A visibly anxious and panicked Biden tweeted [1] yesterday, March 11: “I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO. But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”
The string of rambling tweets betrayed the apprehensive
mental state of a raving executive who was under tremendous pressure from
certain quarters to significantly escalate the conflict with the arch-foe and wanted
to console himself and the listeners that by not committing American ground and
air forces to Ukraine, specifically for enforcing the no-fly zone, he was
making the right decision.
Despite Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal, several Pentagon
officials, full of hubris and evidently suffering from misplaced superiority
complex, have recently made their misconceived institutional logic public that
they no longer regard Russia as an equal military power, instead they
contemptuously dubbed it “a second-rate regional power,” and if given an
opportunity, they wouldn’t hesitate to take Russia head-on, even if the risk is
as perilous as the conflict spiraling into a catastrophic nuclear war.
It’s noteworthy the national security and defense policies
of the United States are formulated by the all-powerful civil-military
bureaucracy, dubbed the deep state, whereas the president, elected through
heavily manipulated electoral process with disproportionate influence of
corporate interests, political lobbyists and billionaire donors, is only a
figurehead meant to legitimize militarist stranglehold of the deep state, not
only over the domestic politics of the United States but also over the
neocolonial world order dictated by the self-styled global hegemon.
All the militaries of the NATO member states operate under
the integrated military command led by the Pentagon. Before being elected
president, General Dwight Eisenhower was the first commander of the Supreme
Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).
The commander of Allied Command Operations has been given
the title Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), and is always a US
four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as the Commander US
European Command, and is answerable to the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.
CNN reported
March 6 [2] Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley visited a week
before an undisclosed airfield near the Ukraine border that has become a hub
for shipping weapons. The airport's location remains a secret to protect the
shipments of weapons, including anti-armor missiles, into Ukraine. Although the
report didn’t name the location, the airfield was likely in Poland along
Ukraine’s border.
“US European Command (EUCOM) is at the heart of the massive
shipment operation, using its liaison network with allies and partners to
coordinate ‘in real time’ to send materials into Ukraine, a second Defense
official said. EUCOM is also coordinating with other countries, including the
United Kingdom, in terms of the delivery process ‘to ensure that we are using
our resources to maximum efficiency to support the Ukrainians in an organized
way,’ the official added.”
In Europe, 400,000 US forces were deployed at the height of
the Cold War in the sixties, though the number has since been brought
down [3] to almost 100,000 after European powers developed their own
military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War. The number
of American troops deployed in Europe now stands at 50,000 in Germany, 15,000
in Italy and 10,000 in the United Kingdom.
During the last year, the United States has substantially
ramped up US military footprint in the Eastern Europe by deploying thousands of
additional NATO troops, strategic armaments, nuclear-capable missiles and air
force squadrons aimed at Russia, and NATO forces alongside regional clients
have been provocatively exercising so-called “freedom of navigation” right in
the Black Sea and conducting joint military exercises and naval drills.
The Biden administration approved on Feb. 24 an additional 7,000
US troops [4] to be deployed to Germany, bringing the total number of American
forces sent to Europe to 15,000 this month, including troops previously deployed
to Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. In Poland alone, the US military footprint now
exceeds 10,000 troops as the majority of 15,000 troops sent to Europe last
month went to Poland to join the 4,000 US troops already stationed there.
“We have 130 jets at high alert. Over 200 ships from the
high north to the Mediterranean, and thousands of additional troops in the
region,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg
told CNN [5].
A spokesman for US European Command told CNN the United
States was sending two Patriot missile batteries to Poland, and was also
considering deploying THAAD air defense system, a more advanced system
equivalent in capabilities to Russia’s S-400 air defense system.
Besides providing 2,000 surface-to-air missiles and 17,000
anti-armor munitions, including Javelins and NLAWs, to Ukraine’s security
forces and allied militias, British Defense Minister Ben
Wallace said [6] that the UK was considering sending the laser-guided
Starstreak shoulder-fired anti-aircraft system, a significant upgrade from the
Stinger missiles sent by the US, Germany and other allies. The weapon has a
range of over four miles and can take down fighter planes more effectively than
the Stinger.
Although NATO powers did provide Stingers to their jihadist
proxies that helped turning the tide in the Soviet-Afghan war in the eighties,
since then, despite providing anti-tank munitions and rest of weapons to
militant groups in the proxy wars in Libya and Syria, Western powers have
consistently avoided providing MANPADS to proxy forces, because such deadly
anti-aircraft munitions could become a long-term threat not only to military
aircraft but also to civilian airlines.
In the sheer desperation to inflict maximum material damage
on Russia’s security forces, however, NATO appears to have breached its own
long-standing convention of curbing the proliferation of anti-aircraft
munitions. Following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, Germany alone has proudly
bragged [7] of dispatching caches of 500 US-made surface-to-air Stinger
missiles and 2,700 Soviet-era, shoulder-fired Strela missiles to Ukraine’s
conscript military.
Who would be responsible for the myopic and vindictive
policy of providing anti-aircraft munitions to Ukraine’s irregular militias
once Kyiv falls and those MANPADS are found in black markets posing grave risk
to civilian airlines across the globe? In fact, Russia’s seasoned Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov alluded to the grave risk posed by the proliferation of
anti-aircraft munitions in the peace talks with the Ukrainian counterpart in
Turkey.
Russia’s reluctant and delayed military intervention in
Ukraine is fundamentally a war of power projection, a shot across the bow to
perfidious former allies, the East European states, who’ve been joining the EU
and NATO in droves since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, that the
collective security of Eurasian nations is a shared responsibility, and NATO’s
eastward expansion along Russia’s western flank not only imperils the security
of resurgent Russia but also compromises the balance of power in the multipolar
world.
