The Period of American Dominance Has Passed
The Period of American Dominance Has Passed
Russian Missile Tech has Made America’s Trillion Dollar Navy Obsolete
Dmitry Orlov
For the past 500 years European nations—Portugal, the Netherlands,
Spain, Britain, France and, briefly, Germany—were able to plunder much
of the planet by projecting their naval power overseas. Since much of
the world’s population lives along the coasts, and much of it trades
over water, armed ships that arrived suddenly out of nowhere were able
to put local populations at their mercy.
The armadas could plunder, impose tribute, punish the disobedient,
and then use that plunder and tribute to build more ships, enlarging the
scope of their naval empires. This allowed a small region with few
natural resources and few native advantages beyond extreme orneriness
and a wealth of communicable diseases to dominate the globe for half a
millennium.
The ultimate inheritor of this naval imperial project is the United
States, which, with the new addition of air power, and with its large
aircraft carrier fleet and huge network of military bases throughout the
planet, is supposedly able to impose Pax Americana on the entire world.
Or, rather, was able to do so—during the brief period between the
collapse of the USSR and the emergence of Russia and China as new global
powers and their development of new anti-ship and antiaircraft
technologies. But now this imperial project is at an end.
Prior to the Soviet collapse, the US military generally did not dare
to directly threaten those countries to which the USSR had extended its
protection. Nevertheless, by using its naval power to dominate the sea
lanes that carried crude oil, and by insisting that oil be traded in US
dollars, it was able to live beyond its means by issuing
dollar-denominated debt instruments and forcing countries around the
world to invest in them. It imported whatever it wanted using borrowed
money while exporting inflation, expropriating the savings of people
across the world. In the process, the US has accumulated absolutely
stunning levels of national debt—beyond anything seen before in either
absolute or relative terms. When this debt bomb finally explodes, it
will spread economic devastation far beyond US borders. And it will
explode, once the petrodollar wealth pump, imposed on the world through
American naval and air superiority, stops working.
New missile technology has made a naval empire cheap to defeat.
Previously, to fight a naval battle, one had to have ships that
outmatched those of the enemy in their speed and artillery power. The
Spanish Armada was sunk by the British armada. More recently, this meant
that only those countries whose industrial might matched that of the
United States could ever dream of opposing it militarily. But this has
now changed: Russia’s new missiles can be launched from thousands of
kilometers away, are unstoppable, and it takes just one to sink a
destroyer and just two to sink an aircraft carrier. The American armada
can now be sunk without having an armada of one’s own. The relative
sizes of American and Russian economies or defense budgets are
irrelevant: the Russians can build more hypersonic missiles much more
quickly and cheaply than the Americans would be able to build more
aircraft carriers.
Equally significant is the development of new Russian air defense
capabilities: the S-300 and S-400 systems, which can essentially seal
off a country’s airspace. Wherever these systems are deployed, such as
in Syria, US forces are now forced to stay out of their range. With its
naval and air superiority rapidly evaporating, all that the US can fall
back on militarily is the use of large expeditionary forces—an option
that is politically unpalatable and has proven to be ineffective in Iraq
and Afghanistan. There is also the nuclear option, and while its
nuclear arsenal is not likely to be neutralized any time soon, nuclear
weapons are only useful as deterrents. Their special value is in
preventing wars from escalating beyond a certain point, but that point
lies beyond the elimination of their global naval and air dominance.
Nuclear weapons are much worse than useless in augmenting one’s
aggressive behavior against a nuclear-armed opponent; invariably, it
would be a suicidal move. What the US now faces is essentially a
financial problem of unrepayable debt and a failing wealth pump, and it
should be a stunningly obvious point that setting off nuclear explosions
anywhere in the world would not fix the problems of an empire that is
going broke.
Events that signal vast, epochal changes in the world often appear
minor when viewed in isolation. Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon
was just one river crossing; Soviet and American troops meeting and
fraternizing at the Elbe was, relatively speaking, a minor event—nowhere
near the scale of the siege of Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad or
the fall of Berlin. Yet they signaled a tectonic shift in the historical
landscape. And perhaps we have just witnessed something similar with
the recent pathetically tiny Battle of East Gouta in Syria, where the US
used a make-believe chemical weapons incident as a pretense to launch
an equally make-believe attack on some airfields and buildings in Syria.
The US foreign policy establishment wanted to show that it still
matters and has a role to play, but what really happened was that US
naval and air power were demonstrated to be almost entirely beside the
point.
