https://www.globalresearch.ca/russia-strategic-aims-consequence-collapsing-us-empire/5807676
Russia’s Strategic Aims – In Consequence to a Collapsing U.S. Empire
Things are getting psychotic. As you listen to EU leaders, all parroting identical ‘good news’ speaking points, they nonetheless radiate basal disquietude – presumably a reflection of the psychic stress from, on the one hand, repeating ‘Ukraine is winning: Russia’s defeat is coming’, when, on the other, they know the exact opposite to be true: That ‘no way’ can Europe defeat a large Russian army on the landmass of Eurasia.
Even the colossus of Washington confines the use of American military power to conflicts that Americans could afford to lose – wars lost to weak opponents that no one could gainsay whether the outcome was no loss, but somehow ‘victory’.
Yet, war with Russia (whether financial or military) is substantially different from fighting small poorly equipped and dispersed insurgent movements, or collapsing the economies of fragile states, such as Lebanon.
Initial U.S. braggadocio has imploded. Russia neither collapsed internally to Washington’s financial assault, nor fell into chaotic regime change as predicted by western officials. Washington underestimated Russia’s societal cohesion, its latent military potential, and its relative immunity to Western economic sanctions.
The question worrying the West is what the Russians now will do next: Continue to attrit the Ukrainian army, whilst simultaneously de-stocking NATO’s weapons inventory? Or roll out the gathering Russian offensive forces across Ukraine?
The point, simply put, is that the very ambiguity between the threat of the offensive and implementation is part of the Russian strategy to keep the West off-balance and second-guessing. These are the psychological warfare tactics for which General Gerasimov is renown. Will it come; from whence, and where will it go? We do not know.
Russia’s timing will not be shaped by the western political calendar; but when, and if, an offensive becomes propitiate to Russian interests. Furthermore, Moscow has its eye on two fronts: the financial war (which may argue for a slower military roll out to allow levels of economic pain to accrete) and the military situation (which may, or may not, favour the slow incremental, extirpation of the Ukrainian capacity to fight at all). Former Senior Adviser to the U.S. Defence Secretary, Colonel Douglas Macgregor, sees a big force roll out – and soonish. He may be right.
This latter consideration must be set against the bigger picture: Russia primarily is engaged in the roll-back of U.S. hegemony, and pushing NATO out from the Asian ‘Heartland’. Russians have known for some time that the ‘Global Order system’ is not sustainable (post-WWII structures are already clearly visible in the rear-view mirror). And both Russia and China appreciatethat there is no graceful – or short cut – way to undo such a large system.
The latter know that the West cannot be trusted and is destined to fall. For some years, Russia and China have been restructuring their economies and building their militaries – preparing for the inevitable collapse of the U.S. empire (whilst keeping fingers crossed that the ‘fall’ will not entail Apocalypse).
In practice, both Russia and China have been at pains to moderate that collapse, as far as possible. No one benefits from an uncontrolled implosion of the U.S. However, the U.S. is taking steps too far with its Ukraine project, and Russia is going to use this conflict to facilitate the end of the U.S. empire – there is really no other option.
As Kelley Beaucar Vlahos in the American Conservative underlines, U.S. factions have been preparing Russia’s ‘burial’ for many years. Indeed, one of most damaging facts to emerge from Matt Taibbi’s ‘Twitter Files’ exposé has been: “how aggressive congressional lawmakers and federal agency officials were – in pushing a cynical narrative that brought the social media giant to heel whilst setting up the Russian bogeyman that haunts U.S. foreign policy and posturing in the Ukraine war today”.
That concocted story of Russia trying to destroy U.S. democracy brought public buy-in for a new war with Russia.
This existential fight can’t stop now: It might be argued that the Europeans and Americans are in a bubble of everything is optics and ‘all’ is PR immediacy and theatre – and we all need to play this game. They may well also be projecting the same zeitgeist onto the Russians and the Chinese, believing that they must think similarly: No values, no belief in anything, except whatever plays best on MSM.
Looked at from this perspective, it truly is a cultural clash – one reflecting the western incapacity for empathy. The West genuinely may think that Putin’s attention is focussed above all on ratings – just as it is for Macron, Scholz and Biden – and that when hostilities end, it will be business as usual. They may genuinely not understand that this is not how the rest of the world thinks.
Within this mindset exists, ‘‘War is business’ … Tanks a lot, Now Give Us F-16s!’ No sooner had the U.S., Germany and other NATO powers announced the major release of main battlefield tanks for Ukraine, than Kiev immediately started demanding the supply of F-16 warplanes. Indeed, Ukrainian defence official Yuriy Sak brazenly commented about the relative ease of the “next big hurdle” of acquiring F-16s fighter jets:
“They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us HIMARS [missiles], then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get.”
This is a prime example of ‘war as business’ syndrome – and politics is about amassing money. That means F-16s are up next, and that means Poland – F-16s would not be based at an airbase in Ukraine. And extending the battlespace to Poland, inevitably would lead to more ‘war as business’: Tanks, APCs and F-16s. The Military Complex will be rubbing its hands in glee.
