On the Joseph Biden side of the 2020 capitalist election spectacle stood the military establishment, albeit quietly, including Trump’s Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Millay and Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, the latter fired by Trump a few days after the president’s Nov. 3 election defeat. Trump’s now muted, ever-diminishing pre-election coup threat to refuse a peaceful transition should he lose had no takers in the military, not to mention in his own cabinet. VP Mike Pence made sure to follow Trump’s post-election podium bluster that he had won with assurances that no such claim was credible until the “votes were counted.”

Both Millay and Esper had balked in June at Trump’s threat to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to quell Black Lives Matter and all other protests across the country. “Not at this time,” they repeatedly insisted, in contrast to the moron Trump’s threats and insistence that this was the time. While few among the ruling rich discounted Trump’s incessant threats, no section believed that a military solution to the mass anti-racist protests, that mobilized an unprecedented 16-26 million in the streets in 2000-plus cities and towns following the police murder of George Floyd, was necessary. They had other means in mind to corral the mass hatred of society’s systemic racism into safe channels. The Democratic Party, the “historic graveyard of social movements,” was and remains their first choice.

Trump had warned on June 1 in a White House Rose Garden speech, as federal law enforcement officers fired rubber bullets and noxious chemical gases at peaceful White House area protestors, that if the nation’s governors don’t call up National Guard troops to “dominate the streets, I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” To make his point, de minimus, the bragging demagogue sent a relative handful of plainclothes federal officials to Portland and Minneapolis to momentarily arrest and disappear small groups peaceful protestors only to be repudiated by local and state officials. Shortly after, both Millay and Esper, publicly repudiated having escorted Trump, bible in hand, from the White House to nearby St. Peter’s Church for a one-minute photo op aimed at displaying his military might. Trump literally posed himself as under the command of his military establishment, with a momentarily intimidated Millay – dressed up in combat fatigues – playing along as if Trump had actually invoked the 1807 Act.

Democrats had more generals than Trump

Biden’s VP running mate, the pro-corporate and tough on crime cop-in-chief, California Attorney General, Kamala Harris, bragged during her pre-election debate with VP Pence that her Democrats had more generals and national security officials on Biden’s side than Trump’s Republicans. The Democrats, ever publishing lists of military tops and defecting Republicans, made no bones about who they looked to for credibility.

The FBI and CIA, the new Cold War “Russiagate” establishment, similarly lent their weight to Biden as did the vast majority of the corporate media. Biden’s red-baiting Democrats and their FBI/CIA friends, nevertheless repeatedly proved incapable of proving that Russia had spent a dime supporting Trump, not to mention Putin’s government stealing or tampering with U.S. ballot boxes.

Less than a week after the election Trump signaled his intention to boot the FBI and CIA directors while he replaced defecting or equivocating NSA and Pentagon officials with more reliable toadies. The nation’s billionaire class weighed in on Biden’s side according to Forbes Magazine, with 131 of the super rich contributing generously to Biden and a paltry 93 to Trump. The 2020 election contest included a record spending of $13.3 billion, nearly double the amount spent in 2016, with Biden outspending Trump in the last months by a factor of two to one.

Republican stalwarts support Biden

Well known Republican establishment figures like former President George W. Bush, warmonger-in-chief for his two terms of service for the ruling rich, joined the Biden team. Bush’s presidential credentials included his ownership of the Texas Rangers baseball team plus a few posts that he assumed by virtue of his lineage to his multi-billionaire Cold War father, President George H. W. Bush, whose bonafides included being the CIA’s director-in-chief. Biden’s team included former body builder and film star Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was promoted to the California governorship by the then world’s richest corporation, General Electric, and via his personal ties to the Kennedy clan.

Biden’s coalition included all wings of the Democratic Party including the “progressives” like Bernie Sanders and the AOC Squad, all of whom joined in 2018 and 2020 to support every single Democrat running for election, including the most overtly reactionary.

Biden’s racist record

Biden’s history as the Democrat’s longterm designee to align Southern racist segregationists with the North’s “liberal” Democrats was highlighted when he was called upon to eulogize “my friend” the infamous Southern racist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1994 and more recently.

Thurmond’s mid-century Dixiecrat platform, when he was vying for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, included the following gem: “We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program.” Indeed, Biden was chosen for the VP slot when he was Obama’s running mate due to his established skills in aligning to the Democratic Party the same Southern racist bigots, today disguised with labels like “conservative” or “centrist” or “Blue Dog” Democrats.

