NATO’s Endgame Appears to Be Nuclear War
It is downright puzzling that millions of people
aren’t protesting in the streets every day to deescalate the crisis between
Russia and the West and pull civilization back from the brink.
by Chris
Wright Posted on July 12, 2024
Reprinted from Common Dreams.
https://original.antiwar.com/Chris_Wright/2024/07/11/natos-endgame-appears-to-be-nuclear-war/
The world is at its most dangerous moment since the
Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Back then, however, the fear of total destruction
consumed the public; today, few people seem even to be aware of this
possibility.
It is easily imaginable that nuclear war could break
out between Russia (and perhaps China) and the West, yet politicians continue
to escalate tensions, place hundreds of thousands of troops at “high
readiness,” and attack military targets inside Russia, even while ordinary
citizens blithely go on with their lives.
The situation is without parallel in history.
Consider the following facts. A hostile military
alliance, now including even Sweden and Finland, is at the very borders of
Russia. How are Russian leaders – whose country was almost destroyed by Western
invasion twice in the 20th century – supposed to react to this? How would
Washington react if Mexico or Canada belonged to an enormous, expansionist, and
highly belligerent anti-U.S. military alliance?
As if expanding NATO to include Eastern Europe wasn’t
provocative enough, Washington began to send billions of dollars’ worth of
military aid to Ukraine in 2014, to “improve interoperability with NATO,” in the words of the Defense Department. Why this Western
involvement in Ukraine, which, as Barack
Obama said while
president, is “a core Russian interest but not an American one”? One reason was
given by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in a recent moment of startling televised candor: Ukraine is “sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of
critical minerals… I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to
share with China.”
As The Washington Post has reported: “Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest
reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium, and massive
deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.”
Ukraine also has colossal
reserves of natural
gas and oil, in addition to neon, nickel, beryllium, and other critical rare
earth metals. For NATO’s leadership, Russia and, in particular, China can’t be
permitted access to these resources. The war in Ukraine must, therefore,
continue indefinitely, and negotiations with Russia mustn’t be pursued.
Meanwhile, as Ukraine was being de facto integrated
into NATO in the years before 2022, the United States put into operation an
anti-ballistic-missile site in Romania in 2016. As Benjamin Abelow notes
in How the
West Brought War to Ukraine, the missile launchers that the ABM system uses can
accommodate nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile.
“Tomahawks,” he points out, “have a range of 1,500 miles, can strike Moscow and
other targets deep inside Russia, and can carry hydrogen bomb warheads with
selectable yields up to 150 kilotons, roughly 10 times that of the atomic bomb
that destroyed Hiroshima.” Poland now boasts a
similar ABM site.
American assurances that these anti-missile bases are
defensive in nature, to protect against an (incredibly unlikely) attack from
Iran, can hardly reassure Russia, given the missile launchers’ capability to
launch offensive weapons.
In another bellicose move, the Trump administration in
2019 unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces. Russia responded by proposing that the U.S. declare a moratorium on the
deployment of short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, saying
it wouldn’t deploy such missiles as long as NATO members didn’t. Washington
dismissed these proposals, which upset some European leaders. “Has the absence
of dialogue with Russia,” French President Emmanuel
Macron said,
“made the European continent any safer? I don’t think so.”
The situation is especially dangerous given what
experts call “warhead
ambiguity.” As senior
Russian military officers have said, “There will be no way to determine if an
incoming ballistic missile is fitted with a nuclear or a conventional warhead,
and so the military will see it as a nuclear attack” that warrants a nuclear
retaliation. A possible misunderstanding could thus plunge the world into
nuclear war.
So now we’re more than two years into a proxy war with
Russia that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and has seen Ukraine
even more closely integrated into the structures of NATO than it was before.
And the West continues to inch ever closer to the nuclear precipice. Ukraine
has begun using U.S. missiles to strike Russian territory, including defensive (not
only offensive) missile systems.
This summer, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium will
begin sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, and Denmark and the
Netherlands have said there will be no restrictions on the use of
these planes to strike targets in Russia. F-16s are able to deliver nuclear
weapons, and Russia has said the planes will be considered a nuclear threat.
Bringing the world even closer to terminal crisis,
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states that 500,000 troops are at “high readiness,” and
in the next five years, NATO allies will “acquire thousands of air defense and
artillery systems, 850 modern aircraft – mostly fifth-generation F-35s – and
also a lot of other high-end capabilities.” Macron has morphed into one of
Europe’s most hawkish leaders, with plans to send
military instructors to
Ukraine very soon. At the same time, NATO is
holding talks about
taking more nuclear weapons out of storage and placing them on standby.
Where all this is heading is unclear, but what’s
obvious is that Western leaders are acting with reckless disregard for the
future of humanity. Their bet is that Russian President Vladimir Putin will
never deploy nuclear weapons, despite his many threats
to do so and recent
Russian military drills to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. Given that Russian
use of nuclear warheads might well precipitate a nuclear response by the West,
the fate of humanity hangs on the restraint and rationality of one man, Putin –
a figure who is constantly portrayed by Western media and politicians as an
irrational, bloodthirsty monster. So the human species is supposed to place its
hope for survival in someone we’re told is a madman, who leads a state that
feels besieged by the most powerful military coalition in history, apparently
committed to its demise.
Maybe the madmen aren’t in the Russian government but
rather in NATO governments?
It is downright puzzling that millions of people
aren’t protesting in the streets every day to deescalate the crisis and pull
civilization back from the brink. Evidently the mass media have successfully
fulfilled their function of manufacturing consent. But unless the Western
public wakes up, the current crisis might not end as benignly as did the one in
1962.
Chris Wright has a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the
University of Illinois at Chicago, and is the author of Worker Cooperatives and
Revolution and Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the
Great Depression. His website is www.wrightswriting.com.
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