Predictably, the war-zealots’ frustration with the collective West’s failure to stem the tide of Ukrainian defeat is growing, and has been further compounded by the Rand Corporation(Pentagon-funded) report last week which amounted to a forensic rebuttal of the justifying rationale for the war in Ukraine. Emphasising that, though Ukrainians are doing the fighting, their flattened cities and decimated economy does not comport with Ukrainian interests.
The Report warns that the U.S. should avoid ‘a protracted conflict’, declaring Ukrainian victory as ‘improbable’ and ‘unlikely’ – and significantly warns of the conflict bleeding into Poland. The contingency that the U.S. risks inadvertently sliding towards nuclear war over several ‘issues’ is also highlighted.
On this last point, the Rand Report is prescient: The head of the Russian delegation to the OSCE this week has publicly warned that should western armour-piercing depleted uranium, or beryllium projectiles be deployed in Ukraine – as were used by the U.S. in Iraq and Yugoslavia with devastating consequences – Russia would view a such deployment as constituting the use of dirty nuclear bombs against Russia, with ensuing consequences.
If there were any doubts about Russian ‘Red Lines’, and where they lie, there can be none now. Just to be clear, ‘consequences’ equals a possible Russian nuclear response. The West has been warned.
If frustration at the failing Ukrainian military project be ‘the cause’, desperation is the sequel.
“Like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea”, Victoria Nuland opined last week. This statement shows impotence, more than anythingelse (translated, Nuland is saying, OK folks, we are not impotent as – wink, wink – we still managed to destroy the gas pipeline for the EU).
The whole PR campaign for more tanks looks more like an attempt to give extra morale to Ukrainians and their supporters in Europe (given that the tanks will not change the course of war) – a ‘going through the motions’, effectively nothing more significant. Ditto for the political proposals put forward by Secretary of State, Blinken, and Victoria Nuland last week. They look to have been drafted knowing they would be rejected in Moscow – and they were.
Yet to give the Blinken-Nuland combination their due, if neo-cons are hopeless at the execution of their war projects – which almost invariably end disastrously – they are brilliant at manipulating States into becoming their accomplices – contrary to their own national interests.
Where the neocons have been given free-range is on destroying Europe, politically, economically and militarily. The U.S. itself (and the wider world) must be absolutely astonished at the degree of European subservience, and the absolute control of EU leadership that these neo-cons have exercised.
NATO’s members were never strongly united behind Washington’s crusade to fatally weaken Russia. The EU (especially French and German) populace has no stomach for body bags. But the neo-cons correctly espied the European Achilles Heel: It was Poland, Lithuania, the other Baltic Republics and the Czech Republic. The U.S. neo-cons allied themselves with this radical Russophobic faction who want Russia dismembered and pacified, and to seize the levers of EU foreign policy away from France and Germany. The latter sat silent and impotent at Bucharest in 2008, when the NATO ‘door’ was thrown open to Georgia and Ukraine. Why did they not then express their reservations which they say they had at the time?
Weak leadership has lifted the lid on the European Pandora’s box, for all the old ghost European animosities, jealousies and naked ambitions to waft out as dark vapours. Is there anyone who can close its lid now?
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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/distract_divide_and_conquer_the_painful_truth_about_the_state_of_our_union
Distract, Divide and Conquer: The Painful Truth About the State of Our Union
Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness.
These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot afford to ignore them much longer.
Foreign interests are buying up our farmland and holding our national debt. As of 2021, foreign persons and entities owned 40.8 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, 47% of which was forestland, 29% in cropland, and 22% in pastureland. Foreign land holdings have increased by an average of 2.2 million acres per year since 2015. Foreign countries also own $7.4 trillion worth of U.S. national debt, with Japan and China ranked as our two largest foreign holders of our debt.
Corporate and governmental censorship have created digital dictators. While the “Twitter files” revealed the lengths to which the FBI has gone to monitor and censor social media content, the government has been colluding with the tech sector for some time now in order to silence its critics and target “dangerous” speech in the name of fighting so-called disinformation. The threat of being labelled “disinformation” is being used to undermine anyone who asks questions, challenges the status quo, and engages in critical thinking.
Middle- and lower-income Americans are barely keeping up. Rising costs of housing, food, gas and other necessities are presenting nearly insurmountable hurdles towards financial independence for the majority of households who are scrambling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, mounting layoffs in the tens of thousands are adding to the fiscal pain.
The government is attempting to weaponize mental health care. Increasingly, in communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, even if they pose no danger to others. While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with the government’s ongoing efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), the specter of mental health round-ups begins to sound less far-fetched.
The military’s global occupation is spreading our resources thin and endangering us at home. America’s war spending and commitment to policing the rest of the world are bankrupting the nation and spreading our troops dangerously thin. In 2022 alone, the U.S. approved more than $50 billion in aid for Ukraine, half of which went towards military spending, with more on the way. The U.S. also maintains some 750 military bases in 80 countries around the world.