The latter term alludes to a dog being left out in the cold – the Democratic Party mainstream – so long that it turns blue. This wing of the Democrats, today representing some 26 members of congress, includes ever defecting or threatening to defect to the Republicans, politicians who the mainstream Democrats need hold on to their narrow House majority.

Movement 4 Black Lives presses for Biden

The Biden campaign witnessed the Democrat’s ongoing capacity to capture promising social struggles, as was the case with the Black Lives Matter movement and its associated Movement 4 Black Lives (M4BL). The latter’s self-appointed and largely corporate Democratic Party-funded “leaders” sheepherded unwary Black anti-racist activists and their supporters among white youth into Biden’s reactionary camp, lock, stock and barrel. From the online M4BL-sponsored Black National Convention to the Al Sharpton-initiated March on Washington to literally every elected Black Democrat in the country, the promising mass mobilizations against ongoing police brutality and murder and against U.S. systemic racism were turned to the Biden campaign. The precondition for membership was to obliterate Biden’s past racist record and to re-cast his image as a virtual crusader for Black equality. Malcolm X said it well in describing the Black Democrats of his time as “cigars,” that is, “fire on one end and fool on the other.” Today’s Black Democratic Party officials – Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford calls them “the Black mis-leadership class” – are far from fools but rather the conscious agents of capitalism who have taken on the assignment of herding the oppressed into the master’s corrupt vote-hustling machine… for a price, of course – perhaps an corporate grant or a future petty post in the machine. Tragically, the same holds for the mis-leadership of the large Latinx community and the hardened bureaucracy of today’s ever-declining trade union movement. They, and thousands of corporate-funded NGOs played the sheepherding role to the hilt and will be expected to continue to do so. Richard Trumka’s toothless AFL-CIO, for but a few vague promises to throw a future bone to his tail-wagging whimpering bureaucrats, can be expected to do the same. In the absence of anything resembling an independent working class break from capitalist politics – a fighting labor party in alliance with all the exploited and oppressed – the trade union vote split 60-40 between Biden and Trump.

Biden’s racist, imperialist record disappeared

Disappeared from these sheepherding politicians’ and bureaucrats’ discourse was Biden’s key role in crafting the overtly racist crime bills, virtually authored by police “unions,” that sent millions – majority Black, Latinx and Native Americans – to the nation’s increasingly privatized-for-profit prison-industrial-complex to work at Fortune 500 corporations at slave wages. Biden was compelled to offer up a few words of apology for this “mistake” as he did for his support for the Iraq War, an imperialist mass slaughter that murdered 1.5 million Iraqis, justified by lies of Iraq possessing “weapons of mass destruction.” Biden’s admitted “mistakes” were taken for good coin by so-called progressives, because they had once again found a “greater evil” to oppose.

Disappeared from the “progressives’” rhetoric were the Obama administration’s multi-trillion dollar corporate bailouts via quantitative easing (printing money) and gifting it to the corporate elite at near zero interest rates. Disappeared were the Obama-Biden bloated military budgets and their seven simultaneous imperialist wars for profit and plunder against poor and oppressed nations. Wedded to the marrow to solve capitalism’s ever-deepening crises at the expense of working people, the Obama-Biden administration came to office with majorities in both houses of congress and proved incapable of advancing the interests of the vast majority. Obama-Biden became the world’s leading immigrant deporters, frackers, offshore drillers, secret surveillance orchestrators, and warmongers. Elected by their ruling class superiors, they oversaw the de-industrialization of large portions of the country, wherein ever-declining U.S. profit rates were to be countered by hiring Chinese or Vietnamese or Mexican workers to operate U.S.-owned plants at a fraction of the labor rates in the U.S. Those plants that remained in the U.S. or were constructed during the Obama-Biden reign were subjected to the ongoing replacement of workers with robots and/or with speed up and cuts in wages, benefits and pensions. In truth, Obama-Biden laid the basis for what Trump-Pence continued. Trump’s reactionary nationalist appeals were aimed at workers whose jobs were eliminated by Obama-Biden and their predecessors. Trump’s promises notwithstanding, few if any jobs were brought back to the U.S.