Of course, all of this is terrible news to the US military and
foreign policy establishments, as well as to the many US Congressmen in
whose districts military contractors operate or military bases are
situated. Obviously, this is also bad news for the defense contractors,
for personnel at the military bases, and for many others as well. It is
also simply awful news economically, since defense spending is about the
only effective means of economic stimulus of which the US government is
politically capable.
Obama’s “shovel-ready jobs,” if you recall, did nothing to forestall
the dramatic slide in the labor participation rate, which is a euphemism
for the inverse of the real unemployment rate. There is also the
wonderful plan to throw lots of money at Elon Musk’s SpaceX (while
continuing to buy vitally important rocket engines from the Russians—who
are currently discussing blocking their export to the US in retaliation
for more US sanctions). In short, take away the defense stimulus, and
the US economy will make a loud popping sound followed by a gradually
diminishing hissing noise.
Needless to say, all those involved will do their best to deny or
hide for as long as possible the fact that the US foreign policy and
defense establishments have now been neutralized. My prediction is that
America’s naval and air empire will not fail because it will be defeated
militarily, nor will it be dismantled once the news sinks in that it is
useless; instead, it will be forced to curtail its operations due to
lack of funds. There may still be a few loud bangs before it gives up,
but mostly what we will hear is a whole lot of whimpering. That’s how
the USSR went; that’s how the USA will go too.
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https://russia-insider.com/en/russian-missile-tech-has-made-americas-trillion-dollar-navy-obsolete/ri23242
N.B. the following articles collected by Paul Craig Roberts get deeper into the currant issues:
The Idiot Neoconservatives Will Get Us All Killed
The Idiot Neoconservatives Will Get Us All Killed
http://www.unz.com/article/the-implications-of-russias-new-weapons/
http://www.unz.com/tsaker/war-with-russia-two-great-american-myths/
Are We Over the US/UK Fomented Crisis In Syria?
Are We Over the US/UK Fomented Crisis In Syria?
Paul Craig Roberts
It appears from the very limited US missile attack, most of which
were intercepted and destroyed by Syrian air defenses, that the US
military prevailed over the crazed John Bolton and carefully avoided a
strike that would have resulted in a Russian response. No significant
Syrian site appears to have been targeted, and no Russians were
endangered. https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/04/in-depth-syria-stuns-world-thwarts-us-attack/
The US ambassador to Russia said that the US strikes were coordinated with Russia to avoid a great power confrontation. https://www.rt.com/news/424132-us-russia-syria-strikes/ Russia Insider concludes that the exercise was a face-saver for Trump https://russia-insider.com/en/out-whimper-trump-blinks-delivers-limited-strikes/ri23132
The main effect seems to be that Trump has further discredited
himself and the US by violating the UN Charter and international law and
committing an act of aggression, which is a war crime for which Nazi
civilian and military officials were executed. Russia’s President Putin
said that the wanton and illegal use of force by Washington has had “a
devastating impact on the whole system of international relations” and
called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. China also
condemned the illegal US attack. https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/04/china-says-us-led-attacks-against-syria-are-illegal-and-against-international-law/
How was the feared conflict between the US and Russia avoided? From
what I have been able to learn, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff would not
accept the risk of conflict with Russia. The reason is not that the
Joint Chiefs are more moral, more caring about the deaths and injuries
that would result, or less inclined to go to war based on lies. Their
objection was based on the lack of protection US Navy ships have from
the new Russian weapons systems. An attack that brought a Russian
response could sink the US flotilla and present the US with a
humiliating defeat that would discredit American military prowess.
Bolton’s position was that Putin is a pussy who, as in every previous
case, will do nothing. Bolton’s postion is that the Russians are so
scared of US military might that they will not respond to any US attack
on their forces and Syrian forces. The Russians, Bolton says, will do
what they always do. They will whine about the crime to the UN, and the
Western media will ignore them as always.
The US Secretary of War, Mattis, represented the Joint Chiefs
opinion. What, Mattis asked, if the Russians have had enough and do
what they are capable of and sink the US flotilla? Is Trump prepared to
accept a defeat engineered by his National Security Adviser? Is Trump
prepared for a possible wider conflict?
The Joint Chiefs would rather use the orchestrated “Syrian crisis” to
argue for more money, not to go to war that could be terminable of
their retirement plans. The Joint Chiefs can tell Congress: “We
couldn’t risk conflict with Russia over the use of chemical weapons in
Syria because we were outgunned. We need more money.” The older
American generation will rementer the fantasy “missile gap” of the
Nixon/Kennedy presidential campaign that was used to boost US defense
spending.
