Erin Blakemore — America’s Unlikely Cold War Weapon

Books.

JSTOR Daily 

America’s Unlikely Cold War Weapon
Erin Blakemore

Branko Milanovic — My response to DeLong and Pseudoerasmus

More on paradoxes of liberalism — that some liberals at least do not seem to be able to recognize or acknowledge.

Global Inequality
My response to DeLong and Pseudoerasmus
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

John Helmer — The President’s Inferiority Complex , His Advisor’s Russia-Hating Obsession, And The Putsch Plotter With The Itchy Trigger Finger

Second installment on Zbig and Jimmy Carter. Another eye-opener.

Accounts such as these make it clear that there are no "good guys." "Our guys" are thugs, too.

These games of liquidating others in the cause of defeating the Kremlin has invigorated Carter, even today when Carter himself is on his last legs. Drawing the Russians on to the field of battle was his and Brzezinski’s aim; Afghanistan, after the Soviet military intervention began in December 1979, was their main chance. Their successors in the White House have the same chance against Russian forces on the battlefields of Syria and Ukraine. Though he has tried, Brzezinski is no longer in a position to advise them that if they don’t dare, they can’t win. Carter is still alive to demonstrate that if they dare, they are likely to lose.

It isn’t sure that’s what KGB trainee Putin scribbled down during his lectures at the Andropov Red Banner Institute in 1984. It’s certain he has noted it down now.

Helmer's accounts explain much about the current Russophobia in the government and press.

Dances with Bears
THE PRESIDENT’S INFERIORITY COMPLEX , HIS ADVISOR’S RUSSIA-HATING OBSESSION, AND THE PUTSCH PLOTTER WITH THE ITCHY TRIGGER FINGER
John Helmer

Andrew Cockburn — The New Red Scare – Reviving the art of threat inflation

Weekend reading.

Harper's
The New Red Scare – Reviving the art of threat inflation

Andrew Cockburn

Melvin A. Goodman — Learning from the Cold War to prevent war with Russia today

Backgrounder in conjuring up enemies and manufacturing consent to fight them.

Summary: Clinton has stocked her foreign policy team with advisors belligerent and reckless, eager for conflict with Russia. The military-industrial complex’s propaganda mills work to arouse fear and hatred of Russia, as they did during the Cold War. Let’s learn from that history before we starting risk a terrible war. We were told mostly false stories about the Soviet Union. How accurate are those about Russia? {This updates my post from Oct 2009.}

Fabius Maximus
Learning from the Cold War to prevent war with Russia today

Melvin A. Goodman | senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

See also

LobeLog
The Doctrine of Armed Exceptionalism

William Hurting

Ron Unz — American Pravda: Did the US Plan a Nuclear First Strike Against Russia in the Early 1960s?

Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?Heather A. Purcell and James K. Galbraith, The American Prospect, Fall 1994 

I quickly read the article and was stunned. The central document was a Top Secret/Eyes Only summary memo of a July 1961 National Security Council meeting written by Howard Burris, the military aide to then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson, which was afterward deposited in the Johnson Archives and eventually declassified. The discussion focused on the effectiveness of a planned nuclear first strike, suggesting that 1963 would be the optimal date since America’s relative advantage in intercontinental nuclear missiles would be greatest at that point. Galbraith’s student, Heather A. Purcell, had discovered the memo and co-authored the article with him, and as they pointed out, this meeting was held soon after the US military had discovered that the Soviet missile forces were far weaker than previously had been realized, leading to the plans for the proposed attack and also proving that the first strike under discussion could only have been an American one.…

Not what you were told.

The Unz Review

American Pravda: Did the US Plan a Nuclear First Strike Against Russia in the Early 1960s?

Ron Unz

The Saker — Debunking popular clichés about modern warfare

What a conflict between NATO and Russia would look like.

The Unz Review
Debunking popular clichés about modern warfare

The Saker

Vesti — Ryabkov: Washington Is Preparing A "Global Strike"

Washington continues to prepare a global strike, according to Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation Sergei Ryabkov to RIA Novosti . He noted that a continuation of negotiations on further nuclear reductions are impossible for this reason. 

