Trump had publicly threatened Putin that some “really bad things” might happen.
Feb 2022 - Biden there will be no more #NordStream2
Credit: @kozako01
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A Forceful Russian Response to NATO Recklessness
A couple of weeks ago, Israel launched its sudden surprise attack against Iran and within hours successfully decapitated most of that country’s top military leadership. The resulting Israel-Iran war soon drew America into the conflict, with President Donald Trump ordering a massive bombing attack against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities and the Iranians retaliating with missile strikes against an American base in the region. Although many of Trump’s top advisors were pressing for a full-fledged “regime change war” to overthrow the Iranian government, these tit-for-tat blows have temporarily ended the exchanges while Israel and Iran also agreed to a truce.
Before the fighting temporarily ebbed, these dramatic events naturally dominated most of the recent news headlines. Thus, they distracted attention away from an unrelated but extremely dangerous development at the very beginning of this month, an event with potentially greater geopolitical significance.
On June 1st, the world was astonished to hear that Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, one of the three legs of its vital nuclear deterrent triad, had suddenly been attacked by a huge wave of advanced explosive drones, which targeted five major airbases deep in the interior of that enormous country.
The Ukrainian government had spent more than three years locked in a bitter war with Russia, and it took full credit for what it called Operation Spiderweb, claiming that the remarkably bold attack had successfully destroyed one-third of Russia’s nuclear bombers, thus inflicting a severe strategic defeat upon its far larger and more powerful adversary.
The drones involved in the attack had been surreptitiously brought into Russia within shipping containers transported by unsuspecting Russian truckers, then automatically released close to the targeted airbases, a highly innovative military maneuver never previously employed. The Ukrainian government achieved a major propaganda victory by releasing video footage of the burning wrecks of Russia’s strategic bombers at the Belaya airfield deep in Siberia, located thousands of miles from Ukraine.
The actual damage inflicted seems to have been far less than was originally claimed. Although all five of the Russian airbases used by its nuclear bomber fleet were targeted for near-simultaneous drone attacks, apparently only some of those operations succeeded, and by most accounts perhaps only about 10-15% of the Russian strategic bombers were destroyed, with some additional ones suffering repairable damage.
But regardless of those particular details, this constituted the first time in history that the strategic arsenal of a nuclear superpower had been directly attacked, and the vulnerability demonstrated seemed extraordinarily destabilizing.
Hostile pundits initially ridiculed the Russians for parking their nuclear bombers in vulnerable open airfields, but they failed to realize that current nuclear arms treaties with the U.S. required exactly this unprotected visibility to satellites.
Moreover, under official Russian military doctrine, any such conventional strike against the country’s nuclear arsenal could fully justify a nuclear response. The attack was gleefully praised by many Western pundits and media outlets, a viewpoint that surely reflected their many political and national security sources. But the retaliatory consequences of this extraordinarily provocative operation might have been mushroom clouds over Kiev and other Ukrainian cities.
Fortunately, President Vladimir Putin’s government consists of extremely sober-minded and level-headed individuals, and they quickly deemphasized those attacks on their nuclear deterrent, instead choosing to focus upon other Ukrainian attacks against ordinary Russian civilian targets, which they angrily condemned as blatant terrorism. Foregoing any nuclear response, they have merely retaliated with larger waves of the same drone and missile strikes that they have been regularly launching against Ukrainian targets for the last several years.
However, the dramatic importance of this attack against Russia’s nuclear triad cannot be over-emphasized. Virtually all knowledgeable outside observes argued that these highly-sophisticated drone operations so deep within the Russian heartland could not possibly have been carried out without the direct support of Western intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities, almost certainly involving the participation of Western personnel.
Indeed, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s longtime foreign minister, publicly declared that his country had 100% certainty that British forces had been directly involved in orchestrating these attacks, with Prof. John Mearsheimer and other top American experts declaring that Lavrov’s statements were almost surely correct.
Scott Ritter is another Napolitano guest, someone with a strong military background but often quite bombastic and “excitable” in his statements, and he was even more emphatic. He declared that Putin would almost certainly now use huge waves of missile strikes, including his most advanced hypersonics, to destroy Ukraine while killing President Volodymr Zelensky and probably most of the country’s parliament. Such a decisive action would thereby warn Britain that any future attacks against Russian nuclear forces might result in the “disappearance” of London.
