. 240)


[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Russian Revolution of 1917 erupted on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital. From the start, the October Revolution seemed both to confirm and contradict Marx’s analysis. He had envisioned a working-class-based socialist revolution breaking out in the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe. But the 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto, written a year before his death, amended this by pointing to a revolution in Russia as a possible “signal for proletarian revolution in the West.”1 Yet although a worker-peasant revolution under Marxist leadership triumphed in Russia in 1917, Russia was still a largely underdeveloped country, and the revolutionary uprisings in Germany and Central Europe which followed were weak and easily extinguished.In these circumstances, Soviet Russia, completely isolated, faced a massive counterrevolution, with all the major imperialist powers intervening on the side of the White Russian forces in the Civil War. “Socialism in one country,” the basic defensive posture of the USSR throughout its history, was thus to a large extent a geopolitical reality imposed on it from outside. This was evident beginning with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in which Russia was forced to give up much of the territory of the Tsarist Empire, followed soon after by the Treaty of Versailles, which sought to isolate it still further.It was imperialism—not in its generic sense, encompassing the whole history of colonialism—but in its connection to the monopoly stage of capitalism, as V. I. Lenin employed the term, that constituted the differentia specifica of twentieth-century capitalism, determining the conditions of both revolution and counterrevolution. Already by the late nineteenth century, the contest over colonies that had shaped much of European conflict since the seventeenth century had been replaced by a struggle of a qualitatively new kind: competition between nation-states and their corporations, not for imperial zones, but for actual global hegemony in an increasingly interconnected imperialist world system.2 Henceforth revolution and counterrevolution would be interrelated at the level of the system as a whole. All revolutionary waves, concentrated in the periphery where exploitation was most severe, since intensified by the extraction of surplus by the metropolitan powers, were revolts against imperialism, and were confronted by imperialist counterrevolution, organized by the core capitalist states.3Complicating this was the fact that a privileged sector of the working class in the advanced capitalist states could be seen as benefitting indirectly from the drain of surplus from the periphery, giving rise to a “labor aristocracy,” a phenomenon first singled out Frederick Engels and later theorized by Lenin in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.4Still, in 1967, a half-century after October 1917 and a hundred years after Capital, it was not unreasonable to assume, amid the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution in China, that world revolution would gradually gain the upper hand, and that the revolutions that had occurred, not only in Russia, but also in China, Cuba, and elsewhere, were irreversible. The twentieth century had already proven itself the bloodiest in human history. Yet it was also a period of enormous advances in human liberation. If the forces of world counterrevolution were gathering, their victory, even in the short run, was far from certain. As Herbert Marcuse declared in the opening pages of his 1972 Counterrevolution and Revolt:

The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. In its extreme manifestations, it practices the horrors of the Nazi regime. Wholesale massacres in Indochina, Indonesia, the Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Sudan are unleashed against everything which is called “communist” or which is in revolt against governments subservient to the imperialist countries. Cruel persecution prevails in the Latin American countries under fascist and military dictatorships. Torture has become a normal instrument of “interrogation” around the world. The agony of religious wars revives at the height of Western civilization, and a constant flow of arms from the rich countries to the poor helps to perpetuate the oppression of national and social liberation…. The counterrevolution is largely preventative and, in the Western world, altogether preventative…. Capitalism reorganizes itself to meet the threat of a revolution which would be the most radical of all historical revolutions. It would be the first truly world-historical revolution.

Today, a hundred years after the Russian Revolution and a century-and-a-half after Capital, conditions have changed. It would appear that the clock has been turned back, and the forces of global counterrevolution have triumphed. Most of the emancipatory movements that seemed to be gaining ground in the 1960s, primarily in the periphery, have been roundly defeated.

Nevertheless, the material contradictions of capitalist development—particularly in the form of the planetary ecological emergency—are in many ways more serious than ever before. Since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–09 pulled the veil away, it is abundantly clear that the present phase of global monopoly-finance capital, with its unprecedented levels of inequality, its stagnation and instability, its civilization-destroying bellicosity, its destruction of the environment, and its new forms of political-economic reaction, threatens the future not only of this generation, but that of all generations—the very survival of humanity. As Eric Hobsbawm concluded in his history of the twentieth century, “the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.”5

Reaction on a World Scale

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f imperialist counterrevolution triumphed in the end over the revolutionary waves of the twentieth century, how are we to understand this, and what does it mean for the future of world revolution? The answer requires a survey, in desperate brevity, of the whole history of imperialist geopolitics over the last century.

The period from the mid-1870s through the First World War marked a qualitative break in the logic of capitalist development. Contemporary observers as early as the 1870s spoke of the “new imperialism,” to refer to a rapid increase in colonial acquisitions, the rise of new imperial powers, and a reemergence of inter-imperialist rivalries.6 It was in this phase of the system that monopoly capital—capitalism dominated by giant industrial and financial firms—arose. Germany and the United States were rapidly entering the new age of heavy industry and advancing by leaps and bounds into the monopoly stage of capitalism, while Britain lagged behind in both respects.7 British hegemony over the capitalist world economy, dating from the Industrial Revolution, while still unrivalled in scale, was increasingly threatened under a new multipolar order of competing core states. The last three decades of the nineteenth century were years of economic stagnation, known in Europe at the time as the Great Depression. But it also represented an age of dramatic shifts in the locus of capitalist power.

Observing these trends, proponents of imperialism in the major capitalist states developed the new pseudoscience of geopolitics, which focused on the struggle for hegemony in the world system. Geopolitics can be understood in Clausewitzian terms as war by other means, often leading to the actual outbreak of hostilities. It had its origins primarily in the United States and Germany in the 1890s, marking the rise of both nations as imperial powers. In the United States, the new outlook was best represented by Charles Conant’s “The Economic Basis of Imperialism” (1898) and Brooks Adams’s The New Empire (1902)—both of which projected U.S. political-economic hegemony over large parts of the globe, particularly the Pacific.8 The founder of the German school of Geopolitik was Friedrich Ratzel, who in the 1890s coined the term Lebensraum, “living space,” as an imperative of German policy. “There is in this small planet,” Ratzel wrote, “sufficient space for only one great state.”9

However, what can be called classical geopolitical analysis only appeared in the interwar years and during the Second World War. Its leading British theorist was Halford MacKinder, a former director of the London School of Economics and for twelve years a Member of Parliament from Glasgow. In Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919), he wrote: “The great wars of history are the outcome, direct or indirect, of the unequal growth of nations.” The object of capitalist geopolitics was to promote “the growth of empires,” ending in “a single World-Empire.”10MacKinder was famous for his doctrine of the Heartland. Hegemony over what he called the World-Island (the interlocked continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa) and through it control of the entire world, could only be achieved, he argued, by dominating the Heartland—the enormous transcontinental landmass of Eurasia, encompassing Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. The Heartland was “the greatest natural fortress on earth,” because of its inaccessibility to the sea.11 In the new Eurasian age, land power—not sea power, as in past centuries—would be decisive. In Mackinder’s famous dictum:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.12

Mackinder’s geopolitical strategy was influenced by the Russian Revolution, and used to justify imperialist counterrevolution. In 1919, the British government appointed him high commissioner for South Russia, responsible for organizing British support for General Denikin and the White Army in the Civil War. Following the Red Army’s defeat of Denikin, Mackinder returned to London and reported to the government that, although Britain was right to fear German industrialization and militarism, German rearmament, then ostensibly blocked by the Treaty of Versailles, was essential. For Mackinder, Germany constituted the chief bulwark against Bolshevik control of Eastern Europe, and thus of the geopolitical Heartland.13