Fort Russ
Ryabkov: Washington Is Preparing A "Global Strike"
Vesti (original in Russian)

Translated by Ollie Richardson for Fort Russ

Peter Schwarz — Leading German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung says Russia should be threatened with nuclear war

Topping John McCain, even discounting that this is being reported by WSWS?

One day before the crisis meeting on Ukraine in Minsk, a leading German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), published an editorial calling for NATO to militarily escalate the confrontation with Russia to the point of a nuclear attack. 

The conservative newspaper appeared on Tuesday with a front-page commentary by its co-editor, Berthold Kohler, calling for a policy of “deterrence” against Russia up to the “highest level.” 

Kohler accused German Chancellor Angela Merkel of shrinking “from delivering weapons to Kiev that could entangle the West in a proxy war,” even though Russian President Vladimir Putin was prepared “to escalate the dispute to the brink of a nuclear conflict.” 

“If the West maintains its view that the conflict ‘cannot be solved militarily,’” Kohler warned, “then, in the worst case, the Kremlin could allow its ‘separatists’ to march to Kiev.” 

He then posed the rhetorical question: “How can one deal with an aggressive and expansionist power that disregards the fundamental principles of peace in Europe?” The answer, he said, was “unpleasant but inevitable. Deterrence, all the way up to its highest level.” 

Kohler clearly had nuclear weapons in mind, writing: “Would Putin have dared to occupy Crimea if Ukraine also possessed nuclear weapons?” 

He left no doubt about his willingness to use such weapons. NATO had to make clear to the Kremlin, he wrote, “that any breach-of-area will be countered with a military response and the willingness of the West to go up the escalation ladder, in the worst case, even faster than the Russians.” 

Kohler complained that, “of course, no one in the West speaks openly” of such scenarios, because they contravene “the existing dogma of de-escalation.” 

This is the unadulterated voice of German imperialism, heard previously in World War I and World War II. The FAZ publisher is willing to contemplate and threaten a nuclear war that would cost billions of lives and very likely spell the end of human civilization. 

WSWS

Leading German newspaper says Russia should be threatened with nuclear war

Peter Schwarz

TASS — Most Russians consider US major enemy of Russia — pollster

According to a poll by the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center, 73% of respondents said the US was Russia’s number one enemy…

…less than one percent named the United States a partner-country, while 73% agreed that America was Russia’s number one enemy. Besides the US, Ukraine (32%), the EU and Germany (10%) are believed to be among Russia’s rivals. Moreover, Italy, France and Japan were considered Russia’s partners by only one percent of the surveyed. 

As a matter of fact, 82% of the respondents supported the idea that the criticism of foreign mass media towards Russia’s President Vladimir Putin could be considered as an attempt to destroy the country and to make it fall apart. Nevertheless, 12% disagreed with the statement, while 6% remained unsure.

TASS
Most Russians consider US major enemy of Russia — pollster

Ghia Nodia — The Cold War and the Cold Shoulder

The Ukraine crisis has shattered key Western assumptions about Russia, and many analysts and policymakers have fallen back on the belief that Russian President Vladimir Putin must be acting irrationally. But it is Western assumptions that need to be questioned. In particular, what has made Russia so keen to undermine the current international order, first in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine now?

Project Syndicate
The Cold War and the Cold Shoulder
Ghia Nodia | President of the Caucasus Institute for Peace, Democracy, and Development in Tbilisi, Georgia

Branko Milanovic — The origins of the Second Cold War: an essay in interpretation

It is a truism that the origins of the Second World War are to be found in the way the First World War ended. The same is true for the Second Cold War whose beginnings we are witnessing these days. The way the First Cold War ended was sufficiently ambiguous that it gave rise to two narratives which are incompatible and have led to the current impasse. That they would eventually do so was, I think, clear to many people for years although some (like myself) thought that it was bound to happen later, with a post-Putin rise of Russian nationalism.

What are the two narratives? …

globalinequality
The origins of the Second Cold War: an essay in interpretation
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at LIS

See also Pepe Escobar, A chessboard drenched in blood, July 23, Asia Times Online.