“Progressive Democrats” an oxymoron

Capitalist elections are orchestrated at every level – zero exceptions – by the U.S. ruling class, that is, the tiny multi-$billionaire, cum $trillionaire class that owns and controls society’s key economic, financial and political institutions. Workers are periodically allowed to cast their votes for one of the two twin partiers of this ruling class. The election game is rigged at every turning point from near zero access of working class parties to the ballot or to the corporate media, not to mention to the multiple $billions required for serious participation. The sheer notion that the capitalist Democratic Party has a “progressive” wing is utter nonsense. “Progressive Democrat” is an oxymoron. Bernie Sanders and the likes of the AOC Squad are allowed to participate only because they lend credibility to the charade. They joined the Biden team because to do otherwise would end their spurious claims that the diseased capitalist system can be reformed to meet the needs of the vast majority. They are band aids on a capitalist system that cannot do otherwise but deepen its degeneracy in extracting yet another pound of flesh for profit regardless of the consequences in human lives.

Ideology of the ruling class

In capitalist society the dominant or all pervasive ideology is the ideology of the ruling class, the class whose representatives, fundamental structures, institutions and corporate media control the dissemination of ideas. It is only when mass forces in struggle emerge among capitalism’s victims – led by conscious fighters with a clear counter vision to capitalism’s endless justification for it’s continued minority rule, that the Truman Show-Potemkin Village fantasy world is challenged at its core. That time is rapidly approaching as capitalism’s ever-intensifying inherent crises compel countless millions to challenge its very right to exist.

Within days of Biden’s victory, he and his associates have already sounded a major retreat from the pathetic and empty few promises they were able to muster. Today we hear Biden speaking of a renewed bi-partisanship, of an America where everyone’s needs are met, where compromises with the Republicans are the order of the day.

Emerging class polarization

The 2020 elections revealed a growing polarization in U.S. society registered in the votes alone. Both capitalist candidates received the highest popular vote totals ever – Biden with some 79 million votes, including some 87 percent of the Black population, and Trump with 73 million voters, including a majority of white voters. That the majority of white voters again cast their vote for Trump and the Republicans was no surprise, although a number of these had previously been Obama voters or voted for Trump because they believed, falsely, that he would return lost top wage jobs to de-industrialized regions, as opposed to their present employment at near poverty wages brought on by the Democrats. The record keepers tout the fact that 65 percent of the eligible electorate participated, up from the 55 percent in 2016. The 35 percent who did not vote, however, were deemed by pollsters to be people who were disillusioned with the system itself and/or people who believed, (correctly) that their vote made no difference. Another 10-12 million were banned from the rigged process entirely because they were immigrants without papers. Millions more were disenfranchised by court rulings because they were ex-felons. Additional millions were victims of a broad range of voter suppression measures aimed at students and the communities of the oppressed more generally. No doubt, significant layers of the white population, including workers and small business people, have been influenced by Trump’s racist and anti-immigrant scapegoating, believing that the most oppressed, rather than the exploiting ruling class elite, were responsible for their ever-declining standard of living and decreasing economic security. Many others, however, voted for the Republicans because they saw the Democrats as catering to the giant corporations that sent their jobs overseas. A tiny few, relegated to small clusters of neo-fascist-like thugs and related hate group provocateurs, no doubt took sustenance from Trump’s racist vitriol and cop disposition to ignore their violent attacks on peaceful protestors.

Broad left capitulation to lesser evilism

Tragically, the 2020 elections witnessed the near collapse of the “socialist” left, with one after another party or group, crossing the class line to join Biden’s “lesser evil” camp and especially after their touted “democratic socialist” standard bearer, Bernie Sanders, another capitalist candidate with a carefully crafted Don Quixote image, was unceremoniously eviscerated in the course of the Democratic Party primaries. Sanders, thrown under the billionaire-financed oncoming Biden bus denouncing “socialism” and all of Sanders’ modest proposed reforms of an un-reformable capitalist monstrosity, stayed the course, as he had promised, to the end, perhaps with a future seat at Biden’s cabinet table, pending his agreement to maintain the fiction of the viability of “bore from within” the monster and proceed as usual to champion the “lesser evil.”

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It was a routine speech for Esper, short and content free with no thought whatsoever in it, let alone any original one, and therefore entirely typical of his storied career. No major American or Western European wire service or other major mainstream news bothered carrying a word of it. Even for them, it was intellectually content free, vacuous.