Mackinder was not the only influential interwar figure to promote such beliefs. It was this same logic that led Neville Chamberlain’s government two decades later not so much to “appease” Nazi Germany, as to collude with it, in the hope that Germany would turn its guns eastward, toward the USSR. Indeed, the Treaty of Versailles, as Thorstein Veblen explained, was a “compact for the reduction of Soviet Russia,” which while “not written into the text of the Treaty,” could “be said to have been the parchment upon which the text was written.”14

In Germany, the leading geopolitical theorist of the 1930s and ’40s was Karl Haushofer, the mentor of Rudolf Hess (Deputy Führer in the Nazi regime), and himself a key adviser to Adolf Hitler. He saw the British and U.S. empires as the main threat to Germany, and thus advocated the creation of a great Eurasian intercontinental power bloc, with Germany entering into an alliance of convenience with Russia and Japan to destroy Anglo-American power. With the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact, he wrote: “Now finally, the collaboration of the Axis powers, and of the Far East, stands distinctly before the German soul. At last there is hope of survival against the Anaconda policy [the strangling encirclement] of the Western democracies.”15

In the United States, the foremost geopolitical thinker of the age was Nicholas Spykman. In America’s Strategy in World Politics (1942) and his posthumous The Geography of Peace (1944), Spykman opposed Mackinder’s Heartland, land-based geopolitical strategy, in favor of one that emphasized sea power. By controlling the coastal rimlands of Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, and the Pacific, the United States could encircle the Eurasian Heartland, then controlled by the USSR. Spykman insisted on the need for an American-British hegemony over the globe, and was primarily concerned in The Geography of Peace with preventing the USSR from establishing “a hegemony over the European rimland.” The Soviet Union, he argued, would be unable to defend itself against “a united rimland.”16 Spykman’s geopolitics exerted a powerful if largely forgotten influence on U.S. foreign policy with the advent of the Cold War, including George Kennan’s strategy of “containment,” as well as the grand designs of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 1943, Mackinder underscored the global stakes for the U.S. empire, declaring in Foreign Affairs that “the territory of the Soviet Union is equivalent to the Heartland,” over which it could not be allowed to retain control.17 Washington’s initial geopolitical strategy adopted during the Second World War was intended to extend U.S. hegemony outward beyond what the Council on Foreign Relations called the Grand Area of the British and American empires, to further encompass continental Europe, the Middle East, and the rimlands of Asia.18 In the new anticommunist crusade, revolutions were to be fought all across the globe, but especially in these strategic areas. Not only the Council on Foreign Relations, but a succession of leading Cold War and post-Cold War strategic planners, such as James Burnham, Eugene Rostow, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Paul Wolfowitz, would go on to argue in similar terms.19 Washington would ultimately set itself the wider objective of dominating states and regions throughout the world, as well as controlling strategic resources, capital movements, currencies, and world trade. However, the full extent of U.S. imperial ambitions was to become apparent only in the period of naked imperialism following the demise of the Soviet Union.20

The clearest official statement of this new global ambition was the Defense Planning Guidance for 1994–1999 (portions of which were leaked to the New York Times in 1992) overseen by Wolfowitz as undersecretary of defense for policy. This became known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, commonly associated with the rise of neoconservatism. Intended as a direct response to the disappearance of the USSR from the world stage, it explicitly declared that the new goal of U.S. geopolitical strategy would be the indefinite prevention of the reemergence of any rival power that could threaten American supremacy—that is, the pursuit of a permanent unipolar world. “Russia,” the document stated, “will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States.”21It thus continued to be the principal long-run target.

As Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, put it in 1997 in The Grand Chessboard, “the United States…now enjoys international primacy, with its power directly deployed on three peripheries of the Eurasian continent”—Western Europe and parts of Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, and East Asia and the Pacific Rim. The goal, he argued, was to create a “hegemony of a new type” or “global supremacy,” indefinitely establishing the United States as “the first and only truly global power.”22 The new world order then envisioned was one of U.S. unipolar power, backed by nuclear primacy. Regime change in mid-level states considered of geopolitical significance and outside the U.S. empire—even those previously tolerated in the context of the Cold War—became essential. Here the goal was not to create stable democracies—an objective never considered viable in key strategic areas such as the Middle East—but rather to destroy “rogue states” and unassimilated political blocs, particularly on the outskirts of the Eurasian Heartland and in the oil-rich Persian Gulf, that could threaten the security or hinder the expansion of the U.S. empire. The blowback from this grand strategy of destruction is most evident today in the rise of the Islamic State.

The U.S. imperial grand strategy for the post-Soviet era first outlined in the Defense Planning Guidance had as its governing assumption the eventual resurgence of hostilities with a now capitalist Russia, as that nation inevitably recovered. In anticipation of this, the U.S. hegemon and its NATO allies expanded further into Eurasia and surrounding regions, engaging in wars in the Balkans, Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, tightening the noose around Russia over the quarter-century from 1992 to the present.23 This same grand imperial strategy included the suppression of all anti-systemic movements and forces in key strategic areas in the periphery, as well as attempts to constrain China militarily and politically.

Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, the New World Order originally declared by George H. W. Bush took on the additional ideological mantle of the War on Terrorism introduced by George W. Bush. This justified a strategy of permanent war and “humanitarian interventions” throughout the global periphery. In its efforts to assert total dominance over the Middle East following the 2003 Iraq War, the United States, backed by NATO, designated Iran and—particularly after the 2011 invasion of Libya—Syria as the leading Middle Eastern states sponsoring terrorism, making their demise its principal objective. Yet the real reasons for regime change in the Middle East and elsewhere, as Wolfowitz had intimated in the early 1990s to General Wesley Clark, were strictly geopolitical.24

The Obama administration, together with its NATO allies, brokered the 2014 coup in Ukraine, putting in place a pliant far-right government headed by a Western-friendly oligarch, thereby proclaiming in no uncertain terms the New Cold War against Russia. This reflected a strategic campaign in the works since at least 2007, when Vladimir Putin defiantly declared that “the unipolar policy model [of absolute U.S. global supremacy] is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world.”25 The long counterrevolution against the Soviet Union was thus extended into a geopolitical struggle aimed at a reemerging, now capitalist, Russia. The latter struck back by absorbing Crimea (formerly part of Ukraine) following a referendum; seeking to stabilize conditions in eastern Ukraine on its border, particularly with respect to Russian nationals; and intervening to counter the U.S.-Saudi-sponsored proxy war against the Assad regime in Syria—thereby succeeding in preventing the toppling of its main Middle Eastern ally.

Remarkably, the new Trump administration, representing a somewhat different faction of the U.S. capitalist class—beholden particularly to the fossil-fuel industry and financial sector and drawing heavily on a lower middle-class, ultra-nationalist ideology—initially signaled a geopolitical shift, aimed at détente with Russia. This was to be accompanied by a policy of concentrating on countering the Islamic State, Iran, North Korea, and China as the principal global antagonists—a view associated with the “clash of civilizations” strategy of Samuel P. Huntington, as opposed to the Eurasian Heartland approach of Wolfowitz and Brzezinski.26The incoming administration made it clear that China, with its rapid economic growth and increasing regional power, represented the main threat to U.S. hegemony (and U.S. jobs), and hence the main target of its imperial strategy.

