Tuesday, June 21, 2016

John Helmer — US Strategy For Russia – Wage War But Not Declare It

Between August 9 and 12, 1941, taking their battleships in turn to meet in a Canadian bay, US President Franklin Roosevelt (centre, left) and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (centre, right) discussed what to do about their adversaries at the time, Germany and Japan. Roosevelt had whispered, and Churchill later reporting him as saying aloud: “I will wage war, but not declare it.”

Until February 21, 2014, President Barack Obama’s (right) whispers were audible; President Vladimir Putin (left) didn’t believe what he was hearing. Now there is armed US war against Russia on the Ukraine and Syria-Turkey fronts; exchanges of armed signals in the Black and Baltic Seas; and an all-fronts war against Russian capital. For the US, no declaration; for Russia, no way back.
Putin said as much at last week’s St. Petersburg meetings: “People feel no danger and that is alarming for me. Why can’t we see that we are dragging the world into an utterly new dimension? This is the problem.” “I am not interested in laying blame now. I simply want to say that if this policy of unilateral actions continues and if steps in the international arena that are very sensitive to the international community are not coordinated then such consequences are inevitable.” By consequences, Putin meant war, undeclared by the US against Russia, compelling Russia to forestall in its defence. “If we continue to act according to this logic, escalating [tensions] and redoubling efforts to scare each other, then one day it will come to a cold war.”
Cold is not the kind of war Putin means. “I don’t know where it [the deployment of the U.S. missile defense system in Europe] might lead to but I know for sure that we will have to respond.”
For the precedents of undeclared US warmaking, provoking the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, and that as the intended backdoor to US war with Germany, it’s necessary to open, The Challenge of Grand Strategy. This is a little-known collection of essays by US historians of the period between World War I and World War II. Open it here.…
In retrospect, the evidence proves Roosevelt planned US economic sanctions against Japan, first against trade in strategic minerals, then against Japan’s offshore cash and capital, and finally against the sale of oil, in order to provoke war in the Pacific. As Roosevelt is quoted as telling his Secretary of War in October 1941, seven weeks before the Pearl Harbour attack: “we face the delicate question of the diplomatic fencing to be done so as to be sure that Japan was put in the wrong and made the first bad move – overt move."
Today, according to Russian sources, it is the conclusion of the Kremlin and General Staff that Obama and his would-be successor, Hillary Clinton, are following the Roosevelt line….
Russians, even ordinary people, are aware of this. Americans not so much.

Not only Russia. UP strategy is heavily tilted toward hybrid warfare including but not limited to information war, economic war, and subversion to overt hostilities. Regime change is a lot less costly then hot war and it leaves a country intact and ripe for the picking.

The goal is US global hegemony under transnational capitalism direct from the West and tight domestic security to control the homeland. Not a pretty future.

5 comments:

chris said...

Oh sure.... the Russians and Putin in particular with their/his outright invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with this (sarcastic). If anything what you posit... war without declaration is exactly Putin's game... I sure hope that the US obliges in return as Russians/Putin really only understand power and pretty much lie lie lie until it comes down to that.

Tom Hickey said...

Thanks for your contribution, chris. You do understand that Putin has promised to hit continental US this time if attacked? Do you really think that the US is able to neutralize Russia' nuclear trident of land-based ICBMs, strategic bombers and submarines along with a nuclear arsenal as large as the US?

Peter Pan said...

Yeltsin is gone. The question now is how will Europe respond. Will they allow NATO to run wild?

Kaivey said...

You have absorbed all their propaganda without any thought to become their cannon fodder. The US top brass will all be down their nuclear shelters.

Peter Pan said...

Surely Putin is aware of the level of apathy of the average American citizen?