It’s worth recalling that before the Biden-Putin summit at
Geneva last June, Russia had a similar troop build-up along Ukraine’s borders.
Extending the hand of friendship, Russia significantly drawdown its forces
along the western border before the summit last year. Instead of returning the
favor, however, the conceited leadership of supposedly world’s sole surviving
super power turned down the hand of friendship and even snubbed Putin.
Despite losing the empire in the nineties, as far as
military power is concerned, Russia with its enormous arsenal of conventional
as well as nuclear weapons still more or less equals the military power of the
United States, as is obvious from the unfolding Ukraine war where all the NATO
could do is watch it from distance, and not even attempting to enforce a no-fly
zone lest the conflict spirals into a mutually destructive nuclear war.
But it’s the much more subtle and insidious tactic of
economic warfare for which Russia has no antidote, as the global neocolonial
order is being led by the United States and its Western European clients since
the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord in 1945 following the Second World War.
Because any state, particularly those pursuing socialist policies, that dares
to challenge the Western monopoly over global trade and economic policies is
internationally isolated and its national economy goes bankrupt over a period
of time.
Despite having immense firepower at its disposal that could
readily turn the tide in conflicts as protracted as Syria’s proxy war, the
Russian advance in Ukraine has been slower than expected according to most
estimates because Russia is only targeting military infrastructure and doing
all it can to minimize collateral damage, particularly needless civilian losses
in the former Soviet republic whose majority population is sympathetic to
Russia.
Rather than mitigating suffering of Ukraine’s
disenfranchised masses held hostage by the Zelensky regime, the self-styled
champions of human rights are doing all they can to lure Russia into their
“bear trap project,” a term borrowed from the Soviet-Afghan War of the eighties
when Western powers used Pakistan’s security forces and generous funding from
the oil-rich Gulf States for providing guerrilla warfare training and lethal
weaponry to Afghan jihadists to “bleed the security forces” of former Soviet
Union in the protracted irregular warfare.
The Congress’ recently
announced [8] $1.5 trillion package to fund the federal government through
September would boost national defense coffers to $782 billion, about a 6
percent increase. On top of the hefty budget increase, the package is set to
deliver $13.6 billion in emergency funding to help Ukraine, nearly twice the
assistance package initially proposed, including $3 billion for US forces and
$3.5 billion for military equipment to Ukraine, plus more than $4 billion for
US humanitarian efforts.
Of the $13.6 billion humanitarian and military assistance
for Ukraine announced by the Biden administration, the top brass of the
Pentagon is reportedly making preparations for disbursing $3.5 billion for
providing military training and arms to millions of refugees who have fled
Ukraine following the war.
The Machiavellian plan of NATO’s military strategists is to
establish refugee settlements with the “humanitarian assistance” in the border
regions of Ukraine’s neighboring countries Poland and Romania, and then provide
guerrilla warfare training and lethal arms to all able-bodied men of military
age in order to mount a war of attrition against Russia’s security forces.
Although NATO’s military strategists are drawing parallels
with the Soviet-Afghan War of the eighties and the two-decade occupation of
Afghanistan by the US forces from Oct. 2001 to August 2021 when the ragtag
Afghan insurgents defeated two super powers of the era, and are betting on the
success of Ukraine’s potential insurgency against Russian forces from border
regions of Poland and Romania, those were two very different wars.
The former Soviet Union and the US never lacked resources to
subdue insurgency in Afghanistan. What they lacked was the will to pour
infinite military and economic resources into a meaningless war lacking clear
strategic objectives over an indefinite period of time.
By contrast, the Vladimir Putin government is fully
committed and Russia’s national security establishment regards Ukraine as an
integral part of Russia, eastern Ukraine with its large Russian-speaking
population in particular, and would go to any extent to integrate Ukraine into
Russia’s sphere of influence and forestall NATO’s further eastward expansion
along Russia’s vulnerable western flank.
If we take a cursory look at the insurgency in Afghanistan,
the Bush administration toppled the Taliban regime with the help of the
Northern Alliance in October 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack.
Since the beginning, however, Afghanistan was an area of lesser priority for
the Bush administration.
The number of US troops deployed in Afghanistan did not
exceed beyond 30,000 during George Bush’s tenure as the American president, and
soon after occupying Afghanistan, Washington invaded Iraq in March 2003 to
expropriate its 140 billion barrels proven oil reserves, and American resources
and focus shifted to Iraq.
It was the ostensibly “pacifist and noninterventionist”
Obama administration that made the Afghanistan conflict the bedrock of its
foreign policy in 2009 along with fulfilling then-President Obama’s electoral
pledge of withdrawing American forces from Iraq in December 2011, only to be
redeployed a couple of years later when the Islamic State overran Mosul and
Anbar in Iraq in early 2014.
At the height of the surge of the US troops in Afghanistan
in 2010, the American troops numbered around 100,000, with an additional 40,000
troops deployed by the rest of the NATO members, but they still could not
manage to have a lasting impact on the relentless Taliban insurgency.
Citations:
[1] Biden:
Confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III:
[2] Mark
Milley visited an undisclosed airfield near the Ukraine border:
[3] What
the US Gets for Defending Its Allies and Interests Abroad?
[4] An
additional 7,000 US troops to be sent to Germany:
[5] Pentagon
shores up its NATO defenses in Europe:
[6] How
Biden scuttled Polish aircraft deal:
[7] Germany
to ship anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine:
[8] $13.6 billion military and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine:
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