Ukraine (closed; covers till August 2014)

[jmm99]

The original on Youtube (60 sec. video).



This week's Russian version, from Reuters, Russia can turn US to radioactive ash - Kremlin-backed journalist (by Lydia Kelly, Mar 16, 2014):

[Video here]

MOSCOW, March 16 (Reuters) - A Kremlin-backed journalist issued a stark warning to the United States about Moscow's nuclear capabilities on Sunday as the White House threatened sanctions over Crimea's referendum on union with Russia.

"Russia is the only country in the world that is realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash," television presenter Dmitry Kiselyov said on his weekly current affairs show.

Behind him was a backdrop of a mushroom cloud following a nuclear blast.

Kiselyov was named by President Vladimir Putin in December as the head of a new state news agency whose task will be to portray Russia in the best possible light.

Yup, Mr Kiselyov certainly has a way with words and images - especially with Americans - to show Russia in its best possible light - how many lumens are there in a 50 megaton air burst ?

As Wm correctly points out:

Nuclear weapons have value only insofar as the will exists to use them and a delivery platform exists to get them where one wants/needs.

and that the sawed-off Corsican also had it right:

In battle, the moral is to the physical as three to one.

Mr Kiselyov and the two Chinese colonels have reminded us all that the future is as likely to be about unrestricted warfare as about anything else - which renders Article 2 of the UN Charter humorous at best and dangerous to non-aggressors at worst.

So, reaching back into history, a decade before 1964, we find the 1954 Jimmy Doolittle Report (bio, Wiki, report):

pp.16-17
The second consideration is less tangible but equally important. It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever coat.

There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered.

1. What do you think the EU-NATO community would say about Doolittle's statement ?

2. What do you think the USG would say about Doolittle's statement ?

3. What do you say about Doolittle's statement ?

Next, another (more recent) historical piece for your consideration, The Security and Defense Agenda (Future of NATO) (as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Brussels, Belgium, Friday, June 10, 2011); the whole speech is worth the short read, but here is the key point:

With respect to Europe, for the better part of six decades there has been relatively little doubt or debate in the United States about the value and necessity of the transatlantic alliance. The benefits of a Europe whole, prosperous and free after being twice devastated by wars requiring American intervention was self evident.

Thus, for most of the Cold War U.S. governments could justify defense investments and costly forward bases that made up roughly 50 percent of all NATO military spending. But some two decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. share of NATO defense spending has now risen to more than 75 percent – at a time when politically painful budget and benefit cuts are being considered at home.

The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress – and in the American body politic writ large – to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense. Nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.

Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders– those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.

What I’ve sketched out is the real possibility for a dim, if not dismal future for the transatlantic alliance.

1. Did this speech (and similar speeches by Bob Gates' successors, cited in the article linked by Mark Adams on Rasmussen) give the EU-NATO community fair warning of a drastic shift in US involvement ?

2. What has the EU-NATO community done in response to those US warnings ?

Finally, a read for this situation is John LeCarre's The Looking Glass War, a very sad book because it shows that agencies cannot live in the past and expect to survive - snip from a review of the book:

A profound anatomy of moral deterioration, March 23, 2007

... For my part, it is the one book of Le Carre's that remained with me and troubled me the longest ...
...
The plot itself is simple: a small, practically defunct British spy agency with a mandate for military targets that has been lagging on aimlessly since WWII, gets one more shot at mounting an intelligence operation. WWII was their best of times, the source of their pride and nostalgia: since then, stripped from financing, backwards on technology, they are no more than a bureaucratic specter.

But the gods of warfare reward their zealots, and out of the blue, the agency is offered to retrieve some crucial information about military installations beyond the iron wall (I'll be stingy with details so as not to spoil too much). Everybody wakes up. As they do not have even a single operational agent (nor a radio, weapons, vehicles etc.), they must recruit one, hastily train and employ him; but they need to constantly lie to him, else he might realize how reduced they have become.
...
So much is Leiser involved in his new life, that his common sense does not reveal to him the amateur nature of the preparations. The radio technology he is expected to use is outdated, cumbersome and easy to intercept; there is no clear plan of action, really, except for getting him in; certainly no one gives serious thought how to get him out. The readers suspect this since a totally mundane assignment that Avery embarked on earlier, which was botched for lack of preparation and professionalism, is praised by his superiors as a success; so utterly afraid of facing their own incompetence they have lost that all-important ability of learning from mistakes.

The Circus, their rival agency where Smiley works, of course realizes this. Firmly in the grasp of Control, with Smiley as his lieutenant and sometimes conscience, the Circus observes and keeps its distance .... However, neither Control nor Smiley will deny the specter team the rope that they require to hang their own agent when everything, of course -- goes wrong.

In the present context, the US is still the Circus; without the US, EU-NATO is something of a "specter team" - although it doesn't have to be that way.

Thinking stuff.

Regards

Mike