Based upon such bold predictions, I naturally wondered what dramatic form Russia’s military retaliation would soon take, but the end result seems to have been almost nothing at all. Nearly a month has now gone by, and Russia has merely responded with larger waves of the same drone and missile strikes that they have regularly been launching against Ukrainian targets for the last several years. If the loss of Ukrainian lives and the destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure had failed to deter NATO leaders since early 2022, why would additional losses make any difference? American war-hawks have sometimes even boasted that the West has been using Ukrainian cannon-fodder to successfully bleed Russia.
Doctorow, Ritter, and numerous other Western pundits argued that lack of any sufficiently strong Russian response would merely further embolden NATO’s anti-Russian political leadership and this certainly seems to have been the case. A few days ago the NATO countries declared they would dramatically boost their military spending to an unprecedented 5% of their national GDPs. Although these figures are surely exaggerated and completely unrealistic, such public pledges clearly indicate that NATO is potentially escalating rather than reducing its ongoing confrontation with Russia.
In particular, the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had taken a particularly aggressive line, apparently promising to authorize the use of its Taurus cruise missiles to strike targets deep in the Russian heartland, an enormously dangerous potential decision.
Threats of deadly Russian retaliation apparently led him to somewhat back off from this position, but he instead promised that Germany would assist Ukraine in producing those same missiles on its own territory, which some suggested might simply constitute a subterfuge for laundering those powerful weapons through the Ukrainians.
All of this strongly indicates the complete failure of Russian hopes that President Trump’s election would finally bring an end to the Ukraine war, or at least prevent continued NATO escalation. So I think something different must be considered.
If Russia failed to adequately respond to Western-backed attempts to assassinate Russia’s president and destroy much of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces, such actions are likely to be repeated, with incalculable consequences for the world if one of those operations eventually succeeds. The mechanics of Israel’s decapitating surprise attack against Iran’s military high command seemed suspiciously similar to the blow delivered against Russia less than two weeks earlier, and given the past assassinations of several high-ranking Russian generals, one wonders whether plans might not be in the works for a similar project targeting Moscow’s top leadership.
All these extremely bold Western attacks certainly suggest a complete disregard for Russian power. In a rational world, such operations would only be risked against a feeble, faltering Russia, a country ripe for defeat, collapse, and perhaps dismemberment at the hands of its far more powerful NATO adversaries.
Yet oddly enough, I see the actual facts as being exactly the opposite.
Russia currently has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, with the estimated number of its warheads somewhat outnumbering America’s total. Much more importantly, it also deploys a very powerful suite of unstoppable hypersonic missiles as either conventional or nuclear delivery systems. Despite our own gargantuan annual military budget, comparable in size to that of the rest of the world combined and many times greater than what Russia spends, all American efforts to develop these same sorts of advanced missile systems have been marked by years of repeated, embarrassing failure.
A few months ago, Russia also successfully demonstrated its revolutionary new Oreshnik hypersonic missile system, which even in its purely conventional version provides striking power similar to that of a nuclear warhead, thus allowing Russia to inflict unprecedented destruction without crossing the nuclear threshold.
I lack any substantial military expertise, but based upon the combination of all of these factors, Russia today would seem to clearly enjoy strategic military superiority over America and its NATO allies, having achieved full “escalation dominance” on both the nuclear and conventional levels.
However, there exists a total divergence between this Russian strategic military power and any resulting Western deference. I think this puzzling anomaly is best explained by the West’s own strategic weapon of enormous, perhaps even greater power, a weapon that can largely nullify most of the impact of Russia’s own strategic military superiority.
America and its close allies possess overwhelming dominance over the global media, allowing them to shape the perceived reality of much of the world’s population, ruling elites included. By heavily influencing the thoughts and beliefs of the individuals who control large military forces, nuclear arsenals, and vast wealth, this power of illusion can often easily overwhelm the political impact of the existing balance of physical power in the real world.
This same media mind-control is powerfully deployed inwardly at our own citizenry and ruling elites. Thus, the Western alliance has remained surprisingly cohesive and committed, adhering to policies that would seem deeply inimical to the best interests of many of its major members, who might otherwise have been expected to revoke their damaging alignment.
Any actual use of nuclear weapons let alone strategic ones might plausibly escalate to the large-scale exchanges that would result in worldwide destruction. Therefore, their main practical value is as a powerful means of deterrence and intimidation. But any such impact assumes that other leaders will recognize that power and react accordingly. This is not the case if the thoughts of those leaders are heavily clouded by media mind-control.
Thus, to a considerable extent, this Western media weapon has successfully nullified the impact of Russian strategic military superiority. For such superiority to have any influence, it must be recognized as such, and if media power blinds both Western populations and their elites to that important reality, the impact is largely eliminated. A loaded handgun cannot be used to effectively deter or intimidate a group of individuals if their zombified brains fail to appreciate its potential lethality.