Yet Esper’s speech was also enormously important and revealing – and as light into the mind and soul of the chief civilian executive of the armed forces of the United States, alarming. For in referring to the historic global victories of 1945, he did not mention the contributions of the Soviet Union, or Britain, France, Canada, Australia, Yugoslavia or China once.

“Throughout the war,” Esper said, “millions of our countrymen answered the Nation’s call with great courage and selflessness. Americans of all faiths, races, and ethnicities; from all walks of life and vocation, rich to poor; and from all corners of the country, from cities to suburbs to farms – they left behind their loved ones, men and women alike, to sail across oceans and join allies in a desperate fight for liberty.”

Esper’s entire short speech left the impression, which I have no doubt that he – like the true Graduate of West Point U.S. Army officers elite military training college that he is – genuinely believes: That the United States went to war on December 8, 1941 gallantly to Save the World – which it then did Single Handed

Esper in fact did dwell on the shock and treacherous Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. My late father in law, Dmitri, a patriotic Russian-American was serving in the U.S. Army at Pearl at the time and was lucky to survive it. He and his three brothers all went on to serve bravely and with distinction on combat fronts from New Guinea through India/Burma to the European Theater of Operations,

But what Esper never mentions, not once, is that by the time of Pearl Harbor, the Soviet Union and China had already lost multiple millions of dead each from the unprovoked aggressions of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Total Soviet dead was listed for many years at 27 million. It is now recognized as being at least 40 million. Outstanding research by both Russian and U.S. Holocaust scholars has uncovered that after the machinery of Nazi genocide had slaughtered six million innocent Jews plus hundreds of thousands of gypsies and many others, they then killed at least three times as many Russians (around 20 million) in 200 smaller extermination camps across the Nazi-Occupied East. China’s World War II deaths are estimated from 15 million to 20 million. They could even have been far higher.

Before Pearl Harbor, the Soviet peoples had won the astonished admiration of the world for the way they kept fighting and had rallied around Moscow and Leningrad to halt the previously invincible Nazi blitzkriegs before Pearl Harbor . They had already inflicted more than a million casualties on the Wehrmacht before the United States even entered the war. But Esper didn’t see it necessary to pay any tribute whatsoever to either of those nations and their remarkable efforts and achievements.

Far, far worse immediately followed: Only two days after his insulting and boorish end of World War II speech, as Cynthia Chung has recorded in these columns, Esper approved an unprecedented deployment of strategic weapons targeted at Russia, sending U.S. Air Force B-52H bombers flying from their United Kingdom bases to Ukrainian airspace, where they then tauntingly patrolled for an extended period right at the edge of the Ukraine-Russian border. A more provocative or dangerous deployment of nuclear delivery systems could not be imagined.

The recklessness and indeed sheer stupidity of this exercise was compounded by the fact that Esper had to have known that the official Russian armed forces newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (“Red Star”) had warned in August that any ballistic missile launched at its territory would be perceived as a nuclear attack that would warrant a nuclear response, as Cynthia Chung noted.

It would be easy to write off Esper as an ignorant boor because he is: But the key point to grasp is that he shouldn’t be. Although from a modest background, he has been fast-tracked for privilege and leadership in the U.S. military establishment since he was a teenager. He is a graduate of West Point, from the same class as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whom he naturally defers to as his leader.

Esper received a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the U.S. Military Academy in 1986. He was a dean’s list student at West Point and was awarded the Douglas MacArthur Award for Leadership. He also was awarded a master’s degree in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1995 and a doctorate in public policy from George Washington University in Washington, DC in 2008.

Therefore it should come as no surprise that he is entirely lacking in any knowledge of history, strategy, diplomacy, public decency or common sense.

Esper also had the kind of gung-ho military career shooting up helpless developing countries as if it was difficult or heroic so typical of witless empires at the height of their hubris.

He was an infantry officer with the 101st Airborne Division in the 1991 Gulf War. His public career includes having been chief of staff at the conservative Heritage Foundation from 1996 to 1998 and also policy director for the House Armed Services Committee.

Esper’s astonishing ignorance, stupidity and recklessness, unfortunately, is only too typical of the ignorance, arrogance and rank incompetence of 21st century America: But once – a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away – it used to be very different.

In the spring of 1945, in a letter to a friend, Ernie Pyle, most beloved and cherished of all U.S. war correspondents – indeed, the Ilya Ehrenburg of the U.S. Army – famously recorded the real reasons why the United States had emerged victorious in World War II.