Nevertheless, the greater part of the U.S. military-industrial complex, from the Pentagon to the intelligence agencies to the major security contractors, has strongly resisted this shift away from Russia as the principal antagonist—to the point of insinuating treason on the part of the Trump administration for its preliminary discussions with Russian officials, portrayed as collusion with the enemy. Hence, the administration has been subject to an unprecedented number of leaks from within the national security state, and has come under investigation for its communications with Russia during the campaign and the post-election transition. For dominant sections of the U.S. ruling class, it remains essential that Russia, occupying the Eurasian Heartland, and still constituting the chief nuclear rival, should remain the principal target of U.S. grand strategy. The stability of the NATO alliance, and the entire U.S. strategy of permanently subordinating Europe to its rule, is founded on the New Cold War with Russia.

For the U.S. ruling class, the strength of the U.S. economy, the supremacy of the dollar, and hence the financial power of Washington, are all seen as dependent on U.S. global primacy. Although U.S. GDP growth and that of the other core capitalist countries has stagnated, with the West losing ground economically to a rapidly developing China, the increasingly irrational geopolitical strategy coming out of Washington still has as its objective a unipolar world order. This is to be leveraged by an array of strategic assets, including the combined weight of the triad alliance of the United States and Canada, Europe, and Japan under U.S. leadership; geopolitical dominance; military and technological power; and financial supremacy via the dollar.

The aggressiveness of this imperial strategy can be seen in the U.S. pursuit of absolute dominance in nuclear weapons capabilities under the rubric of the “modernization” of all three legs of its nuclear arsenal. The object is to take full advantage of the fact that a weakened Russia fell behind for years in maintaining and modernizing its own nuclear weaponry, allowing the United States to pull decisively ahead. U.S. nuclear strategy is now predicated on the “death of MAD” (Mutual Assured Destruction), that is, the demise of the entire system of deterrence.27 Those formulating U.S. strategic doctrine increasingly believe that the United States is currently capable, while using only a small part of its nuclear arsenal, of destroying enough nuclear weapons of an opponent in a first strike (or counterforce attack)—even in the case of Russia—to prevail in a nuclear confrontation. In short, Pentagon planners now believe the United States has attained “strategic primacy” in nuclear weapons capability.28 This would make a first strike against any enemy on Earth “thinkable” for the first time since 1945, when Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties—in what was a political rather than a military decision, and the first real act of the Cold War.29 Ominously, with the imminent death of MAD, the other side too, in any period of nuclear tensions, has greater incentive to strike first, lest it be destroyed completely by a U.S. hegemon no longer restrained by fears of its own destruction in the event of a first strike on its part.30

“An essential feature of imperialism,” Lenin wrote, “is the rivalry between a number of great powers in the striving for hegemony.”31 Such dangers are redoubled over the long run when one capitalist nation, as in the case of the United States in the twenty-first century, seeks to create a unipolar world or superimperialist order.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States showed itself to be the world’s most destructive nation, killing millions in wars, invasions, and counterinsurgencies across the globe.32 This bloody legacy continues into the present: over a single Labor Day weekend, on September 3–5, 2016, the United States dropped bombs on or fired missiles at six largely Islamic countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. In 2015, it dropped a total of over 22,000 bombs on Iraq and Syria alone.33 No country opposed to the United States can afford to underestimate the level of violence that could be directed at it by the U.S. hegemon.

Revolution: The Human Future

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the twentieth century, revolutions were as much a product of resistance to imperialism as of class struggle. They most often broke out, as Lenin observed, in the “weak links” of the imperialist world system.34 Inevitably, they were met with counterrevolution organized by the great powers of the capitalist core. Even a small uprising was likely to be seen as a threat to world capitalist rule, and was usually crushed with brutal force, as in Ronald Reagan’s massive 1983 invasion of the tiny island of Grenada, or the covert war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The dominant ideology invariably blames the enormous human cost of this warfare on the revolutions themselves, rather than on imperialist counterrevolutions, which are rapidly erased from historical memory.

In 1970, MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy were invited to the inauguration of Chilean President Salvador Allende, who had been democratically elected as the head of a Popular Unity government, which promised to introduce socialism in Chile, starting with the nationalization of U.S. corporate assets in the country’s major industries. Magdoff and Sweezy were longtime friends of Allende’s, and their analysis at the time of his inauguration focused on the dangers arising from the close connections between the United States and the Chilean military, suggesting the strong likelihood of a military coup to be sponsored by Washington and carried out by Chile’s praetorian guard. Imperialism, they warned, respects no rule of law where challenges to the existing order are concerned. And indeed, a bloody seizure of power, led by General Augusto Pinochet and engineered by the United States, occurred three years later, taking the life of Allende and thousands of others.35

All of this reaffirms the historical truth that there can be no socialist revolution—however it should arise—that is not also forced to confront the reality of counterrevolution. Indeed, in judging revolution and counterrevolution over the last century, particular stress must be put on the strength and virulence of the counterrevolution. The struggles and errors of the revolutionists are only to be seen in the context of this wider historical dialectic.

From history textbooks to the mainstream news media, the dominant ideology in the West today presents the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an utter failure from beginning to end. The USSR, we are told, collapsed under the weight of its own internal inefficiencies and irremediable defects—though these accounts often claim almost in the same breath that it was U.S. power and military might that “won” the Cold War. It is undeniable that the history of the USSR was rife with historical tragedies and social and economic contradictions. Much of the enormous human potential that the Russian Revolution unleashed was exhausted in the devastating Civil War—in which the White Russian forces were directly supported by troops and arms from the West. The Soviet Union later fell prey to Joseph Stalin’s extreme collectivization and brutal purges.36

Nevertheless, the USSR over its history also underwent extraordinary industrial development, the conditions of the working class generally improved, and the population enjoyed certain economic securities lacking elsewhere. It was the Soviet Union that saved the West in the Second World War, beginning with the dramatic defeat of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad—the turning point of the war—and the victorious westward march of the Red Army (though the war also took a huge toll: the USSR lost more than twenty million people). The Soviet Union’s very existence inspired movements for human liberation in the third world. With the growth of the Soviet bloc and the region’s economic and technological accomplishments, the position of the USSR in the world seemed secure well into the 1970s. Its central planning system, despite certain inefficiencies and a tendency to degenerate into an overly bureaucratized command economy, offered a new and in many ways successful approach to economic and social development in noncapitalist terms.