It would be a mistake for anyone to conclude that common sense has
prevailed and the conflict has been resolved. What has prevailed is the
Joint Chiefs’ fear of a defeat. The next crisis that Washington
orchestrates will be on terms less favorable to Russian arms.
Bolton, the neoconservatives and the Israeli interest that they
represent will go to work on Mattis and the dissenting generals. Leaks
will appear in the presstitute media that are designed to discredit
Mattis and to foment Trump’s distrust. The neoconservatives will
advance military men more in line with the neoonservatives’
aggressiveness to positions on the Joint Chiefs.
Syria is not about any chemical weapons use. Ahmet Uzumcu, director
general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,
reported that all chemical weapons had been removed from Syria. “Never
before has an entire arsenal of a category of weapons of mass
destruction been removed from a country experiencing a state of internal
armed conflict, and this has been accomplished within very demanding
and tight time frames.” https://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/06/24/last-of-syrias-chemical-weapons-removed.html
Syria is not about dictatorship or building democracy. It is not
about the alleged 70 victims of chemical weapons. It would take a
complete idiot to believe that Washington and its European vassals, who
have killed, maimed, orphaned, and displaced millions of Muslims in
seven countries over the last 17 years to be so upset over the deaths of
70 Muslims that they are willing to risk war with Russia.
Syria and Iran are an issue, because Syria and Iran supply the
Lebonese millita, Hezbollah, with money and weapons. This support from
Syria and Iran gives Hezbollah the capability of preventing Israel’s
occupation and annexation of southern Lebanaon, whose water resources
Israel covets.
Twice the vaunted Israel Army has been chased out of Lebanon by
Hezbollah. Israel’s military reputation cannot risk a third defeat by a
mere militia, so Israel is using its control over US foreign policy and
its rock solid alliance with the neoconservatives to use the US
military to destabilize Syria and Iran as the US did to Iraq and Libya.
Additionally, there is the crazed neoconservative ideology of US
world hegemony. The interests of Russia and China are in the way of US
hegemony. Therefore, these two countries are defined as “threats.”
Russia and China are not threats because they intend to attack the US,
which neither has shown any indication of doing. They are threats
because they are in opposition to US unilateralism which overrides their
sovereignty. In other words, to be clear, the US cannot tolerate any
country that has an independent foreign or economic policy.
That Russia and China have independent policies is the reason that they are “threats.”
It would be a mistake to conclude that diplomay has prevailed and
common sense has returned to Washington. Nothing could be further from
the truth. The issue is not resolved. War remains on the horizon.
Ten Days Before The End Of The World
Ten Days Before The End Of The World
Paul Craig Roberts
The criminally insane governments of the US, UK, and France are
sending a flotilla of missile ships, submarines, and an aircraft carrier
to attack Syria in the face of Russian warnings. What is the likely
outcome of this outrageous act of aggression based entirely on an
orchestrated and transparent lie, an act of reckless aggression that is
more irresponsible and more dangerous than anything done by the
demonized Nazi regime in Germany?
There are no protests from European governments. There are no
protesters in the streets of European and US cities. Congress has not
reminded Trump that he has been given no authority by Congress to launch
a military attack on a soverign country that is likely to ignite a war,
possibly World War 3. Everyone seems content with the prospect of the
end of the world. The moronic American presstitutes are egging it on.
Here are possible outcomes:
(1) The Russians, trapped in the deluded belief that facts and
evidence matter to the West and that common sense will prevail, accept
the attacks. This outcome is the most dangerous of all, because this
outcome will encourage more attacks until Russia is backed into a corner
and has no alternative to a direct nuclear attack on the US.
(2) Russia takes the initiative in the brewing conflict and escorts
the US missile ship, USS Donald Cook, out of attack range of Syria
before the attack flotilla arrives and declares a perimeter line beyond
which the Western flotilla becomes target for attack. This should force
a showdown between Trump’s warmonger government and the US Congress
that would challenge Trump’s ability to unilaterally commit the US to
war.
(3) Russia escorts the Donald Cook away from the scene and
simultaneously wipes out the military capabilities of Saudi Arabia and
Israel, removing Washington’s ground-based allies in its attack on
Syria, thus loading the odds in Russia’s favor, and making it clear that
Russia is going to pre-empt attack, not respond to one.
