Month: March 2019

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 28 MARCH 2019

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn RF SITREP

MUELLER. One half of the lie has been exploded with the finding that no one connected with Trump colluded with any Russians. The other half of the lie – created by the same people for the same reasons – lives on. Again I tell you: Russia did not/not interfere in the US election, Mueller’s indictment of a Russian clickbait farm notwithstanding. (Again: read MoA and learn today what the NYT will discover (admit to) tomorrow.) Neither official Russia nor unofficial Russia. Why not? Simple deduction: if Moscow had wanted to damage Clinton, it would have used its most powerful weapon; it didn’t; QED.

AMERICA-HYSTERICA. Will continue – somewhat diminished by the hard kick of reality to be sure – but they’ve too much invested in it and some will double down while others try to slither away. We see the goalposts being moved. The winner so far: Mueller Report Has Moscow in Ecstasy, Opening the Way for More Putin Plots… expect Vladimir Putin to be more aggressive than ever. Schiff (Mr Pillow Man) digs his hole deeper; Swalwell and Peters dive into it.

MEDIA. “[Did you] receive bad information throughout this process like so many of us did?” asks whathishair – remember that moment: a “Big Journalist” admits that they’re just typists. Followed by the admission from the boss of CNN that they’re not investigators. NYT blubbers not just we, but you too. Taibbi is correct: “death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.” Last week I wrote “A poll shows that “hardly any confidence at all in the press” is the winning answer.” What’s next week’s answer going to be? A free, sceptical and challenging media is important; what happens when it’s just a big typing pool waiting for Big Brother’s Dictaphone? Time to learn from the Soviets.

SCHADENFREUDE COMPENDIUM. Here. And there’ll be more: make your choice for the biggest liar. Schadenfreude is enjoyable (I do enjoy it – earliest I could find, but I always knew it was BS). Hannity rant. Carlson ditto.

RUSSIA RELATIONS. Immense damage has been done. Will it be repaired? Can it be repaired? Russia is not a joke country in Disneyland and we’re not characters in a Marvel comic. How idiotic it would be if the Earth were destroyed because Hillary Clinton lost, couldn’t accept it and invented a story for lying liars to lie about. Much will depend on whether Trump starts a real investigation so that the falsity is exposed. (Conrad Black has the best exposition of the conspiracy for people who are just tuning in.)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

CALVEY ARREST. I have no worthwhile opinion and I defer to John Helmer who is sceptical.

CRIMEA. Five years ago. What’s been done. A lot.

SANCTIONS. A sentence from Awara’s latest struck me: “Russia’s imports from China (26% of total) are now three times bigger than those from Germany (7.8%). Total imports from the EU now make up only 30% of all Russia’s imports.” I don’t think the EU is going to get much of that market back, do you?

GOLAN HEIGHTS. Bingo! There goes the Western case on South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Karabakh, Transdnestr and, of course, Crimea. (One yuuuge difference being, of course, that in the other cases the locals were consulted.) But maybe Trump knows that: “Crimea is part of Russia because everyone there speaks Russian“; which, if you’ve taken the trouble to learn Trumpian, is quite a profound statement.

EUROPEANS ARE REVOLTING. Italy joins BRI; wavers on the obligatory F-35 buy. (They’re still duds, BTW.) Germany won’t spend the money and won’t block Huawei.

KAZAKHSTAN. Nazarbayev has constructed a smooth changing of the guard.

VENEZUELA. Moscow warns, Washington warns, Beijing clears its throat. Russian troops and aid appear, S-300s deployed. I keep thinking about this video – Kalibres lurking in commonplace containers.

NEW NWO. Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian Chiefs of Staff meet in Damascus. Don’t remember seeing this in the PNAC manifesto. But it’s a result, all the same.

CHICKENS. HOME. ROOST. “[T]he G7 group is concerned by extreme political movements in Ukraine…“. Whoa! Weren’t these people just Putin’s “fabricated claim“, “revanchist policy“, “lying“? FBI: Neo-Nazi Militia Trained by US Military in Ukraine Now Training US White Supremacists. Azov-Christchurch?

UKRAINE. Lowest confidence in their government in the world. Comedian still in front: someone hopes that things will get better. Sorry: Kiev has to burn the last bit of the Galician fantasy to ashes and understand that the right people won the Second World War. Then, maybe, some hope.