“We won this war because our men are brave and because of many things — because of Russia, England and China and the passage of time and the gift of nature’s material,” Pyle wrote. “We did not win it because destiny created us better than all other peoples.”

Pyle was no fast-tracked favorite of privilege and government like Esper. He was the son of dirt poor tenant farmers in the U.S. state of Indiana. He worked his way through college and had a lifelong solid career in journalism becoming while still in his 30s editor of a nationally respected Washington, DC, newspaper and then a famous travelling correspondent for the Scripps-Howard News Service before becoming the outstanding U.S. combat reporter of World War II.

Pyle was only 44 when he was killed by a burst of Japanese machinegun fire on Ie Shima. Yet , amazingly, he looked old enough to be the father of the 56-year-old Esper when their photographs are laid side by side.

That irony is not coincidental.

Pyle in his 44 years saw much more of the grim suffering of life than Esper has and he took it in. Pyle was the product of a very different America than the one which has produced Esper over the past half century. Pyle dined with generals and admirals and they felt privileged to dine with him. But he never lost his sense of brotherhood and even love for the ordinary “frontoviks”, the GI grunts whom he celebrated in his columns, Pyle never glorified or trivialized war: And he certainly never called for new ones to be launched. He had seen far, far too much of war.

It is horrifying to set the words of Ernie Pyle alongside those of Mark Esper and to understand how far we have come – and it has been downhill all the way.

The Black Sea mission took place shortly after a US-British naval task force conducted “maritime security operations” for five days in the Barents Sea. They were supported by two electronic warfare aircraft, a Navy P-8A Poseidon and an Air Force RC-135. US Naval Forces Europe announced that the warships held the manoeuvres “to assert freedom of navigation and demonstrate seamless integration among allies.” The commander of the US 6th Fleet stated that “In these challenging times, it is more important than ever that we maintain our steady drumbeat of operations across the European theatre.”

Russia’s Northern Fleet has its headquarters on the Barents Sea, which lies within the Arctic Circle, and it is hardly coincidental that “Russia has the world’s longest Arctic coastline and gets roughly one-quarter of its GDP from activity in the region.” There has never been an incident in which freedom of navigation has been threatened by Russia, and it is in Russia’s best interests – indeed, the world’s best interests – that the region remains tranquil.

Then it was noted that on June 3 four US Air Force B-52 nuclear bombers conducted a mission in which “They flew over the Arctic Ocean and the Laptev Sea, off the northern coast of Siberia.” The commander of US Air Forces in Europe, General Harrigian, declared that the Arctic “is a strategic region with growing geopolitical and global importance, and these Bomber Task Force missions demonstrate our commitment to our partners and allies and our capability to deter, assure, and defend together in an increasingly complex environment. The integration of our bombers across Europe and the Arctic is key to enhancing regional security.”

From 7-16 June the US-Nato military alliance deployed 29 warships and 29 strike, support and electronic warfare aircraft in BALTOPS 2020, the Baltic Operations manoeuvres which have the mission to “demonstrate international resolve to ensure stability in, and if necessary defend, the Baltic Sea region.” There have been no incidents of any sort in the Baltic and the only threat to stability is the increasing number of US-Nato military exercises and operations that are so provocatively conducted in the region.

The picture is emerging of an ever-increasing pace of menacing deployments around Russia’s borders by combat aircraft and ships of the Pentagon which is intent on expanding its global military presence.

On 1 June, during the widespread protest demonstrations in the US, the head of the Pentagon, Mark Esper, declared that the US military was “in full support” of law enforcement authorities and in a telephone link with President Trump and State governors was emphatic that “the sooner that you mass and dominate the Battle Space, the quicker this dissipates and we can get back to the right normal.” The ‘Battle Space’ in Pentagon-speak means the area in which military forces engage in operations against the enemy, and Mr Esper was referring to areas in which citizens of the United States were protesting against their government’s policies.

While Trump was speaking with the governors he told them that General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the country’s senior military figure, was “in charge” of operations against protestors, and emphasised that the governors “have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run all over you, you’ll look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate…”

In his address to the nation from the Rose Garden at the White House on the same day, Trump said he was “dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel, and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting,” and just as the Pentagon is being ordered by President Trump to “dominate” the people of America, so it is deploying combat forces round the world to try to dominate the skies and waters around Russia and China.