But the USSR failed to carry forward the socialist revolution. The postrevolutionary society that emerged generated its own bureaucratic ruling class, the nomenklatura, which had arisen from the inequities of the system. The USSR’s stubborn refusal to allow independent development in Eastern Europe (albeit viewed as a necessary buffer zone against Western invasion) was made clear in the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.37

In the end, the USSR lost its inner dynamism, relying too much on extensive (the forced drafting of labor and resources) rather than intensive development (dynamic productivity from technological innovation and the unleashing of creative forces). It was exhausted by a decades-long military, political, and economic contest with the West, forced to compete in a massive arms race that it could ill afford.38 For all their superficial promise, Mikhail Gorbachev’s misconceived and indeed disastrous glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) policies massively undid the system, rather than reforming it. Although the loss of Eastern Europe, symbolically marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall, contributed to this unraveling, it was the Soviet nomenklatura that proved to be the system’s final undoing, as numerous representatives of the Soviet power elite and a corrupted privileged intelligentsia, in alliance with Boris Yeltsin and the West, chose to dissolve the post-revolutionary state from above—believing that their own individual and class interests would be better promoted under capitalism.39

Yet in spite of all of this, the experience of the USSR, as the first major socialist break with the capitalist system, continues to inspire and to inform revolution in the twenty-first century. Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution—though it took an entirely different form and is now itself imperiled by a counterrevolution supported by the United States—could hardly have been imagined without the Soviet example.40 The USSR’s extraordinary economic, technological, and cultural achievements are not easily erased in the historical memory.41

The world capitalist crisis of the late twentieth century eventually engulfed the core capitalist nations themselves as they sank from the 1970s on into economic stagnation—partly counteracted by the financialization of accumulation in the 1980s and ’90s, which, however, ended with the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007–09. With the full onset of stagnation since the Great Financial Crisis, the positions of the working class and lower-middle class in the advanced capitalist states have plummeted. Inequality has reached its highest level in history, both within nations and globally.

So severe is this seemingly endless crisis that it has destabilized the state within the core capitalist countries. The ruling classes of the various capitalist countries have responded to the growing popular disenchantment by resurrecting the radical right as a kind of ballast for stabilizing the system. Neoliberalism has thus partially given way to neofascism, or what may prove to be a neoliberal-neofascist (or center right/radical right) alliance. In the United States, science itself is rejected as a threat to capitalism, with climate-change denial now the official stance of the Trump White House.42 The “destruction of reason” is thus complete.43

Reactionary forces have of course gained the upper hand many times before in the history of the class struggle, only to give rise to new revolutionary waves. Commenting on the defeat of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, Engels observed in Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution:

A more signal defeat undergone by the continental revolutionary party—or rather parties—upon all points of the line of battle, cannot be imagined. But what of that?… Everyone knows nowadays that wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social want in the background, which is prevented, by outward institutions, from satisfying itself…. If, then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning.44

Although the historical conditions have been transformed many times over, these sentiments still ring true. Given today’s ever more desperate need for social change, it is necessary “to begin again from the beginning,” creating a new, more revolutionary socialism for the twenty-first century. Massive, democratic, egalitarian, ecological, revolutionary change in both center and periphery represents the only truly human future. The alternative is the death of all humanity.

Notes

  1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Preface to the Second Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 138–39.
  2. The analysis differs here from most world-systems theory, which sees the successive hegemonies of the Dutch, the British, and the United States within the world-economy as essentially the same, denying the distinctiveness of the monopoly stage of capitalism.
  3. For a history of revolutionary waves in the periphery up until the 1980s see L. S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The third world Comes of Age (New York: Morrow, 1981).
  4. Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1939),13–14, 106–08. On the shift of revolution to the third world and its impact on Marxian theory, see Paul M. Sweezy, Modern Capitalism and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 147–65.
  5. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Vintage, 1994), 585.
  6. R. Koebner and H. D. Schmidt, Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 18401960(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 175.
  7. E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London: Penguin, 1969), 172–93.
  8. Charles A. Conant, “The Economic Basis of Imperialism,” North American Review 167, no. 502 (1898): 326–40.
  9. Ratzel quoted in Robert Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (New York: Putnam, 1942), 31.
  10. Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: Holt, 1919), 1–2.
  11. Halford Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” Foreign Affairs 21, no. 4 (1943): 601.
  12. MacKinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, 186.
  13. Thorstein Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order (New York: Viking, 1943), 464.
  14. The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal (Edmonton, CA: Éditions Duval, 1995).
  15. Geography of Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944), 43, 57.
  16. Halford Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” 598.
  17. The Politics of War (New York: Random House, 1968).
  18. See John Bellamy Foster, “The New Geopolitics of Empire,” Monthly Review 57, no. 8 (January 2006): 9–14.
  19. John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).
  20. From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Atlanta, GA: Clarity, 2017), 275–77.
  21. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic, 1997), 3, 10, 30–39.
  22. Richard N. Haass, “The New Thirty Years War,” Project Syndicate, July 21, 2014, http://project-syndicate.org.
  23. General Wesley K. Clark, Don’t Wait for the Next War (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), 37–40.
  24. Putin quoted in Johnstone, “Doomsday Postponed?” 277.
  25. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).
  26. Johnstone, “Doomsday Postponed?” 275.
  27. The New Era of Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence, and Conflict,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013): 3–14, “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 2 (2016): 42–54; Hans M. Kristensen, Matthew McKenzie, and Theodore A. Potsoi, “How US Nuclear Force Modernization is Undermining Strategic Stability: The Burst-Height Compensating Super-Fuze,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1, 2017.
  28. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage, 1996).
  29. These Nuclear Breakthroughs Are Endangering the World,” Foreign Policy in Focus, April 26, 2017.
  30. Lenin, Imperialism, 91.
  31. On casualties from U.S. warfare in the periphery, especially those of civilians, see John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 316–36. On the history of U.S. military interventions from 1945 through the 1980s, see Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
  32. How Many Bombs Did the United States Drop in 2015?” Council on Foreign Relations blog, January 7, 2016, http://blogs.cfr.org; Tom Engelhardt, “You Must Be Kidding: The Exasperating, Never-Ending Sprawl of American Empire,” In These Times, September 23, 2016.
  33. Lenin, Imperialism, 9–14.
  34. Monthly Review 22, no. 7 (December 1970): inside covers.
  35. Ian C. D. Moffat, The Allied Intervention in Russia, 19181920 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
  36. The Soviet Century (London: Verso, 2005), 348, 385; Samir Amin, Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 57–58; Paul M. Sweezy, Post-Revolutionary Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 113–33.
  37. Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, “Perestroika and the Future of Socialism,” Monthly Review 41, no. 10 (March 1990): 1–13 and 41, no. 11 (April 1990): 1–7. The USSR operated on its production possibilities curve, relying on full capacity production, while monopoly-capitalist economies like the United States operated below their production possibilities curve, with substantial idle capacity. This meant that the former always faced a choice between “guns and butter,” while the latter was able to expand both guns and butter—and indeed more butter because more guns. This understanding was the basis of “military Keynesianism.” On the role that U.S. military Keynesianism played in forcing the USSR into a damaging arms race, see John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney, “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending,” Monthly Review 60, no. 5 (October 2008): 2–9.
  38. Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the conditions that led to the downfall of the Soviet state, but it was Yeltsin who carried out the coup de grâce, going so far as to initiate an armed overthrow of the elected parliament, cheered on by the capitalist West.
  39. This is quite literally so, since many of Chávez’s revolutionary ideas, as he often acknowledged, were drawn from Mészáros’s critique of the “capital system,” which encompassed the USSR, in István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995).
  40. See Amin, Russia and the Long Transition.
  41. Neofascism in the White House,” Monthly Review 68, no. 11 (April 2017): 1–30.
  42. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin, 1980).
  43. Frederick Engels, Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 9–10.

About this author
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER serves as editor of Monthly review. Professor Foster, who teaches at University of Oregon, received his PhD from York University. His research is devoted to critical inquiries into theory and history, focusing primarily on the economic, political and ecological contradictions of capitalism and imperialism, but also encompassing the wider realm of social theory as a whole. Professor Foster's teaching encourages in-depth, critical exploration of history and ideology, equipping students to learn to learn on their own.