Put another way, even if Russian hypersonics can successfully pierce any of the West’s defensive missile systems, the political results of this powerful military technology will be minimal unless the Russians can similarly develop some effective means of piercing the West’s defensive shield of media mind-control.
The practical value of this Western media weapon was demonstrated very early in the Ukraine conflict. The huge German-Russian Nord Stream pipelines were vital to the German economy as the main conduit for cheap Russian energy. Our own government naturally regarded them as a politically dangerous element of European-Russian economic integration, so numerous top American leaders publicly promised to eliminate them, including President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. A huge underwater explosion soon destroyed those pipelines, with Blinken, Nuland, and other leaders then crowing about the great benefits for America and gleefully declaring that the pipelines were now merely “a hunk of metal on the bottom of the sea.”
- American Pravda: Of Pipelines and Plagues
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 3, 2022 • 3,900 Words
A few months later, renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh came out with a blockbuster expose providing all the details of the American attack that had destroyed the pipelines, an obvious act of war against Germany, our most important NATO ally. This prompted hearings at a public session of the United Nations Security Council devoted to that topic.
- Seymour Hersh: Standing Tall in a Sea of Lies
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 13, 2023 • 2,000 Words - “But That Newspaper Is Dead”
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 27, 2023 • 2,400 Words
The insurance payout on the WTC towers destroyed on 9/11 was less than $4.6 billion while the construction costs of the pipelines themselves were roughly $20 billion and the loss of cheap Russian energy inflicted huge damage to the economies of Germany and other European nations. So at the time, I confidently assumed that Hersh’s revelations would soon lead to the collapse of NATO.
But I was entirely mistaken. But as far as I can tell, Western media mind-control has ensured that an overwhelming majority of Germans and other Europeans have still remained completely unaware of what had happened. Instead, most of them have been persuaded that the greatest act of industrial terrorism in world history was instead probably committed by a handful of shadowy Ukrainian activists on a rented sailboat, an absolutely ludicrous alternative hypothesis.
The case of the Nord Stream pipeline attacks perfectly illustrates how Western media has completely warped reality for Western populations and Western elites, with enormous geostrategic consequences. However, the actual circumstances of Russia’s entire war with Ukraine have been distorted by the same blanket of unreality.
Following the 1991 breakup of the old Soviet Union and the end of the long Cold War, Ukraine had very usefully functioned as a buffer state between the Russian Federation and NATO, with its population evenly divided by ethnicity and ideology into pro-Russian and anti-Russian elements. But in 2014 that was all changed by a Western-backed coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically-elected Russian-leaning government and installed a fiercely anti-Russian regime that threatened Russia’s continuing use of its very important Crimean naval base of Sebastopol, and also provoked the secession of the ethnic Russian territories of the Donbass. For centuries Crimea had been an integral part of Russia and its population was almost entirely ethnically Russian, so the quick response of the government of President Putin was to annex that region with the overwhelming support of its population, while also lending aid to the Donbass separatists.
Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago ranks as one of our most distinguished political scientists, and in 2014 he gave a public lecture on the simmering Ukraine conflict that he warned might eventually lead to a major war in Europe. After sitting quietly on YouTube for many years, his prescient presentation exploded in popularity once his prediction came true in 2022, and its 30 million current views may now have made it the most popular academic lecture in the history of the Internet.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University spent decades as an important economic advisor to Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other countries in the region, making him a direct eyewitness to many of the important developments responsible for the conflict. Last year he provided his first-hand account in a two-and-a-half hour interview with Tucker Carlson. The Tweet containing that interview has already been viewed more than 6 million times and I would highly recommend watching the entire segment, either on that platform or on YouTube:
Despite their enormous scholarly credentials and their deep knowledge of the issues, both these leading academics have been almost completely banned from our rabidly anti-Russian mainstream media outlets. Fortunately, over the last several years they have become regular interview guests on various popular podcast channels, including that of Judge Andrew Napolitano, thereby reaching an audience easily comparable to that of various cable news shows on network television. They have been joined by numerous other seasoned experts and analysts, equally blacklisted by mainstream outlets.
These latter individuals include Ray McGovern, who spent 27 years as a leading CIA analyst, rising to become head of the Soviet policy group and serving as the morning intelligence briefer for a half-dozen American presidents. Others in this distinguished company include Col. Larry Wilkinson, the long-time chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and Chas Freeman Jr. who had a long and very distinguished diplomatic career and served as Assistant Secretary of Defense. Their views on the origins of the Ukraine war are in perfect alignment, as are those of other regular guests such as Alastair Crooke, Col. Douglas Macgregor, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, Larry Johnson, Philip Giraldi, and Scott Ritter.
