Escalations in a New Cold War
The
Obama administration poked Russia in the eye again by activating a
missile defense site in Romania while building up NATO forces on
Russia’s borders, acts that could escalate toward nuclear war, notes
Jonathan Marshall.
By Jonathan MarshallMay 15, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - "Consortium News " - If
the United States ever ends up stumbling into a major conventional or
nuclear war with Russia, the culprit will likely be two military
boondoggles that refused to die when their primary mission ended with
the demise of the Soviet Union: NATO and the U.S. anti-ballistic missile
(ABM) program.
The
“military-industrial complex” that reaps hundreds of billions of
dollars annually from support of those programs got a major boost this
week when NATO established its first major missile defense site at an air base in Romania, with plans to build a second installation in Poland by 2018.
President
Barack Obama meets with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on the
sidelines of the G20 Summit at Regnum Carya Resort in Antalya, Turkey,
Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015. National Security Advisior Susan E. Rice listens
at left. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Although
NATO and Pentagon spokesmen claim the ABM network in Eastern Europe is
aimed at Iran, Russia isn’t persuaded for a minute. “This is not a
defense system,” said Russian
President Vladimir Putin on Friday. “This is part of U.S. nuclear
strategic potential brought [to] . . . Eastern Europe. . . Now, as these
elements of ballistic missile defense are deployed, we are forced to
think how to neutralize emerging threats to the Russian Federation.”
Iran
doesn’t yet have missiles capable of striking Europe, nor does it have
any interest in targeting Europe. The missiles it does have are notoriously inaccurate. Their inability to hit a target reliably might not matter so much if tipped with nuclear warheads, but Iran is abiding by its stringently verified agreement to dismantle programs and capabilities that could allow it to develop nuclear weapons.
The ABM system currently deployed in Europe is admittedly far too small today to threaten Russia’s nuclear deterrent. In fact, ABM technology is still unreliable, despite America’s investment of more than $100 billion in R&D.
Nonetheless,
it’s a threat Russia cannot ignore. No U.S. military strategist would
sit still for long if Russia began ringing the United States with such
systems. That’s why the United States and Russia limited them by treaty —
until President George W. Bush terminated the pact in 2002.
President
Reagan’s famous 1983 “Star Wars” ABM initiative was based on a theory
developed by advisers Colin Gray and Keith Payne in a 1980 article
titled “Victory is Possible”: that a combination of superior nuclear
weapons, civil defense programs, and ballistic missile defenses could
allow the United States to “prevail” in a prolonged nuclear war with the
Soviet Union.
Such
nuclear superiority, Gray argued, could back up “very large American
expeditionary forces” fighting in a future conflict “around the
periphery of Asia.” By limiting damage to the U.S. homeland, missile
defenses would neutralize Russia’s nuclear deterrent and help the United
States “succeed in the prosecution of local conflict . . . and — if
need be — to expand a war.”
Gray
published that latter observation in a 1984 volume edited by Ashton
Carter, who as President Obama’s Secretary of Defense now champions the
new missile shield in Europe. So it should come as little wonder that
Moscow is going all out these days in a sometimes ugly campaign to
remind the world of its nuclear potency, lest NATO take advantage of
Russia’s perceived weakness.
Russian Tough Talk
Moscow spokesmen have warned that Romania could become a “smoking ruins” if it continues to host the new anti-missile site; threatened Denmark, Norway and Poland that they too could become targets of attack; and announced development of a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to penetrate the U.S. missile shield.
Secretary Carter responded this
month that “Moscow’s nuclear saber-rattling raises troubling questions
about . . . whether they respect the profound caution that nuclear-age
leaders showed with regard to brandishing nuclear weapons” — even as he
announced new details of a $3.4 billion military buildup to support
NATO’s combat capabilities.
U.S. military leaders say they
are drawing up even bigger funding requests to send more troops and
military hardware to Eastern Europe, and to pay for new “investments in
space systems, cyber weapons, and ballistic missile defense designed to
check a resurgent Russia.”
Speaking in February at security conference in Munich, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called for
an end to such confrontation, noting that “almost every day [NATO
leaders] call Russia the main threat for NATO, Europe, the U.S. and
other countries. It makes me wonder if we are in 2016 or in 1962.”
But
stepped-up conflict comes as a godsend to the Pentagon and its
contractors, which only a few years ago faced White House plans for major cutbacks in
funding and troop strength in Europe. It allows them to maintain — and
increase — military spending levels that today are greater than they
were during the height of the Cold War.
U.S.
and other NATO leaders justify their buildup by pointing to Russia’s
allegedly aggressive behavior — “annexing” Crimea and sending
“volunteers” to Eastern Ukraine. They conveniently neglect the blatant
coup d’état in Kiev that triggered the Ukraine crisis by driving an
elected, Russian-friendly government from power in February 2014. They
also neglect the long and provocative record of NATO expansion toward Russia’s borders after the fall of the Soviet Union, contrary to the pledges of Western leaders in 1990.
That
expansion was championed by the aptly named Committee to Expand NATO, a
hot-bed of neoconservatives and Hillary Clinton advisers led by Bruce Jackson, then vice president for planning and strategy at Lockheed Martin, the country’s largest military contractor. In 2008, NATO vowed to bring Ukraine — the largest country on Russia’s western border — into the Western military alliance.
Cold War Warnings
George Kennan, the dean of U.S. diplomats during the Cold War, predicted in
1997 that NATO’s reckless expansion could only lead to “a new Cold War,
probably ending in a hot one, and the end of the effort to achieve a
workable democracy in Russia.”
Last year, former Secretary of Defense William Perry warned that
we “are on the brink of a new nuclear arms race,” with all the vast
expense — and dangers of a global holocaust — of its Cold War
predecessor.
U.S.
diplomat George F. Kennan who is credited with devising the strategy of
deterrence against the Soviet Union after World War II.
And just this month, President Obama’s own former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned that
NATO’s plans to deploy four battalions to the Baltic States could
result “very quickly in another Cold War buildup here, that really makes
no sense for either side.”
If
“we continue to build up the eastern flank of NATO, with more
battalions, more exercises, and more ships and more platforms,” he told
an audience at the Atlantic Council, “the Russians will respond. I’m not
sure where that takes you.”
Nobody
knows where it takes us, and that’s the problem. It could take us all
too easily from small provocations to a series of escalations by each
side to show they mean business. And given the trip-wire effect of
nuclear weapons stored on NATO’s soil, the danger of escalation to nuclear war is entirely real.
As foreign policy expert Jeffrey Taylor commented recently,
“The Obama administration is setting the stage for endless
confrontation, and possibly even war, with Russia, and with no public
debate.”
Returning
to the days of the Cold War will buy less security and more danger. As
President Obama contemplates what he will say about the lessons of
nuclear war in Hiroshima, he should fundamentally reconsider his own
policies that threaten many more Hiroshimas.
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