China’s Military Interests Along The Silk Road Stretch From Sea To Shining Sea

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

China is no longer a paper tiger in military capabilities. Which only raises the ante in the face of colossal idiotic provocations.


[dropcap]L[/dropcap]eaked Chinese military documents purport that the People’s Liberation Army will seek to expand its presence across the world in order to defend its Silk Road interests.

The Japan Times was the first outlet to report on the plans that putatively circulated in Chinese circles back in February and which implored the state to concentrate on expanding its force projection capabilities beyond coastal defense and into the maritime and land realms. Although not directly stated, this is in clear reference to the need that China has to protect its Silk Road infrastructure investments and Sea Lines Of Communication (SLOC), mirroring the path that all other globally relevant Great Powers before it followed in having their overseas military activity driven by economic interests.

It was only a matter of time before China naturally did so as well, despite publicly eschewing this approach and being extremely sensitive to how it’s portrayed, though with good reason because of the likelihood that this will be exploited through weaponized infowar means as supposed “proof” that the country is really just “another imperial power”, albeit one that cleverly disguises its military moves with win-win Silk Road slogans. That’s not entirely correct, though it feeds into India’s paranoia about China’s creeping military encirclement through the so-called “String of Pearls” infrastructure projects around its South Asian periphery.

About those, it would make the most sense for China to reach agreements with the host states there and beyond similar to the 2016 Logistics Exchange Memorandum Of Agreement (LEMOA) between the US and India in allowing both parties to use each other’s military facilities on a case-by-case “logistical” basis, essentially giving some category of Silk Road projects such as seaports and airports a dual function even though this is exactly what American think tanks warned would eventually happen. Even so, it’s the most logical and cost-effective security solution available.



The catch, though, is that China must avoid being drawn into “mission creep” all across the world in defending its Silk Road interests, to which end it’s likely to avoid having any significant military presence overseas, let alone in actual conflict zones apart from the Hybrid War experiences that its peacekeepers are presently learning from. Thus, China will probably step up its training, advisory, and assistance missions to its many partners as part of its own multipolar version of the US’ “Lead From Behind” strategy, which could for example see future aircraft carrier deployments off the African coast in order to help its in-country allies respond to anti-Silk Road militants.

The People’s Liberation Army is therefore predicted to become a hemispheric force active all across Afro-Eurasia, though concentrating mostly on the supercontinental Heartland of Central Asia and the East African coast of the Indian Ocean Region in managing its dual mainland-maritime military competencies in protecting the Silk Road. This is natural given China’s expanding security interests by virtue of the need to defend the trade routes and infrastructure that form the backbone of its export-oriented economy and consequently its national stability, though it will undoubtedly be misportrayed by the country’s enemies as an “aggressive move” driven by “neo-imperial” calculations.

The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday July 13, 2018:

DISCLAIMER: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Andrew Korybko is a political analyst, journalist and a regular contributor to several online journals, as well as a member of the expert council for the Institute of Strategic Studies and Predictions at the People’s Friendship University of Russia. He specializes in Russian affairs and geopolitics, specifically the US strategy in Eurasia. His other areas of focus include tactics of regime change, color revolutions and unconventional warfare used across the world. His book, “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change”, extensively analyzes the situations in Syria and Ukraine and claims to prove that they represent a new model of strategic warfare being waged by the US.

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Debunking Two American Myths

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE SAKER
Crosspost with
Information Clearing House
Dateline—November 10, 2017 “Information Clearing House” – 

here are two myths which are deeply imprinted in the minds of most US Americans which are extremely dangerous and which can result in a war with Russia.

  • The first myth is the myth of the US military superiority.
  • The second myth is the myth about the US invulnerability.

I believe that it is therefore crucial to debunk these myths before they end up costing us millions of lives and untold suffering.


The Zircon technology is confounding dreams of American superiority.


In my latest piece for the Unz Review I discussed the reasons why the US armed forces are nowhere nearly as advanced as the US propaganda machine would have us believe. And even though the article was a discussion of Russian military technologies I only gave one example, in passing, of Russian military technologies by comparing the T-50 PAKFA to the US F-35 (if you want to truly get a feel for the F-35 disaster, please read this and this). First, I am generally reluctant to focus on weapons systems because I strongly believe that, in the vast majority of real-world wars, tactics are far more important than technologies. Second, Andrei Martyanov, an expert on Russian military issues and naval warfare, has recently written two excellent pieces on Russian military technologies (see here and here) which gave many more examples (check out Martyanov’s blog). Having read some of the comments posted under Martyanov’s and my articles, I think that it is important, crucial, in fact, to drive home the message to those who still are thoroughly trained by the propaganda machine to instantly dismiss any notion of US vulnerability or, even more so, technological inferiority. I am under no illusion about the capability of those who still watch the idiot box to be woken out of their lethargic stupor by the warnings of Paul Craig Roberts, William Engdahl, Dmitrii Orlov, Andrei Martyanov or myself. But I also think that we have to keep trying, because the war party (the Neocon Uniparty) is apparently trying really hard to trigger a conflict with Russia. So what I propose to do today is to connect the notions of “war with Russia” and “immediate and personal suffering” by showing that if Russia is attacked two of the most sacred symbols of the USA, aircraft carriers and the US mainland itself, would be immediately attacked and destroyed.

The aircraft carriers myth

USN ABRAHAM LINCOLN Strike Group.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] have to confess that even during the Cold War I always saw US aircraft carriers as sitting ducks which the Soviets would have rather easily destroyed. I formed that opinion on the basis of my study of Soviet anti-carrier tactics and on the basis of conversations with friends (fellow students) who actually served on US aircraft carriers.

I wish I had the time and space to go into a detailed description of what a Cold War era Soviet attack on a US aircraft carrier battle group would typically look like, but all I will say is that it would involve swarms of heavy air and sea launched missiles coming from different directions, some skimming the waves, others dropping down from very high altitude, all at tremendous speeds, combined with more underwater-launched missiles and even torpedoes. All of these missiles would be “intelligent” and networked with each other: they would be sharing sensor data, allocating targets (to avoid duplication), using countermeasures, receiving course corrections, etc. These missiles would be launched at standoff distances by supersonic bombers or by submerged submarines. The targeting would involve space-based satellites and advanced naval reconnaissance technologies. My USN friends were acutely aware of all this and they were laughing at their own official US propaganda (Reagan was in power then) which claimed that the USN would “bring the war to the Russians” by forward deploying carriers. In direct contrast, my friends all told me that the first thing the USN would do is immediately flush all the carriers away from the North Atlantic and into the much safer waters south of the so-called GUIK gap. So here is the ugly truth: carriers are designed to enforce the rule of the AngloZionist Empire on small and basically defenseless nations (like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq). Nobody in the USN, at least not in the late 1980s, seriously considered forward deploying aircraft carrier battlegroups near the Kola Peninsula to “bring the war to the Russians”. That was pure propaganda. The public did not know that, but USN personnel all knew the truth.

Sidebar If the topic of carrier survivability is of interest to you, please check out this Russian article translated by a member of our community which is a pretty typical example of how the Russians don’t believe for one second that US carriers are such hard targets to destroy]

What was true then is even more true today and I can’t imagine anybody at the Pentagon seriously making plans to attack Russia with carrier-based aviation. But even if the USN has no intention of using its carriers against Russia, that does not mean that the Russians cannot actively seek out US carriers and destroy them, even very far from Russia. After all, even if they are completely outdated for a war between superpowers, carriers still represent fantastically expensive targets whose symbolic value remains immense. The truth is that US carriers are the most lucrative target any enemy could hope for: (relatively) small, (relatively) easy to destroy, distributed in many locations around the globe – US carriers are almost “pieces of the USA, only much closer”.