Yet the narrative seemingly embraced by the vast majority of Western elites seems an entirely different one, as exemplified by the bizarre but almost ubiquitous tendency to describe Russia’s invasion as “completely unprovoked.”
Thus, Western media power has successfully befogged the minds of Europeans, preventing them from recognizing Russia’s strategic military superiority or the culprits behind the Nord Stream pipeline attacks or the true origins of the Ukraine war. As a result, Russia has been placed in a difficult situation, and its lack of effective retaliation for the recent strikes against its nuclear forces and its president becomes much more understandable.
Suppose, for example, that Russia had retaliated in the very harsh manner suggested by Ritter and others. If Russian attacks had leveled much of Ukraine, killing President Zelensky and most of Ukraine’s other leaders, Western media power would have transformed such retaliation into monstrous, horrific, and totally “unprovoked” atrocities and its victims into pitiful martyrs. This would further demonize Russia in the minds of Europe’s citizenry and elites, fully cementing the reigning anti-Russian narrative.
Every objective observer recognizes that the current conflict amounts to a NATO proxy-war with Russia, with NATO supplying the massive financial support, advanced weaponry, training, targeting intelligence, and even key personnel that have allowed Ukraine to give Russia so much trouble. With such full NATO backing, the Ukrainians have frequently inflicted stinging losses upon Russia’s far superior forces. Indeed, by the standards of international law, NATO had long since already become a co-belligerent in the conflict, though for geopolitical reasons the very cautious Russians have refused to publicly declare that reality and take retaliatory measures.
Such caution is not unwarranted. Taken together, the countries of the NATO alliance have a combined population of nearly one billion, their recent annual military spending is 54% of the world’s total or about $1.3 trillion, and their aggregate GDP is nearly $50 trillion. By contrast, Russia’s population is only 138 million, its military spending is $145 billion, and its total GDP is $2 trillion. So Russia seems outmatched roughly 7-to-1 in population, 9-to-1 in military spending, and 25-to-1 in GDP. All these financial figures were given in nominal dollars and use of much more realistic PPP dollars would shrink these ratios by a factor of two or more, but a huge imbalance would still remain. Similarly, the inclusion of Russia’s close ally China would more than equalize these figures, but China’s military forces are almost entirely pointed towards the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and other nearby coastal areas, so its vast power cannot be easily brought to bear in the European theater, where Russia confronts NATO.
Thus, President Putin and his advisors face a severe dilemma. Western media power has largely nullified the deterrence value of Russia’s strategic superiority. But if those weapons were actually used to destroy Ukraine, let alone to hit NATO military targets, that same media power would falsely portray such strikes as monstrous war-crimes, thereby further solidifying the Western alliance and boosting popular support for increased military spending.
Given that NATO’s total population and industrial base is so many times greater than that of Russia, if the alliance holds firm, Russia might eventually be ground down over time. What was originally intended as a very limited punitive attack against Ukraine lasting just a few weeks has now gone on for well over three years, producing huge causalities on both sides, and it must be brought to an end. Meanwhile, the lack of any sufficiently strong Russian retaliation against NATO has merely emboldened the Western leaders to take more and more reckless and provocative actions, actions that at some point might result in a catastrophe for the world.
One strange aspect of this current conflict is that Russia has essentially been fighting NATO with both hands tied behind its back. NATO missiles using NATO targeting intelligence and key NATO personnel—legally laundered through the fig-leaf of its Ukrainian proxy—have regularly struck deep inside Russia, inflicting many serious blows, including sinking the flagship and other vessels of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, but Russia has refused to respond in kind. So in effect, the NATO countries have constituted a safe haven for producing and assembling the military hardware and systems used to equip Ukraine’s forces without suffering any risk of Russian retaliation. Russian cities have been struck by NATO missiles but NATO cities and their populations have not faced any similar threat.
I lack any military expertise, so my views should be taken with a large grain of salt, but I think that if Russia were actually involved in a full-fledged conventional war against NATO, the situation would be quite different. These days, most of the European NATO countries possess relatively small ground forces having little or no combat experience, so the major conventional advantage of the alliance lies in its airpower, with America’s fleet of advanced combat aircraft greatly outnumbering Russia’s own.