© Patrick Armstrong Analysis, Canada Russia Observer

THE TRUMP MYSTERIES: INCONSISTENT INCONSISTENCIES

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn THE WORLD IS CHANGING, TRUMP MYSTERY, WORLD POWER RELATIONSHIPS

(First published Strategic Culture Foundation, Picked up by SOTT, entelekheia, astutenews.com, aisle c, apokalyps nu, The Russophile,

Unlike the American Democratic Party, the Western news media and most of my neighbours, I do not fully understand Trump. Although, unlike all of them, I thought from the start he had a good chance of winning and, as time went on, became more confident and finally bet he would win.

One of the consistent themes of Trump’s campaign was that foreign entanglements were not to the country’s advantage and the wars were a waste of resources; bad for business, as it were. Now, I’m not so simple-minded as to believe campaigning politicians. Bush promised a quieter foreign policy and Obama was going to close Guantánamo; but what made me pay attention to Trump’s statements was that they weren’t just the disconnected laundry list of focus-groups handed out by most politicians, they had an internal consistency. (And consistent over quite some time: watch this interview from 1987.)

That consistency could be found in his slogan Make America Great Again. It was the “again” that was the clue. Shattered tells us that Bill Clinton tried to get his wife to perceive the dissatisfaction in the USA, Sanders tapped into some of it but Trump saw and understood it early and based his campaign on it; Clinton never understood. Again, that’s the clue. I concluded that Trump saw a connection between the loss of “greatness” and the foreign entanglements: the “six trillion dollars” spent in the Middle East would have been better spent on infrastructure“. Of course he was right: there is a direct connection. But to stop that drain, Trump, now President, has to break the entanglements and that will not be easy. Last year I formed the theory that he would try to get the allies to break these entanglements and updated the idea recently. (It was written just before we heard that Trump is considering to charging allies 150% for the cost of US bases – something that is sure sure to cause a lot of re-thinking and disentangling.)

So I expected a Trump Administration to cut entanglements and not create any more. But here we come to the inconsistencies. There have been three actions inconsistent with this view: important inconsistencies. Added to which, Trump seems to have gone out of his way to surround himself with entanglers. And that is a major and puzzling inconsistency: he’s free to choose his advisors but he has chosen warhawks almost every time. This inconsistency has driven many people to conclude either that he didn’t mean what he said when he was campaigning or that he has been captured by the war party. (Others – see first sentence – remain certain that he’s just an idiot, unfit for the office, can’t be elected and so on.)

There are three events of the Trump period that I cannot fit into either the Trump-the-disentangler theory or the Trump-dupe-of-war-party theory. These actions just don’t fit either: they are inconsistently inconsistent.

On 7 April 2017 the USA attacked a Syrian airfield with (it said) 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles. This was in retaliation for a supposed CW attack for which (certainly wrongly) Assad was blamed. No time was allowed for inspections or any other examination before the strike. The attack was entirely consistent with the long-time attempt by the war party (entanglers all) to overthrow Assad. But, on closer look, while loud (“beautiful” missile launches at night) it would be hard to imagine a less effective strike. The airfield they hit was empty and no real damage was done to anything. At the time I assessed it as a show for the home audience designed to take the pressure off the “Trump isn’t legitimate” meme and, certainly, there was much effusion from the war party and anti-Trump media. But the strike could hardly have been less effective if Assad himself had picked the targets.

A year later there was another bogus CW attack blamed on Assad. And another immediate missile attack (this time France and the UK joined in thereby creating the memorable acronym FUKUS). Again it was a stunningly ineffective attack in which nothing was destroyed. Added to which, it appears that many of the attacking missiles were shot down – unless you can bring yourself to believe the official story that 76 missiles hit this site (here’s just one missile hit for comparison). Again the loud, immediate but completely ineffective action. (And, a year later, the attack justification is looking poorly – a BBC producer has just said the hospital scenes were faked and the OPCW found no nerve agent traces. But anyone paying attention already knew this at the time.)

Mystery piled on mystery: the disentangler would realise that Syria was no concern of the US and have done nothing. (And Trump has ordered the troops out.) As to the CW attack claims from the media and the intelligence agencies, the disentangler would immediately ask cui bono? and realise that it certainly wouldn’t be Assad; and Trump is surely the last person to believe what the media or intelligence agencies tell him. The disentangler would do nothing, or at least wait until there was some actual evidence. On the other hand, always ready to blow something up, the warhawk would have found valuable targets and struck them hard. No attack – yes; an effective attack – yes; but an immediate attack that does no damage? You can’t make any sense out of it.