(4) Russia, in the deluded belief that it must prove itself in the
right, accepts the attack and its unpredictable damage before
responding. This outcome is almost as bad as the first, as this lets
the war start in contrast to options (2) and (3) which have some
possibility of preventing a US/Russian confrontation by forcing common
sense on the Americans.
(5) Senior German politicians inform Merkel that Britain and France’s
support of the US strike on Syria could commit NATO to a war with
Russia. Germany has had one devastating experience with the Russian
military and does not need another. They could pressure Merkel to
withdraw Germany from NATO. The resulting consternation/confusion would
likely halt the US attack on Syria/Russia.
(6) The US Joint Chiefs of Staff could easily and honestly conclude
that in the event of a Russian response to an attack on Syria, the
entire flotilla could be lost, carrier included, inflicting a
humiliating defeat on US arms, and that in view of this possbility, the
Joint Chiefs recommend against the announced attack. Possibly this has
occurred and explains Trump’s latest tweets, which suggest that doubts
might have entered Trump’s mind.
Even if a hopeful outcome such as (5) and (6) occurs, we are left
with the dangerous situation that some elements in the US and UK
governments were able to orchestrate two events—the alleged Skripal
poisoning and the alleged Assad chemical attack—and use the events to
leverage unsupported accusations against Russia and Syria as
justifications for an illegal military attack on a sovereign country.
That such an outrageous orchestration is possible proves that there is
no democracy or constraint on government in the US and UK.
Idiocy Is Bringing The End Of The World
Idiocy Is Bringing The End Of The World
Paul Craig Roberts
Here is Jason Ditz on the coming end of the world:
https://news.antiwar.com/2018/04/10/trump-builds-coalition-for-war-against-syrian-government/
Vladimir Soloviev explains the failure of Putin’s policy of appeasement:
https://russia-insider.com/en/breaking-defining-moment-putin-stand-usisrael-empire-chaos-or-fold/ri23052
If you were the president of France or the prime minister of the UK,
would you permit criminally insane Washington to drag you into military
conflict with Russia?
https://www.infowars.com/get-ready-russia-trump-takes-to-twitter-to-threaten-strike-on-syria/
I didn’t think so. I wouldn’t either. So what’s with Macron and
May? What’s with the French and British governments? What’s with the
French and British media? I read recently that former UK Labour prime
minister Tony Blair is now worth $100 million, his payoff for lying to
the UK government and people in order to support the George W. Bush
regime’s invasion of Iraq. Have Macron and May been promised the same?
It makes no sense for the UK and French governments to make
themselves targets of a military power against which they have no
possibility of defense. It makes no sense that their peoples and media
sit silently while one French president and one British prime minister
endanger not only France and the UK but the entirety of Europe. What’s
with the European Union? There is only silence as Europe, and the
world with it, are taken to the brink of annihiliation. This makes no
sense. https://www.globalresearch.ca/taking-the-world-to-the-brink-of-annihilation/5635456
People in Ghouta, doctors in Ghouta, and Russian experts who have
arrived on the scene report that there is no sign of any chemical
attack. Not only did Syria not use chemical weapons against the
civilians that it liberated, there was no chemical attack, not even a
false flag one staged by the US supported mercenaries who have been
driven out of Ghouta by the Syrian Army. In other words, the chemical
attack is entirely a hoax.
To keep the hoax from being confirmed by independent investigation,
Washington vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to send in neutral
experts to evaluate the claim of chemical attack. Why would Washington
prevent an investigation that would prove Washington’s allegation?
Clearly, Washington would only prevent an investigation that would
disprove the false allegation. There is no doubt whatsoever that
Washington’s allegation is false and is being used as an excuse to force
Russia to fight or to accept Washington’s hegemony in the Middle East.
What if there was a chemical attack? Why does it matter to people
who are killed whether it was by bullets, bombs, missiles, or chemicals?
Why is it so bad to use chemicals instead of Hellfire missiles? Why
is it OK for Washington and Israel to blow up schools, hospitals,
weddings, funerals, market places, and homes full of women and children
with missiles, but not OK to kill people with chemicals? Why is it
worth starting World War 3 over a hoax chemical weapons attack or a real
one?
Americans, for the most part a clueless people, have no awareness of
the risk that the criminally insane government in Washington is taking
with their lives. What if the Russians mean what they say and do not
again turn the other cheek and back down? What happens if Russia
replies to force with force?
Why is it that only a few Internet sites are asking this question?