But surely within the first few hours of any such a conventional war, large waves of Russia’s unstoppable hypersonic missiles would completely destroy every major NATO airbase in Europe, totally eliminating the availability of nearly all of the West’s land-based aircraft. And if America brought its carriers within striking distance, they could easily be sunk along with any accompanying warships, much like Ukraine’s far less advanced missiles had devastated Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Meanwhile, Russia’s anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense systems are regarded as among the best in the world, and they could probably defeat or deter any early NATO airstrikes until the total lack of surviving European airbases eliminated the significant use of that combat arm.
Such a possible scenario of a conventional NATO military defeat should deter NATO leaders from their current recklessness. But those ideas can only have that impact if they could somehow penetrate the all-encompassing power of Western media mind-control.
Thus, the only real solution for the Russian leadership is to somehow circumvent Western media power and split the Western alliance but do so in a way that absolutely minimizes risk of a dangerous military escalation.
As it happens, just over a year ago I proposed exactly such a Russian strategy. Given the extremely dangerous recent attacks against Russia’s nuclear deterrent force and its president, I think that approach should now be given very serious consideration.
The idea is a simple one. Russia should publicly declare that it now considered NATO a co-belligerent in the Ukraine war and that Russia would therefore retaliate against the Western alliance. But instead of any lethal attack against NATO armed forces, the retaliation would initially take the form of a live demonstration of superior Russian strategic military power.
The Russians could announce their plans for a hypersonic missile strike against the NATO headquarters building in Brussels, Belgium, with the attack scheduled for 12 noon in three days’ time.
That sort of advance warning would attract enormous international attention and coverage, certainly becoming the world’s top news story during the several days that followed, and easily penetrating any obfuscating layers of Western media. Providing NATO with plenty of time to evacuate the building and those nearby would prove that Russia sought to absolutely minimize any loss of life, thereby refuting years of inflammatory Western propaganda.
Given the intent of the operation, the Russians could publicly suggest that NATO defend its HQ by ringing it with all of its best anti-missile defense systems, thereby allowing a real-life test of the two competing technologies. NATO leaders and highly-paid military contractors who had spent years or decades boasting of the great effectiveness of their enormously expensive anti-missile systems could prove the sincerity of their convictions by courageously locating themselves in the targeted HQ building at the time of the attack.
Assuming that the multi-missile strike still succeeded in totally leveling the NATO HQ, the result would be few if any unnecessary human casualties along with a simultaneous demonstration that Russian hypersonics were indeed unstoppable by any NATO defenses, with obvious political implications for the citizens of the Western alliance. The city of Brussels would have acquired a huge new hole in the ground, a very visible local landmark that would surely appear on the front pages of every newspaper in the world, perhaps even eventually converted into a permanent political monument.
As I further explained in June 2024:
The Russians could then announce that their next retaliatory strikes would sink several of our aircraft carriers, a warning that American military leaders would now be forced to take very seriously.
Under such circumstances, both the political leaders and electorates of the West might draw some important conclusions from that very high-profile military demonstration. If despite such considerable advance warning, NATO still proved completely unable to defend its own headquarters from total destruction in a Russian attack, the perceived value of that military alliance would crumble, perhaps causing it to dissolve, as should have happened after the end of the Cold War more than thirty years ago.
It would also be difficult for Western media outlets to continue demonizing a Russian government that had gone to such great lengths to minimize any human casualties, while the extreme effectiveness of Russian hypersonics would have been proven by the wreckage and craters suddenly appearing in the heart of Brussels. Taken together, this would constitute a velvet glove on an iron fist.
Many Americans might ask themselves why they were annually spending a trillion dollars on their military if our defense contractors were unable to produce hypersonic weapons or to successfully defend against those produced by the Russians.
And American political and military leaders would probably recognize that if despite such advance warning they were unable to defend their own NATO headquarters from destruction, our aircraft carriers would have little hope of surviving a Russian attack. Our country’s global power-projection relies very heavily upon these carriers, whose military credibility supports our inflated US dollar. If several of those carriers were easily sunk, that credibility would be lost, probably causing a collapse in the dollar. Our ruling political regime might collapse along with it, much like the Japanese victory in 1905 had triggered a revolution in Czarist Russia.
More than three decades ago, the mighty Soviet Union crumbled and dissolved with almost no bloodshed. Under the right circumstances, I think that the Russian destruction of the NATO headquarters building might lead to an equally bloodless and long overdue dissolution of that military alliance.
- Should Vladimir Putin Call His Shot on a NATO Brushback Pitch?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 3, 2024 • 3,300 Words
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SOURCE:
https://www.unz.com/runz/a-forceful-russian-response-to-nato-recklessness/
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