And now we come to Venezuela. Venezuela has been on the war party’s hit list for many years: Obama declared it an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and there were many attempts to overthrow Chavez. The disentangler would immediate know that that was nonsense on stilts – nothing Caracas could do would affect the MAGA goals: no bridges would be built or destroyed, no opioid victim cured or addicted, no manufacturing jobs gained or lost. Nothing. But the warhawk wants a regime-change/resource-theft operation to bring Maduro down.

But what do we see? Certainly an rc/rt op but a singularly incompetent one. The USA is good at these, it’s had a lot of practice, its allies are toeing the line, the media is re-typing the handouts: it should be well on the way by now. But what do we see: the US official put in charge is notorious for involvement in shady coups in Latin America and the Iran-Contra affair, the puppet president is almost completely unknown in Venezuela, the concert was a flop, the “humanitarian aid” another flop, the Venezuelan Army holds firm, no country is willing to provide troops, the big demos in the country are pro-Maduro and anti-intervention (small “thousands” here). So inept a performance that even the NYT is losing enthusiasm: “Footage Contradicts U.S. Claim That Maduro Burned Aid Convoy” thereby blowing up all the faux outrage of “What kind of a sick tyrant stops food from getting to hungry people?” (The significance is not that the NYT has suddenly discovered fact-checking after years of cheering on rc/rt ops but that it is trying to distance itself from this particular one.) Which is not to say that Washington can’t destroy Venezuela: enough “precision bombing” can turn Caracas into Raqqa.

One of the reasons Trump won was his implied promise that he would stay at home and repair domestic deficiencies. And yet he jumped to bomb Syria twice and is involved in a regime change/resource grab in Venezuela. But the two bombings could not have been less effective and the Venezuela adventure is looking more idiotic by the moment. Contradiction within contradiction and it’s hard to make sense out of it.

Justin Raimondo has been brave enough to try; he thinks the Venezuela rc/rg op is a cunning plot by Trump: “Instead of taking on the neocons directly, Trump embraces them – and we can see the knife go in as this whole scenario plays out.” The ridiculous concert just reinforced his conviction “It’s all a show, produced and directed by that expert showman: Donald J. Trump.” I’ve wondered that myself – it’s so incompetent and at the same time so transparent that it can’t be real. For example, Bolton says out loud what is supposed to be said in private: the “humanitarian concerns” are just a cover for the resource grab:

You know, Venezuela is one of the three countries I call the troika of tyranny. It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.

I don’t know, but I wonder why such noisy but ineffective missile strikes by people who know how to find and destroy valuable targets and such an idiotically-incompetent rc/rt op effort by people with many successes under their belts.

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 14 MARCH 2019

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn RF SITREP

TIME AND PREDICTIONS. Gorbachev became GenSek 34 years ago on Monday. I remember Dr Leonid Abalkin saying first stage six months, second stage three years, third stage 30 years. And I’ve kept that in the back of my mind ever since. Well, here we are, plus or minus: 1985.25+33.5=2018.75 years. (Remember that he said this back when people were babbling about how you can’t cross a chasm in two steps, shock therapy, 500 days and similar feel-good bromides. Read Janine Wedel’s book and go back to the day when some American operator knocked on a door in St Petersburg, recognised his doppelganger, and they realised how much they could steal. Now Russian luxury cars in Swiss car shows which is a sign of something.) I met him again when I was a dip on Moscow: I think he didn’t become world-famous because he didn’t speak English but, truth to tell, English fluency probably wouldn’t have helped because what he was saying didn’t Fit The Story. But the people who were proved wrong well before he was proved right are still out there gilding turds; for example.

ARMS CONTROL. Of the four important arms control treaties left to us, only one remains and it probably won’t survive. Washington has killed them (although, typically, blaming Moscow as it did).

TAXI! Is Russia going to lose its monopoly as the Only Taxi Service to the ISS?

SANCTIONS. RUSAL profits up and Russia’s European gas market share up. Not working. Three reasons: the West’s so-called world community isn’t that large; Russia is not just a “gas station” – it’s a full-service economy; Russians don’t give in. (And a fourth – Washington’s “shallow bench” on Russia.)