Ryan Grim — Thomas Piketty Explains Why It Took Until Now For An Economist To Expose The Flaw In Capitalism

Cold War self-censorship prevented mainstream economists from diagnosing adequately the fundamental flaw in capitalism, Thomas Piketty said in an interview with The Huffington Post. 

Piketty's best-selling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, was recently translated from French to English and has upended the global discussion on capitalism and inequality. Piketty relies on the most expansive income and wealth datasets ever compiled to identify a striking trend over more than 200 years: returns on capital grow faster than the regular economy, meaning that without some policy intervention, the rich get richer, and richer, and richer.

Piketty said that he is unsure if he would have had the courage to write his book during the heat of the Cold War. "I don't know what I would have done. I'm lucky enough to belong to a generation, and maybe to the first generation, that didn't have to make that kind of choice, because the Soviet Union was gone," he said.

Piketty's dataset is an expansion of one put together by a leading 20th century economist, Simon Kuznets, famous for what's known as the Kuznets curve -- a chart suggesting that as capitalist economies reach a certain undefined stage of development, inequality begins falling after sharply rising. Yet the Kuznets curve was used for half a century to argue that capitalism has a natural tendency to reduce inequality in advanced economies, despite a lack of evidence.

"During the Cold War period, people really wanted to believe in the stories about inequality and capitalism," Piketty said. "For instance, Kuznets' evidence in the 1950s and 1960s ... he did not believe that the reduction in inequality that he found between 1910 to 1950 was a natural process. He was very well aware, if you read his book, that the World War, the Great Depression, and the policies that were implemented after these shocks -- progressive taxation and other policies -- played a very important role. But everybody wanted to believe in a sort of natural process that would naturally lead to a decline in inequality in advanced stages of development, because in the Cold War context the fight between capitalism and communism was so great."

 In other words, political propaganda.

The Huffington Post
Thomas Piketty Explains Why It Took Until Now For An Economist To Expose The Flaw In Capitalism
Ryan Grim

How & Why Economics Is Always An Extension Of Policy ... (and why YOUR INDUSTRY SECTOR is currently underfunded, compared to the MICC)

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



I've little to add, so I'm posting, with permission, some comments and a link forwarded by Chuck Spinney.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Chuck Spinney

Todd Pierce has produced a tour de force that is crucially important to your appreciation of the increasing possibility of Cold War II.

Related subjects not discussed include 

(1) the role of domestic politics in shaping the systematic expansion of NATO in violation of our promises to Gorbachev as a quid pro quo for ending the first Cold War and 

(2) the role of shoveling money to the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex in the shaping the domestic politics of contemporary militarism.

These issues in no way detract from the importance of Todd's message; I only mention them because they are also central to rise of a peculiar form of 21st Century American Militarism that violates all the criteria of a sensible grand strategy. 

On a personal note: as one who laughing dismissed Wolfowitz's draft Defense Planning Guidance when it was leaked to the New York Times in 1992 as the inconsequential divagations of a troglodyte moron, I stand corrected.

Chuck Spinney, The Blaster

###

‘We’re All Cheneyites Now’

By Todd E. Pierce, Consortium News, 1 April 2014

In late 2008, when President Obama opted more for “continuity” than “change” — and ceded control over much of his foreign policy to hawkish “rivals” — he locked in many of Dick Cheney’s neocon theories that trampled constitutional principles, as retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce explains.

Edward McClelland — Communism saved the American worker

Wiping out Communism removed the final obstacle to the global triumph of capital. No longer did corporations doing business in the Third World have to worry about workers’ movements, or nationalization of their assets. Globalization exploded in the 1990s because the entire globe was finally under a single economic system. And if corporations didn’t have to worry about treating workers abroad well, they didn’t have to worry about treating workers at home well, either. They could simply threaten to move their operations abroad if Americans demanded high wages, or job security.

Communism’s defeat has done more than its 75-year-long victory to validate the theories of its founder, Karl Marx, who foresaw both globalization and the misery it would cause the common worker.
“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production … compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeoisie mode of production. In one word, it creates a world in its own image,” Marx wrote.

