Sunday, July 22, 2018

Pepe Escobar — Here’s the real reason the US must talk to Russia


Pepe Escobar draws out the implications of Andrei Martyanov's Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning.
What Martyanov describes as “the deadly combination of contemporary American elites’ ignorance, hubris and desperation,” though, cannot be underestimated.
Already during his election campaign, Trump announced multiple times that he would contest the post-Cold War international (dis)order. Helsinki was a graphic demonstration that now Trump’s “drain the swamp” faces a massive immovable object, as the swamp will take no prisoners to preserve its trillion-dollar power.
In contrast, Russian diplomacy, as explicitly reaffirmed once again this week by Putin himself, is adamant that anything is permitted when it comes to avoiding Cold War 2.0....
The fundamental issue is a switch from foreign policy idealism (Wilsonian foreign policy characterized by liberal internationalism under US leadership) to foreign policy realism (Jacksonian foreign policy, focus on US national interests). The Foreign policy idealism was furthered by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and foreign policy realism by Henry Kissinger.
It’s crystal clear that President Trump is applying Kissingerian divide-and-rule tactics, trying to reduce Russian political/economic connectivity with the two other Eurasian integration poles, China and Iran....
Here’s the real reason the US must talk to Russia
Pepe Escobar

1 comment:

Konrad said...

“The reason is minutely detailed in Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning, a new book by Russian military/naval analyst Andrei Martyanov.”

This myopia includes greed and corruption.

U.S. military contractors only care about grabbing all the federal dollars they can, for as long as they can. They intentionally produce garbage so that contracts remain open-ended for decades while weapons makers “work out the bugs.”

Because of this cash grab, the U.S. military budget is the largest in the world by far, yet the U.S. military is only good for bombing defenseless civilians. [Weddings, funeral processions, and so on.] Bombing civilians is the reason why the U.S. builds aircraft carriers, which would be sitting ducks in a real war with a real adversary.

What Russian military analyst Andrei Martyanov calls hubris, I call greed. Military contractors don’t care about anyone or anything except pocketing federal dollars. They will not change their thinking, since they will not change their cash grab.

For this reason, “Trump’s ‘drain the swamp’ faces a massive immovable object, as the swamp will take no prisoners to preserve its trillion-dollar power.”

Yes.

Continuing…

“The only justification for such whopping expenditure is to manufacture a lethal external threat: Russia. That’s the key reason the complex will not allow US President Donald Trump even to try to normalize relations with Russia.”

That’s part of the reason. Another part is that the oligarchs, bureaucrats, and puppet politicians need an external “enemy” in order to distract the masses from their ever-worsening poverty (caused by oligarchs, bureaucrats, and puppet politicians).

Incidentally when it comes to war, the U.S. thinks in terms of hardware. (Guns, bombs, tanks, etc.) The U.S. solution to everything is to bomb it from the air. The U.S. assumes that in a war, Russia and China would think like the U.S.

This delusion is arrogant. In war, the ultimate weapon is not hardware, but the human mind -- i.e. the beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes of civilians and combatants. Battlefield commanders know that morale is everything.

The American mind is demoralized.