Introducing the Zircon 3M22 hypersonic missile

First, some basic data about this missile (from English and Russian Wikipedia):

  • Max altitude: 40km (130’000 feet)
  • Warhead: 300-400kg (high explosive or nuclear)
  • Shape: low-RCS with radar absorbing coating.
  • Cost per missile: 1-2 million dollars (depending on configuration)

All this is already very impressive, but here comes the single most important fact about this missile: it can be launched from pretty much *any* platform: cruisers, of course, but also frigates and even small corvettes. It can be launched by nuclear and diesel-electric attack submarines. It can also be launched from long range bombers (Tu-160), medium-range bombers (Tu-22m3), medium-range fighter-bomber/strike aircraft (SU-34) and even, according to some reports, from multi-role air superiority fighter (SU-35). Finally, this missile can also be shore-based. In fact, this missile can be launched from any platform capable of launching the now famous Kalibr cruise missile and that means that even a merchant marine or fishing ship could carry a container with the Zircon missile hidden inside. In plain English what this means is the following:

  1. Russia has a missile which cannot be stopped or spoofed by any of the current and foreseeable USN anti-missile weapons systems.
  2. This missile can be deployed *anywhere* in the world on *any* platform.

Let me repeat this again: pretty much any Russian ship and pretty much any Russian aircraft from now on will have the potential capability of sinking a US aircraft carrier. In the past, such capabilities were limited to specific ships (Slava class), submarines (Oscar class) or aircraft (Backfires). The Soviets had a large but limited supply of such platforms and they were limited on where they could deploy them. This era is now over. From now on a swarm of Zircon 3M22 could appear anywhere on the planet at any moment and with no warning time (5000 miles per hour incoming speed does not leave the target anything remotely comparable to even a short reaction time). In fact, the attack could be so rapid that it might not even leave the target the time needed to indicate that it is under attack.

Any advanced aircraft can serve as a platform for the Zircon.  Ditto for surface vessels and submarines, not to mention shore installations and mobile overland platforms.

None of the above is a big secret, by the way. Just place “zircon missile” in your favorite search engine and you will get a lot of hits (131’000 on Google; 190’000 on Bing). In fact, a lot of specialists have declared that the Zircon marks the end of the aircraft carrier as a platform of modern warfare. These claims are widely exaggerated. As I have written above, aircraft carriers are ideal tools to terrify, threaten, bully and otherwise attack small, defenseless countries. Even medium-sized countries would have a very hard time dealing with an attack coming from US aircraft carriers. So I personally think that as long as the world continues to use the US dollar and, therefore, as long as the US economy continues to reply on creating money out of thin air and spending it like there is no tomorrow, aircraft carriers still have a bright, if morally repulsive, future ahead of them. And, of course, the USN will not use carriers to threaten Russia. Again, the US press has been rather open about the carrier-killing potential of the Zircon, but what it rarely (never?) mentions are the political and strategic consequences from the deployment of the Zircon: from now on Russia will have an easy and very high value US target she can destroy anytime she wants. You can think of the US carrier fleet like 10 US hostages which the Russians can shoot at any time. And what is crucial is this: an attack on a US carrier would not be an attack on the US homeland, nor would it be a nuclear attack, but the psychological shock resulting from such an attack could well be comparable to a (limited) nuclear strike on the US homeland.


A destroyer or frigate is an easy target for the hypersonic missile; a carrier, a much easier one.

This, on one hand, will greatly inhibit the Russian willingness to strike at US carriers as this would expose Russia to very severe retaliatory measures (possibly including nuclear strikes). On the other hand, however, in terms of “escalation dominance” this state of affairs gives a major advantage to Russia as the US does not have any Russian targets with an actual and symbolic value similar to the one of a US carrier.

There is another aspect of this issue which is often ignored. Western analysts often speak of a Russian strategy of “deterrence by denial” and “Anti-Access Area Denial” (A2AD). Mostly this is the kind of language which gets you a promotion and a pay raise in US and NATO think tanks. Still, there is a grain of truth to the fact that advanced Russian missiles are now providing Russia with a very cheap way to threaten even fantastically expensive US assets. Worse, Russia is willing (eager, in fact) to export these (relatively cheap) missiles to other countries. I find it amusing to see how US politicians are in a state of constant hysteria about the risk of nuclear proliferation, but fail to realize that conventional anti-ship missiles are a formidable, and much more likely, threat. Sure, there are missile export limiting treaties, such as the MTCR, but they only apply to missile with a range of over 300km. With modern ballistic and cruise missiles becoming smaller, deadlier and easier to conceal and with ranges which are (relatively) easy to extend, treaties such as the MTCR are becoming increasingly outdated.

The bottom line is this: as long as deterrences holds, attacking US carriers makes no sense whatsoever for Russia; however, as soon as deterrence fails, attacking US carriers, anywhere on the planet, gives Russia an extremely flexible and powerful escalation dominance capability which the US cannot counter in kind.

Striking at the Holy of Holies – the US “homeland”

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f you thought that discussing striking US carriers was bad, here we are going to enter full “Dr Strangelove” territory and discuss something which US Americans find absolutely unthinkable: attacks on the US homeland. True, for the rest of mankind, any war by definition includes the very real possibility of attacks on your own towns, cities and people. But for US Americans who are used to mete out violence and death far away from their own peaceful towns and cities, the notion of a devastating strike against the US homeland is pretty much unthinkable. On 9/11 the loss of 3000 innocent people placed the vast majority of US Americans into a total state of shock which resulted in a massive over-reaction at all levels (which was, of course, exactly the purpose of this false flag operation by the US and Israeli deep states). Just as with carriers, the dangers of a US over-reaction should serve as a deterrent to any attacks on the US homeland. But, just as with the carriers, that is only true as long as deterrence holds. If the Russian territory becomes the object of a US attack this would clearly indicate that deterrence has failed and that the Russian armed forces should now switch from a deterrence mode to a war-fighting mode. At this point, the US American over-reaction to being attacked or taking casualties could, paradoxically, result in a last-minute wake-up call indicating to everybody that what will come next will be truly devastating.


Introducing the RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)

The Sarmat—more potent and versatile than the aging generation of Satan missiles, and they could wipe out an entire country. A game changer.

Though officially very little is know about the Sarmat and the Yu-71, the reality is that the Internet has been full of educated guesses which give us a pretty clear idea of what kind of systems we are dealing here.

You can think of the RS-28 Sarmat as a successor of the already formidable RS-36 Voevoda (SS-18 Satan in US classification) missile: it is a heavy, very powerful, intercontinental ballistic missile with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (warheads):

  • Weight: 100 tons
  • Payload: 10 tons
  • Warheads: 10 to 15
  • Hypersonic glide vehicles: 3-24 (that’s the Yu-71 we will discuss below)
  • Range: 10’000km
  • Guidance: Inertial , satellite, astrocelestial
  • Trajectory: FOBS-capable

That last line, about being FOBS-capable, is crucial as it means that, unlike most Soviet/Russian ICMBs, the Sarmat does not have to fly over the North Pole to strike at the United States. In fact, the Sarmat could fly over the South Pole or, for that matter, in any direction and still reach any target in the USA. Right there this capability is, by itself, more than enough to defeat any current and foreseeable US anti-ballistic missile technology. But it gets better, or worse, depending on your perspective: the Sarmat’s reentry vehicles/warheads are capable of flying in low orbit, maneuver, and then suddenly plunge towards their targets. The only way to defeat such an attack would be to protect the USA by a 3600 coverage capable ABM system, something which the USA is decades away from deploying. And just to add to these already formidable characteristics, each Sarmat can carry up to 3-24 (depending on who you ask) Yu-71 hypersonic glide vehicles.