GUNS. Shoygu addressed a Duma committee: 316 weapons tested in Syria. In six years 217 new nuclear missiles; 3 SSBNs; 57 spacecraft; 7 submarines; 3,712 new and upgraded tanks; more than 1,000 planes and helicopters; 161 surface ships. See below and below.

YET ANOTHER NEW WEAPON. A large version of these. UK media gets another fit of the vapours.

WAR GAMES. Some attention has been given to the findings of RAND that the US has “its ass handed to it” in war games with Russia and China. (In their home ground, of course: the USA remains almost 100% safe from foreign attack.) No news to some of us (I here and here) but somewhat of a shock at home. But, you’ll be happy to hear, the problem can be fixed with a few billion dollars. (The US already outspends the next eight countries but just a few more bucks and it’ll be done.) What is striking about this sort of thing is that there is never any consideration of what diplomacy could do or that the US should stay out of Russia and China’s home ground. Reminds one of Einstein’s supposed remark about insanity, doesn’t it?

HOW WE LOST RUSSIA. US Ambassador explains. Haven’t read it but a colleague has so I don’t have to: “our junior partner” “post-traumatic stress disorder” “little inclination to concede much to a declining power.” “Putin has a remarkable capacity for storing up slights and grievances, and assembling them to fit his narrative of the West trying to keep Russia down.” Poor Americans! What can you do with such an sulky neighbour?

LEXUS AND VOVAN DO VENEZUELA. They catch both the puppeteer and the puppet. These two produce more truthful revelations than a year’s subscription to the NYT.

TRUMP AND THE GORDIAN KNOT. Washington is said to be considering charging hosts for US bases (at 150%); threatens Turkey; threatens Germany; threatens Italy. I still like my theory that Trump’s doing it on purpose to make them cut the knot.

US MEDIA. A poll shows that “hardly any confidence at all in the press” is the winning answer.

AMERICA-HYSTERICA. The bottom is still far away: Dostoevskiy and measles.

NATO. Creating new enemies wherever it goes. “They’re terrorists because their orange groves have been destroyed and they’ve got nothing to do.”

PROBLEMS WITH THE NARRATIVE. The OPCW report of the alleged CW attack in Douma (used as the excuse for an attack by FUKUS – love that acronym!) says no nerve agent. MSM does its best (there are many traces of chlorine in your house) and the US State Department sticks to its line. Its new line that is: yesterday’s line was “Douma symptoms consistent with nerve agent: U.S. State Department“.

UKRAINE. We’re now told that Ukrainian troops in Crimea were ordered to shoot and refused orders. As few in the West remember, most of them either joined the Russian Armed Forces or quit.

UKRAINE ELECTION. The actor is presently leading; nazi groups are taking sides. 17 days to go.

© Patrick Armstrong Analysis, Canada Russia Observer

COMMENTS FROM THE LOCKED WARD

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn ACCUSATIONS, PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, WAR ON RUSSIA

(Miscellaneous comments from pieces dealing with Russia I’ve collected. Most of them anonymous or with pseudonyms. They are chosen to illustrate either rabid hostility to everything Russian or stone-dead ignorance of present reality. I post from time to time when I have enough, spelling mistakes and all.)

Scientific researchers say Russian social-media trolls who spread discord before the 2016 U.S. presidential election may also have played an unintended role in a developing global health crisis.

From the US state broadcaster RFE/RL

The biggest measles outbreak is in Ukraine which hardly has a state-of-the-art medical system.

And yet………….. it’s the RUSSSSSSHUNZ wot dunnit.

The anti-vaxx notion was given real impetus when the Russian trolls that run the British (but actually Putin-controlled) medical (but actually GRU propaganda outlet) journal Lancet (real name Ланцет) published a paper in 1998 by Dr. Andrew Wakefield (real name Эндрю Уэйкфилд) suggesting a link between certain vaccines and autism. The paper has since been retracted.

