Following
the president of the Russian Federation’s decree on suspending Russia’s
compliance with agreements with the US on the disposal of weapons-grade
plutonium and the submission of the corresponding bill to the State
Duma, disputes have begun in the media on whether this is connected to
the rupture of the Syria deal. The second stumbling block is a question:
Why is Russia, having known that the US has not fulfilled its part of
the deal, only reacted now after a few years?
Some
nuclear experts argue that the deal was objectively beneficial for
Russia. Maybe. I’m not an expert in this sphere and it’s difficult for
me to say how objective they are. Moreover, that which is beneficial
from the standpoint of the nuclear industry might be disadvantageous
from the point of view of security.
In
principle, I think that there were no particular security problems.
Russia has a sufficient nuclear arsenal capable of inflicting a deadly
blow on the United States. Washington recognizes this as well. There was
also more than enough material for the production of new warheads. In
the event of full-scale nuclear strike exchanges, the production of
another batch of weapons would already be redundant and, indeed,
physically impossible. The real problem would be physically preserving
the remains of civilization at least at the level of the stone age.
As
for the Syria, this is not the first time, and not only in Syria, that
the US concludes agreements only to disrupt their fulfillment and then
conclude them again. The form of the Russian reaction is clearly not
comparable to Washington’s public rejection of cooperation which, in
fact, it has yet to do.
I
think that in order to understand the scale of this incident, it is
necessary to pay attention to the fact that Putin has not simply taken
Russia out of a contract. He has announced the possibility of returning
to it, but he has furnished certain conditions.
Let’s look at these conditions:
(1) the US must lift all sanctions against Russia;
(2) compensation should be paid not only for the losses from
American sanctions, but also for the losses incurred by Russian
counter-sanctions;
(3) the Magnitsky Act should be repealed;
(4) the US’ military presence in Eastern Europe should be sharply reduced; and
(5) the US should abandon its policy of confrontation with Moscow.
Only one word fits in determining the essence of Putin’s demands: “ultimatum.”
As
far as a I remember, the last time that Washington was given an
ultimatum was by the United Kingdom over the Trent vessel incident. And
that was in 1861 during the American Civil War. Even then, in extremely
difficult conditions, America agreed to partially meet British demands.
It
should be noted that the British demands in 1861 did not contain
anything humiliating for the US. The captain of a US Navy ship had
indeed broken international law, arrested people on a neutral (British)
ship, and thereby encroached upon the sovereignty of the UK, nearly
provoking a war. Then America disavowed the actions of its captain and
freed the prisoners, albeit refusing to apologize.
But Putin
is not demanding any apologies or the release of a few prisoners, but
for all of American policy to be changed, and still more for Russia to
be compensated for losses due to the US’ sanctions. This is an
unmeetable, humiliating demand. This demand essentially means complete
and unconditional surrender in the hybrid war which Washington does not
consider to be irreversibly lost. And there’s still all those
indemnities payments and reparations.
Something
similar was demanded from the US by the British Crown before the end of
the war for independence, when the Americans were still King George
III’s rebellious subjects. For the last 100 years no one has even
imagined talking with Washington in such a tone.
And
so, the first conclusion is: Putin has deliberately and demonstratively
humiliated the US. He has shown that it is possible to talk tough to
the US, even tougher than the US itself has gotten used to talking down
to the rest of the world.
How
was this done? What did Putin actually react to? Did he actually think
that the US would fulfill the Kerry-Lavrov deal and is now upset over
what happened? Russia also knew that Washington has not been observing
the plutonium deal for years, but Moscow has extracted serious profit
from this for its nuclear industry by nearly becoming a global monopoly
and is clearly not perturbed by the US’ technological backwardness
preventing them from disposing of weapons-grade plutonium as stipulated
in the agreement.
Russia’s tough and almost immediate reaction followed the statements of the US
Secretary of State’s spokesperson to the effect that Russia will have
to start sending its troops home from Syria in body bags, is going to
start losing planes, and that terrorist attacks will begin to plague
Russian cities.
In
addition, the State Department’s statement was immediately followed by
the Pentagon's announcement that it is ready to launch a preventative
nuclear strike on Russia. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also
reported that Moscow knows about the US’ intention to launch an air war
against Syrian government forces, which also means against the Russian
contingent legally stationed in Syria.
What else formed the background for Putin’s ultimatum?: The
exercises from six months ago involving air and missile defense and
strategic missile systems which practiced repelling a nuclear attack on
Russia and then launching a responsive counter strike. Add to this the
other day's emergency exercises involving up to 40 million Russian
citizens that inspected the readiness of infrastructure and civil
defense structures for a nuclear war and provided additional information
to citizens on the plan of action in the cause of “X hour.”
If
we take all of this together, then we can see that the US has long
since informally frightened Russia with a nuclear conflict, and Moscow
has regularly hinted that it is ready for such a turn of events and is
not going to back down.
However,
given the end of Obama’s rule and lacking absolute confidence in a
Hillary Clinton victory in presidential elections, the Washington hawks
have decided to raise their bets once again. And now things have reached
an extremely dangerous limit in which conflict begins to reach the
stage of developing independently. At this stage, nuclear Armageddon
could begin over any kind of incident, including due to the incompetence
of some senior Pentagon officials or White House administrators.
At
this precise moment, Moscow has seized the initiative and upped the
ante, but by moving the confrontation onto another plane. Unlike
America, Russia is not threatening war. It is simply demonstrating its
capability of giving a harsh political and economic response which can,
in the event of further inappropriate behavior by the US, realize just
the opposite of Obama’s dream: tearing apart Washington’s economy and
financial system.
In
addition, with these actions, Russia has seriously undermined the
international prestige of the US by showing the whole world that America
can be beaten with its own weapons. The boomerang has come back. Given
such dynamics and turn of events, we might see hundreds of
representatives of the American elite at the dock in the Hague not only
in our lifetime, but even before the next American president serves
their first four-year term in the White House.
The
US has been given a choice. Either it will carry through with its
threats and start a nuclear war, or it will accept the fact that the
world is no longer unipolar, and begin to integrate into the new format.
We don’t know what choice Washington will make. The
American political establishment has a sufficient number of
ideologically-blinded, incompetent figures who are ready to burn up in a
nuclear fire with the rest of a humanity rather than recognize the end
of US world hegemony, which has turned out to be short-lived, senseless,
and criminal. But they have to make a choice, because the
longer that Washington pretends that nothing has happened, the greater
the number of its vassals (who are called their allies, but have long
since been bogged down in dependency) will openly and explicitly ignore
American ambitions and cross over to the other side of the new
perspectives of global power arrangement.
In
the end, the US could be faced with the status of one of the centers of
the multipolar world no longer being available for it. Not only
Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans, but also Europeans will gladly
take revenge against the former hegemon for their former humiliation.
And they are not so humane and peace-loving as Russia.
Finally,
Putin’s ultimatum is a response to all of those who were outraged that
Russian tanks didn’t take Kiev, Lvov, Warsaw, and Paris in 2014 and
pondered over what Putin’s plan could possibly be.
I
can only repeat what I wrote back then. If you are going to confront
the global hegemon, then you have to be sure that you will be capable of
responding to any of its actions. The economy, army, society, and state
and administrative structures should all be ready. If everything is not
fully ready, then one needs to buy time and build muscle.
Now
things are ready and the cards have been put on the table. Let us see
what the US will respond with. But the geopolitical reality will never
be the same. The world has already changed. The US has had the gauntlet
publicly thrown down before it and they have not dared to pick it up
right away.