He also wrote this:

Big industry constantly requires a reserve army of unemployed workers for times of overproduction. The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it, i.e., when the overpopulation is the greatest. The… theory… which is also expressed as a law of nature, that population grows faster than the means of subsistence, is the more welcome to the bourgeois as it silences his conscience, makes hard-heartedness into a moral duty and the consequences of society into the consequences of nature, and finally gives him the opportunity to watch the destruction of the proletariat by starvation as calmly as other natural event without bestirring himself, and, on the other hand, to regard the misery of the proletariat as its own fault and to punish it. To be sure, the proletarian can restrain his natural instinct by reason, and so, by moral supervision, halt the law of nature in its injurious course of development.

Marx was right about those things, but he was wrong about the solution....

An economy without a marketplace will produce only the bare minimum necessary for survival. But capitalism, in its rawest form, leads to the same result. Unless tempered by unionization or a social welfare state, the iron law of wages reduces the majority of workers to a subsistence level, while creating vast wealth for a tiny ownership class.

Salon
Communism saved the American worker

Edward McClelland

Mark Karlin — The Major Reason There Will Be No War With Russia: They Are Rasputin Capitalists Now

All this talk of a new cold war is just a lot of political blather coming out of DC due to the re-emergence of the neocons.

The reality is that there will be no war with the Russian Federation because Russia is now a raffish capitalist nation. 

Wall Street not on board with President Obama and sanctions.

BuzzFlash
The Major Reason There Will Be No War With Russia: They Are Rasputin Capitalists Now
Mark Karlin, Editor Of Buzzflash At Truthout
(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)

Robert Parry — America’s Staggering Hypocrisy

Calling out the neocons and listing the interventions.

BTW, did you catch John McCain's Senate speech in which he chides President Obama for foolishly thinking the Cold War is over, and praising candidate Romney's assertion that Russia is the numero uno enemy of the US?

Consortium News
America’s Staggering Hypocrisy
Robert Parry

Salon — Kerry: Western powers are prepared to sanction Russia for its “incredible act of aggression”

Western powers are prepared “to go to the hilt” to isolate Russia for its military incursion into Ukraine, “an incredible act of aggression” that may lead to visa bans, asset freezes, trade and investment penalties, and a boycott of a Russian-hosted economic summit of global powers in June, Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday....

Kerry also mentioned visa bans, the freezing of Russian assets, trade and investment penalties. He suggested American companies “may well want to start thinking twice about whether they want to do business with a country that behaves like this.”

Salon

Kerry: Western powers are prepared to sanction Russia for its “incredible act of aggression”

Looks like the Cold War is on again and a renewed arms race won't be far behind.

Chuck Spinney — What is the Real Price of Starting Another Cold War?

The chart puts this scam in perspective. Compared to the two lefthand charts, the Pentagon’s deflators (i.e., the righthand graph) make the current defense budgets appear to be less of a departure from past budgets. The right hand chart is the one that the Pentagon briefs to Congress and the press dutifully regurgitates. It implies the current defense budget and future plans are less of a distortionary burden on the economy than is actually the case. (Readers interested in learning more about the inflation scam are referred to this report for a particularly outrageous case study documenting how the Pentagon scammed the Congress and the America people into believing the Reagan spendup was less wasteful than it really was.)

The charts give you an idea of the golden cornucopia awaiting the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC), if its proponents can start a new Cold War. Anyone who doubts the possibility of the MICC’s capacity to pull this off, need only use these charts to think about (1) the durability of the so-called “peace” dividend accompanying the end of the Cold War in 1990 and (2) how the MICC exploited the horror of 9-11 to power boost the defense budget to levels undreamed of by the threat inflators during the worst days of the Cold War or Vietnam. Just try to think about what a new wave of cold-war hysteria could trigger.

Counterpunch
What is the Real Price of Starting Another Cold War?
Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon

AFP — Russia to deploy ‘star wars’ defense system in 2017: report

Woo hoo! It's on. New arms race, that is. No worries about deficits being too small. Great for the export market, too. (snark)

The Raw Story
Russia to deploy ‘star wars’ defense system in 2017: report
Agence France-Presse