 

MCCARTHYISM THEN AND NOW: BUT THERE WAS REALITY THEN

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn HISTORY, PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, WAR ON RUSSIA

(First published Strategic Culture Foundation

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. (Karl Marx)

Humor is reason gone mad. (Groucho Marx)

Every now and again, we hear about a “new McCarthyism“. Usually it’s the alternative media like Truthdig or Consortium News or left-wing outlets because mainstream outlets are so sunk in Trumpophobia that they have forgotten what the expression means. It’s not Trump who’s the new McCarthy (Trumpism Is the New McCarthyism or Is Donald Trump The New Joe McCarthy?) it is they: Is Trump Putin’s Puppet?, Trump Is Making the Case That He’s Putin’s Puppet; calling other people Moscow puppets is precisely what McCarthy did. And today’s Russhysteria has spread outside the USA: France to Probe Possible Russian Influence on Yellow Vest Riots; Why Putin Is Meddling in Britain’s Brexit Vote; Spain: ‘Misinformation’ on Catalonia referendum came from Russia. Endless torrents of delirium, nothing too absurd: Russia could freeze us to death!, Russian cricket agents, 14-legged killer squid found TWO MILES beneath Antarctica being weaponised by Putin? The Russophobes find Moscow’s influence everywhere: childrens’ cartoons, fishsticks, Pokemon. People who like to imagine that they’re taken seriously suggest the Russians are threatened by our “quality”.

But not so threatened, it appears, by our mental qualities.

Joseph McCarthy, making much of (and perhaps improving upon) his war record, was elected a US Senator in 1946. After three years in which he attracted little attention, he rose to national prominence with a speech in February 1950 in which he claimed to have a list of Communist Party members active in the the US State Department. There is still debate today about the precise numbers he claimed and to what degree he was used by other actors. But he realised he was on to a good thing (he secured re-election in 1952) and kept “revealing” communists in the government and elsewhere. Televised hearings showed his vituperative and erratic nature; the Senate censured him in 1954 and he faded away. “McCarthyism” has become a doubleplusungood swearword so stripped of meaning that it can be shaped into mud to be thrown at Trump.

But – and a very big but – whatever McCarthy’s motivation or cynicism, however unpleasant, shifty and unshaven he looked on TV, there was a reality behind what he was saying.

  • ITEM. August 1945. Elizabeth Bentley approaches the FBI and eventually reveals the spying activities of the CPUSA.
  • ITEM. September 1945. Igor Guzenko defects in Ottawa, revealing the extent of spying on its allies by the USSR. Thanks to his information Alan Nunn May, part of the British contribution to the atomic bomb project, is arrested March 1946. A number of Canadians are arrested – including the MP Fred Rose.
  • ITEM. August 1948. Whittaker Chambers, a CPUSA member disgusted by the Hitler-Stalin pact, in testimony to HUAC, names Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official, as a CPUSA agent.
  • ITEM. January 1950. Klaus Fuchs, an important player in the atomic bomb project, admits to spying for the USSR. His confession leads to Harry Gold (arrested May, 1950) which leads to David Greenglass (arrested June 1950), which leads to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (arrested in June and August 1950). The Manhattan Project was well infiltrated by Soviet agents.
  • ITEM. February 1950. McCarthy’s speech.
  • ITEM. Beginning in summer 1951 with the defection of Burgess and Maclean and only ending with the discovery of the last member in 1979, the revelation of extensive penetration by the Soviets of British intelligence – the Cambridge Five – caused continuing investigations and suspicions which tied up the CIA and SIS for years.

In conclusion, whatever you think of the man himself, “McCarthyism” was based on reality: there was extensive Soviet penetration in the USA and elsewhere.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

And today? The equivalent of McCarthy’s speech are the Clinton campaign’s excuses for losing.

We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election. (Hillary Clinton, 19 October 2016.)

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. [9 November 2016] Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument. (From Shattered, quoted here.)

After the story had been happily re-typed by the complaisant media, the “intelligence community” weighed in with two fatuous “intelligence assessments”:

ITEM. The DHS/FBI report of 29 December 2016 carried this stunning disclaimer:

This report is provided “as is” for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within.

ITEM. The DNI report of 6 January 2017 crazily devoted nearly half its space to a four-year old rant about RT. But the real clue that the report was nonsense was its equally stunning disclaimer:

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

In other words, DHS told us to ignore its report and the one agency in the US intelligence structure that would actually know who hacked what refused to sign its name to it.

And not “all 17”, only three. Then – the final nail – not really the three but only “hand-picked” people from them. Eventually, the NYT issued a correction. (“Correction” being presstitute-speak for “you caught us”.)

The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community. (New York Times correction, 29 June 2017)

And that was the beginning of the story that has consumed so much effort, done so much damage, metastasised so far and continues today. No Elizabeth Bentley, no atomic spies, no Venona. Only 1) an excuse for losing, 2) “hand-picked” writers, 3) forced plea deals and 4) the pompous indictment of a Russian click bait farm.