Introducing The Yu-71 (aka “Object 4202) hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV)

Yet again, this is hardly a topic not covered in the media and you can find numerous articles describing what a hypersonic glide vehicle is and how it can be used. (the best article I could find in English was by Global Security, it is entitled “Objekt 4202 / Yu-71 / Yu-74”).

Here is a summary of what we think we know about this HGV:

  • Max Speed: from Mach 5, according to Scott Ritter, to Mach 9, according to a quasi official Russian source, to Mach 15, acccording to Sputnik, to Mach 20 (that’s 7 kilometer per second, or 25’200kh/h, or 15’000mph), according to Global Security. Whatever the true speed, it will be fantastic and far, far beyond the kind of speeds current or foreseeable US anti-missile systems could hope to engage.
  • Hypermaneuverability: Russian sources describe the Yu-71 as “сверхманевренная боеголовка” or “hypermaneuverable warhead”. What that exactly means in turns of sustained Gs does not really matter as this is not about air-to-air combat, but about the ability to perform sudden course changes making it close to impossible for anti-missile systems to calculate an engagement solution.
  • Warhead: nuclear and conventional/kinetic.

That last line is very interesting. What it means is that considering the speeds attained by the Yu-71 HGV it is not necessary to equip it with a conventional (high explosive) or nuclear warheard. The kinetic energy generated by its high speed is sufficient to create an explosion similar to what a large conventional or small nuclear warhead could generate.

Bringing it all together now

Did you notice the similarities between the Zircon missile and the Sarmat+Yu-71 combo?

In both cases we have:

  1. an attack which can come from any direction
  2. speed of attack and maneuver capabilities which make interception impossible
  3. the capability for Russia to destroy a very high value US target in a very short time

It is amazing to see that while US decision makers were talking about their Prompt Global Strike program, the Russians actually developed their own version of this capability, much faster than the USA and at a fraction of the cost.

Russia is a world leader in developing and applying hypersonic materials to weapons systems.

These are all ideal ways to “bring the war home” and to encourage a country which enjoyed total impunity for its policies to begin seriously thinking about the consequences of messing around with the wrong people.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]o make things even more potentially dangerous for the USA, the very same geography which protected the USA for so long is now becoming a major vulnerability. Currently 39% of the US population lives in counties directly on the shoreline. In fact, the population density of coastal shoreline counties is over six times greater than the corresponding inland counties (source). In 2010 the US Census Bureau produced a fascinating report entitled “Coastline Population Trends in the United States: 1960 to 2008” which shows that the coastal counties provide an “intense concentration of economic and social activity”. In fact, a very large number of US cities, industrial centers and economic hubs are located near the USA coastline making them all *ideal* targets for Russian conventional cruise missile strikes which could be launched from very long distances (including over open water). And we are not talking about some future, hypothetical, cruise missile, we are talking about the very same Kalibr cruise missiles the Russians have been using against the Takfiris in Syria. Check out this very well made video which explains how Kalibr cruise missiles can be hidden pretty much anywhere and used with devastating effect on military and/or civilian targets:

The reality is that the US homeland is extremely vulnerable to any kind of attack. This is only in part due to recent Russian advances in military technology. For example, the “just on time” manufacturing or delivery practices which are aimed to minimize costs and inventory are, from a strategic/military point of view, extremely dangerous as it takes very little disruption (for example in the distribution network) to create catastrophic consequences. Likewise, the high concentration of some industries in specific areas of the United States (oil in the Mexican Gulf) only serve to further weaken the ability of the United State to take any kind of punishment in case of war.

Neocon vermin Ken Adelman—part of a serious infestation of America’s highest tiers of foreign policymaking, but essentially not much different than what came before. The US has been viciously imperialist for well ver a century now.

Most TV-watching Americans will dismiss all of the above by saying that “anybody come mess with us and we will kick their ass” or something equally sophisticated. And there is some truth to that. But what this mindset also indicates is a complete mental inability to operate in a scenario when deterrence has failed and the “other guy” is coming for you. That mindset is the prerogative of civilians. Those tasked with the defense of their country simply cannot think that way and have to look beyond the “threshold of deterrence”. They will be the one asked to fix the bloody mess once the civilians screw-up. Georges Clemenceau reportedly once said that “War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men”. I believe that the exact opposite is true, that war is too serious a matter to entrust to civilians, especially the US Neocons (the vast majority of whom have never spent any time in uniform) and who always make it sound like the next war will be easy, safe and painless. Remember Ken Adelman and his famous Iraqi “cakewalk”? The very same kind of scum is in power today and they want us to believe that the next war will also be a cakewalk or that being on a high speed collision course with Russia is something the USA can afford and should therefore engage in. The combined effect of the myth of US military superiority with the myth about the US invulnerability result in a US American sense of detachment, or even impunity, which is not at all supported by fact. I just fervently hope that the people of the USA will not find out how mistaken they are the hard way.

In the meantime, the Russian Chief of General Staff, General Gerasimov, has announced that Russia had completed what he called a “non-nuclear deterrence system” based on the Iskander-M, Kalibr and X-101 missiles. According to General Gerasimov, the Russian armed forces now have enough high-precision weapon systems to strike at any target within a 4000km range. Furthermore, Gerasimov declared that the number of platforms capable of launching such missiles has increased twelve times while the number of high precision cruise missiles has increased by a factor 30. General Gerasimov also explained that the combined capabilities of the Kalibr cruise missile, the Bastion mobile coastal defense missile system and the S-400 air defense system made it possible for Russia to fully control the airspace and surface of the Baltic, Barents, Black and Mediterranean seas (talk about A2AD!). Gerasimov concluded his briefing by saying “the development of high-precision weapons has made it possible to place the main burden of strategic deterrence from nuclear to non-nuclear forces”.

To fully evaluate the implications of what Gerasimov said please consider this: deterrence is, by definition, the action of discouraging an action or event through instilling doubt or fear of the consequences. So what Gerasimov is really saying is that Russia has enough conventional, non-nuclear, capabilities to inflict unacceptable consequences upon the USA. This is something absolutely new, a fundamental game changer. Most importantly, that is the official declaration by a senior Russian official that the USA does not have any technological superiority and that the USA is vulnerable to a devastating counter-attack, even a conventional one. In one short sentence General Gerasimov has put to rest the two most important myths of US geostrategic theory.

Keep in mind that, unlike their US counterparts, the Russians typically like to under-evaluate Russian military capabilities. You will find the Russian media bragging about how “totally awesome and best in the world” Russian weapons systems are, but military personnel in Russia still has a corporate culture of secrecy and under-reporting your real capabilities to the enemy. Furthermore, while junior officers can say pretty much anything they want, senior officers are held to very strict rules and they have to carefully weigh every word they say, especially acting officers. So when the Chief of Staff officially declares that Russia now has a conventional strategic deterrence capability – you can take that to the bank. It’s real.

