U.S. Preparing For Next War - China?

The U.S. Is Already Preparing for the Next War

Danny Haiphong

Russia’s military operation in Ukraine is approaching its first birthday. Top military brass in Russia have long declared that the conflict is not between Russia and Ukraine, but rather Russia and NATO. Simply put, Ukraine is a pawn in another U.S. war. 

Europe’s economy and military have been sacrificed on the altar of U.S. warmongering toward Russia. Winter is here and Ukraine’s prospects for getting out of the conflict with anything resembling “victory” have dissipated, if they ever really existed at all.

Such has been admitted by two of the foreign policy establishment’s most criminal members: Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. 

In an op-ed with the Washington Post, Rice and Gates argue that time is not on Ukraine’s side. The U.S. must act fast or watch Ukraine suffer eventual defeat. Of course, for neocon hawks like Rice and Gates, a negotiated settlement is simply out of the question. The only option for the U.S. political and military establishment is to fortify Ukraine with the heaviest military equipment such as armored tanks to ensure victory on the battlefield.

As geopolitical analyst Brian Berletic notes, a major problem stands in the way of Rice and Gates’s demand: NATO is running out of weapons. The U.S. produces about 30,000 rounds per year for its 155 mm Howitzer long-range systems, a number that Ukraine uses in just two weeks of fighting Russia on the front lines. Russian missile strikes have made quick work of heavier equipment such as the vaunted HIMARS systems. Only larger NATO states like the U.S. and Germany have anything left to provide. So when Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky came to Congress begging for more weapons, he was likely disappointed in Joe Biden’s remark that the U.S. was not going to make promises to arm Ukraine with anything that could possibly lead to a World War III scenario between NATO and Russia.

Russia’s critical victory in Soledar has only intensified concerns among a major faction in the foreign policy establishment that Ukraine is depleting the U.S.’s capacity to wage war elsewhere. In this regard, no other matter of U.S. “national security” is more important than China. The RAND Corporation, a research arm of the Pentagon, has called China a “peer” competitor and the U.S.’s greatest long-term threat. Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has also called China the greatest threat to the U.S.’s “security.” NATO labeled China a “malicious actor” in the alliance’s latest Strategic Concept document and pledged to play a larger role in curbing the so-called “threats” presented by its rise.

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