The fons et origo of today’s Russhysteria, I am convinced, was a conspiracy in the security organs to derail Trump’s candidacy and when that failed, to overthrow him. Little by little that story is dribbling out:

Congressional testimony backs up former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s account that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was talking to high-level officials about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office.

One can only hope that the conspiracy will finally be so revealed and so proven and so obvious that even the consumers of CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian, the NYT and the rest will understand what was really going on. Then, maybe, we can hope to edge away from the highly dangerous anti-Russia hysteria.

McCarthyism was based on reality, today’s recurrence is not. A significant difference indeed.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Lavrenti Beria is reputed to have said “give me the man, and I will give you the crime”. And sleep depravation and teeth and blood on the floor delivered the confession. How little he understood his craft. Maria Butina, an innocent if naïve Russian girl who liked the Second Amendment, arrested, stuck in solitary, on suicide watch (sleep deprivation – Beria knew about that), innumerable charges, after months, makes a plea deal. Michael Flynn, innumerable charges, savings burnt up, makes a plea deal. Paul Manafort, early morning SWAT attack (Beria recognises that), innumerable charges, makes a plea deal. Cohen, Papadopoulos and so on. That’s the American justice system – not Stalin’s “beat, beat and beat again” – just innumerable charges, bankruptcy by lawyers’ fees, endless interrogations, SWAT raids. Then the plea deal. Beria was an amateur.

So the Marx brothers are both wrong: the second time it’s a much more dangerous tragedy and, when you actually see it in reality, reason gone mad isn’t actually very funny.

THE END OF THE INF TREATY

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn HISTORY, THE WORLD IS CHANGING, WORLD POWER RELATIONSHIPS

(Question from Sputnik. Picked up by UrduPoint — I’m always fascinated to see how far these things go.)

The Cold War left us with four important arms treaties. The ABM Treaty (1972) forbade anti ballistic missiles, the INF Treaty (1987) forbade intermediate range nuclear weapons, the CFE Treaty (1990 and modified) limited conventional weapons and the START Treaty (1991 and renewed) limited nuclear weapons. Washington abrogated the ABM Treaty in 2002; NATO never ratified the modified CFE Treaty and invented so many new conditions that Russia, which had ratified it, pulled out in 2015; Washington has just pulled out of the INF Treaty. All that remains is the New START Treaty of 2011, and given that Trump has called it a “bad deal”, we cannot expect that one to last either.

So it looks as if the entire arms control regime inherited from the Cold War will be gone in a few years: in all cases the initiative has come from Washington although Moscow has (of course) been blamed.

One can interpret Trump’s decision as the latest step in a exceptionalist/unipolar tendency in which Washington, confident that it can secure “full spectrum dominance”, throws out all agreements which limit it: Trump has boasted that the US will outspend everyone else. (And that it certainly will but are US weapons today designed to fight wars or generate cost overruns?) On the other hand, it may be another example of Trump’s negotiation style which we’ve seen with Korea and NAFTA: awful threats, extreme statements, bluster and then a negotiated settlement; Trump has several times suggested that he would like a new treaty, this time including China.

How realistic this strategy is remains to be seen. I don’t see any particular incentive for Beijing to bother and Moscow, which had foreseen the future when the ABM Treaty was dropped, already has weapons that can counter any intermediate threat Washington can come up with whether it’s Kalibre cruise missiles on land or Tsirkon hypersonic missiles in submarines off the US coastline.

And, now that their ally has painted targets on their backs, what will the Europeans do? They certainly weren’t happy the last time Washington wanted to base intermediate missiles there.

COMMENTS FROM THE LOCKED WARD

On By Patrick ArmstrongIn PROPAGANDA, LIES AND NONSENSE, PUTIN DERANGEMENT SYNDROME

(Miscellaneous comments from pieces dealing with Russia I’ve collected. Most of them anonymous or with pseudonyms. They are chosen to illustrate either rabid hostility to everything Russian or stone-dead ignorance of present reality. I post from time to time when I have enough, spelling mistakes and all.)

Found out today that my son is being required to read a Russian book, the Brothers Karamazov, for his AP English class. What has our country come to when we are being REQUIRED to consume Russian propaganda in our schools? Can’t wait for Mueller’s report.

— Tweet from some anti-Trump “resistance” member.

Is this a parody? Maybe, but how can you tell these days?