Deepfakes, AI and virtual reality are blurring the line between reality and a computer-generated illusion. Powered by AI software, deepfake audio and video move us into an age where it is almost impossible to discern what is real, especially as it relates to truth and disinformation. At the same time, the technology sector continues to use virtual reality to develop a digital universe—the metaverse—that is envisioned as being the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one.
Advances in technology are outstripping our ability to protect ourselves from its menacing side, both in times of rights, humanity and workforce. In the absence of constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, we desperately need an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.
The courts have aligned themselves with the police state. In one ruling after another, the courts have used the doctrine of qualified immunity to shield police officers from accountability for misconduct, tacitly giving them a green light to act as judge, jury and executioner on the populace. All the while, police violence, the result of training that emphasizes brute force over constitutional restraints, continues to endanger the public.
The nation’s dependence on foreign imports has fueled a $1 trillion trade deficit. While analysts have pointed to the burgeoning trade deficit as a sign that the U.S. economy is growing, it underscores the extent to which very little is actually made in America anymore.
World governments, including the U.S., continue to use national crises such as COVID-19 to expand their emergency powers. None are willing to relinquish these powers when the crisis passes. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the U.S. government still has 42 declared national emergencies in effect, allowing it to sidestep constitutional protocols that maintain a system of checks and balances. For instance, the emergency declared after the 9/11 has yet to be withdrawn.
The nation’s infrastructure is rapidly falling apart. Many of the country’s roads, bridges, airports, dams, levees and water systems are woefully outdated and in dire need of overhauling, and have fallen behind that of other developed countries in recent years. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that crumbling infrastructure costs every American household $3,300 in hidden costs a year due to lost time, increased fuel consumption while sitting in traffic jams, and extra car repairs due to poor road conditions.
The nation is about to hit a healthcare crisis. Despite the fact that the U.S. spends more on health care than any other high-income country, it has the worst health outcomes than its peer nations. Experts are also predicting a collapse in the U.S. health care system as the medical community deals with growing staff shortages and shuttered facilities.
These are just a small sampling of the many looming problems that threaten to overwhelm us in the near future.
Thus far, Americans seem inclined to just switch the channel, tune out what they don’t want to hear, and tune into their own personal echo chambers.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/05/theyre-not-worried-about-russian-influence-theyre-worried-about-dissent/
They’re Not Worried About “Russian Influence”, They’re Worried About Dissent
Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.
I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.
Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.
That’s one reason why I wasn’t surprised by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.
Hamilton 68 purported to track Russian attempts to influence western thought on social media, but Twitter eventually figured out that the “Russians” the operation has been tracking were actually mostly real, mostly American accounts who just happened to say things that didn’t perfectly align with the official Beltway consensus. These accounts were often right-leaning, but also included people like Consortium News editor Joe Lauria, who’s about as far from a rightist as you can get.
They played a massive role in fanning the flames of public hysteria about online Russian influence, but while they did this by pretending to track the behavior of Russian influence ops, in reality they were tracking dissent.
One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda, something that has no meaningful existence in the west. Before RT was shut down it was drawing a whopping 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook. Research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.
Russia exerts essentially zero influence over what westerners think, yet we’re all meant to freak out about “Russian propaganda” while western oligarchs and government agencies continually hammer our minds with propaganda designed to manufacture our consent for the status quo which benefits them.
All this and we’re still seeing calls for more narrative management from the western empire, like the recent American Purpose article “The Long War of Ideas” being promoted by people like Bill Kristol which calls for a resurrection of CIA culture war tactics like those used during the last cold war. Every day there’s some new liberal politician sermonizing about the need to do more to fight Russian influence and protect American minds from “disinformation”, even as we are shown over and over again that what they really want is to shut down dissident voices.
That’s what we’re seeing in the continual efforts to increase online censorship, in the bogus new “fact-checking” industry, in calls to increase the output of formal US government propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, in the way all dissent about Russia has been forcefully purged from the western media in recent years, in the way empire-amplified trolling operations have been shouting down and drowning out critics of US foreign policy online, in the way censorship via algorithm has emerged as one of the major methods of restricting dissident speech.
They claim there needs to be a massive escalation in propaganda, censorship and online psyops in order to fight “Russian influence”, while the only influence operations we’re being subjected to in any meaningful way are only ever of the western variety. They just want to do more of that.
Our rulers aren’t actually worried about “Russian influence”, they’re worried about dissent. They’re worried the public won’t consent to the “great power competition” they plan to subject us to for the foreseeable future unless they can exert massive influence over our minds, because they know that otherwise we will recognize that our interests are directly harmed by the economic warfare, exploding military spending and nuclear brinkmanship which necessarily accompanies that campaign to reign in Russia and stop the rise of China.
They’re propagandizing us about the threat of foreign propaganda in order to justify propagandizing us more. We’re being manipulated into consenting to agendas that no healthy person would ever consent to without copious amounts of manipulation.
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