Will The Kremlin Wake Up?

If the Kremlin ever Wakes Up Things Will Go Badly for the West

Paul Craig Roberts

As I have emphasized for a number of years, the Kremlin’s passivity in the face of provocations encourages more and worse provocations. I have expressed concern that the provocations will cross a red line, and the Kremlin will cease being a passive receiver of provocations. When that time comes, the West might not be prepared for the consequence, comfortable, as it was expressed by the US Department of State the other day, that Russian red lines are just “bluster.

”I have said that if Russia were to put its foot down hard, the provocations would cease, but my opinion has had no effect on the Western “foreign policy community” or on the Kremlin. Russia, it seems, courts provocations, and the West delivers them.

Consider the provocations to Russia of just the past week. Israel attacked the civilian airport in Damascus, Syria, closing the airport. This is just another way of putting pressure on Russia while Russia is engaged in clearing Donbass of Ukrainian forces. Syria has effective Russian air defense systems, but evidently is not allowed to use them to deter Israeli attacks. Apparently, the Kremlin doesn’t understand that it cannot simultaneously protect its Syrian ally and appease Israel.

Hardly before NATO military exercises in the Baltics concluded, Lithuania blocked Russia’s rail and road connection to part of Russia, violating long-standing agreements. Is Russia to accept this aggression from a military insignificant country? If Russia does, imagine the grossness of the next insult the Kremlin will have to eat. When will the Kremlin get sick of eating insults? This is an important question. Asking it is in the interest of realization that leads to different–peaceful–behavior before war explodes.

The US and NATO continue to shove weapons into Ukraine and have committed to supporting Ukraine to victory, declaring the goal to be not only the reconquest of Donbass but the “liberation” of Crimea. The idiot who commands the British toy military has committed his few soldiers to fighting Russia in a land war. Is this a joke or total insanity?

To what conclusions does Russia’s passivity to provocations lead?

One conclusion is that there are sufficient influential Russians who prefer inclusion in the West to Russian sovereignty and that they are able to block effective Russian responses to provocations.

Another conclusion is that the Kremlin thinks that there is more reason and sense in Western leadership, and less stupidity and evil, than there is. It probably makes no sense to the Kremlin than an out-gunned people would provoke nuclear war. The Kremlin likely thinks that sooner or later logic and reason will catch up with the West. This is Russia’s delusion.

Until the Kremlin sees the Wolfowitz Doctrine renounced by the White House and the military/security complex, and the neoconservatives sent into exile, this unfounded belief in the sense and integrity of the West leaves Russia exposed to destruction. Russia’s leaders simply do not comprehend the evil that they confront.

In many ways Russians are psyched out by their belief in the wickedness of Soviet leaders and the greatness of America. They are, it seems, babes in the woods. It is the Russians’ lack of awareness of what they confront that will end in Armageddon.

Caitlin Johnstone and John Mearsheimer warn us of the danger of getting in Russia’s face.

People Don’t Think Hard Enough About What Nuclear War Is And What It Would Mean

There’s a John Mearsheimer video clip from 2016 that’s going viral on Twitter right now, as old John Mearsheimer clips tend to do in the year 2022 when his predictions that western actions would lead to the destruction of Ukraine are coming horrifyingly true.

In response to a question about what the worst US foreign policy disaster has been, Mearsheimer agreed with a fellow panelist that at that moment Iraq looked like the worst, but said he believed US policy on Ukraine would prove much worse in coming years. He spoke of the fact that Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons, and that it’s entirely possible those weapons will be used if Russia feels threatened.

“Because the Cold War is in the distant past, most people, especially younger people, haven’t thought a lot about nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence, and they tend to be quite cavalier in their comments about nuclear weapons, and this makes me very nervous,” Mearsheimer said.

It makes me nervous too. Especially when we’ve got a steadily escalating proxy war which the standoff in Lithuania could easily see spin out into a direct hot war between Russia and NATO powers, and when we hear the UK’s top army general telling troops to prepare for World War Three.

Most of what I see in public discourse about escalating aggressions between the US power alliance and Russia reflects the cavalier attitude Mearsheimer spoke of in 2016, as do my own interactions with people online. Most of what I’m seeing in the behavior of NATO powers indicates this cavalier attitude about nuclear weapons as well. People, from the rank-and-file public to the upper echelons of empire management, don’t seem to be thinking very hard about what nuclear war is and what it would mean.

As Mearsheimer said, this does seem to be because we’re so removed now from the days when everyone was acutely aware that the missiles could start flying at any time.

It just doesn’t sit well with people’s understanding of the world that it could all end through the same nuclear armageddon scenario their grandparents used to worry about. 

But the guns never got any less deadly. The fact that nuclear war hasn’t happened yet means only that: that it hasn’t happened yet. Things that have never happened before happen all the time. There didn’t used to be nuclear weapons, now there are. Earth is currently a habitable planet, one day soon it may not be.

We came within a hair’s breadth of wiping ourselves out during the last cold war, not just once but many times. Any amount of nuclear brinkmanship opens up the possibility of nuclear war erupting in ways that are too hard to anticipate and plan for, because there are too many small moving parts, too many ways a nuke could be detonated as a result of technical malfunction, miscommunication, miscalculation and/or misunderstanding. The further things escalate between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, the greater the likelihood of this happening.

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