Alas, the western media is still stuck in the “full idiot” mode we saw during the transit of the Russian aircraft carrier from the North Atlantic to the Mediterranean: on one hand, the Admiral Kuznetsov was presented as a rusty old bucket while on the other NATO forces constantly shadowed it as if it was about to strike London. Likewise, US politicians present Russia as a “gas station” while, at the same time, stating that this “gas station” has the capability to decide who lives in the White House. This kind of reporting is not only unhelpful but outright dangerous. On one hand the “the Russians are backward brutes”meme  fosters an arrogant and cocky attitude. On the other hand, constantly speaking about fake Russian threats results in a very dangerous case of “cry wolf” in which all possible Russian threats (including very real ones) are dismissed as pure propaganda. The reality is, of course, very different and simple in a binary way: Russia represents absolutely no threat to the United States or anybody else (including the three Baltic statelets). But if some western politician decides that he is smarter and stronger than Napoleon or Hitler and that he will finally bring the Russians to their knees, then he and his country will be destroyed. It is really that simple.

—The Saker

This article was written for the Unz Review

SELECT COMMENTS FROM ORIGINAL THREAD
Comment below if you likeLogged in as editor265morleyevans92p· 1 day agoIf one looks at history, one sees proof that 1). the United States has lost many wars. THE USA HAS LOST EVERY WAR SINCE 1945! and 2). the United States does not have “the most powerful military the world has ever known.” The contribution of the United States to both world wars was the smallest of all nations in blood and treasure. SMALLER THAN SERBIA. The Soviet Union and the Republic of China (who both were allies of the United States in WW II) paid the price to defeat Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. The United States does have the best propaganda the world has ever known and it also has the most expensive military the world has ever known. Americans who are educated by Sergeant Rock comic books and John Wayne / Clint Eastwood movies and who play with guns on the weekend ARE A DANGER TO THEMSELVES AND TO EVERYONE ON THE PLANET. <div style=”display:block;margin:6px 0 0″><a class=”a2a_dd” href=”http://www.addtoany.com/share_save”>siamdave43p· 1 day ago‘lost every war’ kind of depends on definitions and things like that. There is a strong argument to be made that they ‘won’ every war, in the sense they achieved their objective – if their objective was to destroy or destabilize potential or actual successful ‘social democratic’ governments and install or allow brutal dictators to take over the countries, or generally destablize regions and create chaos to destroy active opposition to US hegemonic goals, then you could say they have been very, very successful.morleyevans92p· 1 day agoYou are correct, siamdave. The USA has successfully abused the power it snatched after the Great Victory of ’45. Programs to enrich American weapons manufacturers and Wall Street banks have been a resounding success. Burp! The largest weapons manufacturing conglomerate in the world is BAE Systems. Who is that? It is British. They love war too. As you know, chaos and death are very profitable.Guysth85p· 1 day agoSo very well said .It is called living in delusion . The media keeps it that way . 

ArtieZ1298p· 1 hour ago

The winners of all US wars are the Military Industrial Complex the losers the citizens of the countries we invade and the taxpayers.

 

Biome1p· 1 day ago

Boy, oh boy! Is it possible that we can finally realistically anticipate the dethronement of the twisted western Zionist-Neo-con insanity? Is Russia now the synthesis of the contemporary legitimate political pragmatism that we once hoped for in NSDAP Germany 80 years ago to thwart the megalomaniacal imaginings of the Judeo-Masonic Illuminists? Will the world now have a chance at a sustainable peace through a benevolent application of Russian military superiority? To live a simple, ordinary life seems like a basic yearning of all common peoples. But these are uncommon and extra-ordinary times…

 

participant294387p· 1 day ago

Hopefully when Mr Trump asked Xi to talk to N. Korea about dismantling its nuclear program, Xi said, “first the US needs to dismantle its nuclear program, then everyone else will do the same. Otherwise all countries need nuclear weapons to deter irresponsible reckless US threats.

 

Woopy99110p· 1 day ago

Washington DC war technology is suspect. They had to use Japanese jets to fight the Korean war, Nazis to place satellites in orbit and to this day use WWII German ideas and technology for weaponry. Many experts say that Russia is superior to the US of I in weaponry. Also true that it was the Russians who defeated Germany in WWII and the battle at Normandy was fought against a small skeleton German military because Germany had spent itself fighting the Russians, much more could be said. Bottom line is that no military is invincible and there is a reckoning coming for the US of I unless they grow some brains in a hurry.

 

GivingUpOnTrump98p· 1 day ago

Forget the nuclear missiles, or radar-blind supersonic fighter jets.
The country which can master the technology of Jamming the Radio (RF) signals, from earth or from satellites, will win the war with one nuclear missile.

 

SmuglyUgly46p· 1 day ago

Hopefully the Russians will have made it clear through proper diplomatic channels, all prim and proper like, that should the west start a war and lose, then all surviving western war criminals will be taken east to be tried, and if found guilt they’ll be hanged. And as with the Nazis, their long drop will be filmed for posterity. Take note Bush, Blair, Netty, Aznar et al.

Also, I doubt the UK [and US} populations will accept a draft, so these governments will have to win a war on their own streets against their own people before taking war abroad – and in the unlikely event they win that, we still ain’t going.

 

dodivol1p· 21 hours ago

This is to me the only probable way those blood thirsty demons will ever be brought to account. Unfortunately.

 

Guysth85p· 1 day ago

What a good post from The Saker. I wish and hope that the neocons are listening .To tell the truth ,I believe the American generals know the truth of the matter in spite of what they say . A world war is not in the offing .

 

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morleyevans92p· 1 day ago

I wouldn’t count on American generals thinking clearly. They are mixing and serving the Cool-Aid everyone is drinking.

 

GivingUpOnTrump98p· 1 day ago

“American generals know the truth of the matter in spite of what they say”
I also think so. Everyday in our media they beat the war drum loudly for their own survival. A military without wars is a waste of money, waste of defense budget. Only thinking Americans know it.

 

melcdrofla96p· 1 day ago

Interesting times. Crony capitalism is dying and what will happen next? Worryingly capitalism had a war to escape its crisis. They can’t really afford one without the destruction of the earth. So what will happen next?

 

ejhr201574p· 1 day ago

To The Saker, your statement that the US creates money out of nothing is correct. However it creates by spending, but we the public are conditioned to see the fed government as like a household. it isn’t. It doesn’t use Federal taxes for revenue, rather it uses takes to mollify the economy and control spending power in the non government sector.

What I would like to know is how much money is created to fund the military that is not revealed in the federal budgets. All thesee massive spends are off balance sheet, as QE is one example $29 TRILLION spent there ,equivalent to 1/3rd the total world GDP.

ABOUT THE SAKER
Like The Greanville Post, with which it is now allied in his war against official disinformation, the Saker's site, VINEYARD OF THE SAKER, is the hub of an international network of sites devoted to fighting the "billion-dollar deception machinery" supporting the empire's wars against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and any other independent nation opposing or standing in the way of Washington's drive for global hegemony.  The Saker is published in more than half a dozen languages. A Saker is a very large falcon, native to Europe and Asia. 




Silencing America as it prepares for war

Writing from the United States, John Pilger joins a momentous election campaign - his fourth as a reporter - and suggests that the sound and fury may not be as it appears.