While the Pentagon was deploying warships and combat aircraft in the Battle Spaces of the Arctic and the Baltic and Black Seas it hadn’t forgotten its confrontation policy regarding China. The guided missile destroyer USS Mustin was sent to the South China Sea on 28 May, following an overflight of the area two days previously by another two B-1B Lancer bombers in a mission that Pacific Air Forces Command announced was intended “to demonstrate the Air Force’s ability to operate anywhere international law allows, at the time and tempo of our choosing.”

The US Navy’s announcement concerning the USS Mustin’s operations is that its policy in the region “is no different than that of any other area around the world where the international law of the sea as reflected in the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention provides for certain rights and freedoms and other lawful uses of the sea to all nations. The international community has an enduring role in preserving the freedom of the seas, which is critical to global security, stability, and prosperity.”

Quite so. But there has never been any interference by China in the passage of any foreign merchant vessel through the South China Sea, and nor will there ever be, because it is a vital economic sea lane for China’s trade.

The claims of littoral states concerning sovereignty over island chains in the China Sea have nothing whatever to do with the United States, and the most absurd feature of Washington’s belligerent stance is continual reference to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – simply because the United States refuses to ratify the Convention. It is not a party to the international agreement on the Law of the Sea, yet uses it to attempt to justify extension of Battle Space by carrying out provocative overflights and naval confrontations. Then, to cap it all, on 1 June Washington sent a letter to the UN Secretary General “Protesting China’s Unlawful Maritime Claims”, and stating that the U.S. rejects them because they are “inconsistent with international law as reflected in the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention.”

Concurrently on 1 June President Trump declared to American citizens that he is “your president of law and order,” while the New York Times carried the headline that “Twin Crises and Surging Anger Convulse U.S.”. There is frantic confusion in Washington, where the federal government has demonstrated incompetence in dealing with both the pandemic and the civil unrest which is at a level not seen for thirty years. In spite of the violent chaos enveloping the nation and the ongoing medical emergency the Pentagon continues to be intent on surging further in confrontation with China and Russia. The Battle Space is expanding and the likelihood of conflict is increasing. It is difficult to believe that this is what is wanted by the American people who desire only to live in tranquillity – which they will never experience in a Battle Space.

A successor to the Trump administration will have to rebuild the credibility of the Department of Justice and the effectiveness of such regulatory agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Finance Protection Agency.  It will have to rebuild the intelligence community, which has been heavily politicized, and the Department of State, which has been hallowed out.  Now, you can add the field of arms control and disarmament to the list of reclamation projects because of the hostile and counterproductive acts of the Trump administration.

Every U.S. president since Dwight David Eisenhower has understood the importance of arms control and disarmament, which serves to highlight the ignorance and inexperience of Donald Trump and his key advisers regarding disarmament issues.  Over the past two years, the Trump administration has scuttled the Iran nuclear accord, which brought a measure of predictability to the volatile Middle East, and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which destroyed more missiles that any treaty in history.  Now, the Trump administration has walked away from the Open Skies Treaty, which was particularly important to the Baltic states and the East Europeans for monitoring Russian troop movements on their borders.

The treaty itself was first suggested by President Eisenhower in the 1950s as a way to improve the strategic dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union.  It was ultimately negotiated by President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The Trump administration’s claim that the treaty permits surveys of civilian targets in the United States that pose “an unacceptable risk to our national security” is particularly ludicrous.  Information on U.S. infrastructure is publicly available to anyone from Google Earth as well as commercial imagery.

The U.S. withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty is particularly important as it constitutes another gratuitous setback to the transatlantic security dialogue and as a signal that the United States has no interest in any disarmament dialogue with Russia, including the need for extending the New Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (New START), the last remaining arms control agreement with Russia.  The New START limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 deployed nuclear missiles each, but the Obama administration had to bow to Republicans to accept a $1.7 trillion nuclear modernization program in order to support the treaty.  And such neoconservatives as Senators Ted Cruz (R/TX) and Tom Cotton (R/AK) are supportive of the Trump administration’s commitment to long-term nuclear modernization that has no place for arms control measures.

For the past several years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has tried to engage the United States in an arms control dialogue to include a pledge to no-first-use of nuclear weapons; no militarization of outer space; and the creation of nuclear-free zones.  The Trump administration has turned its back on all of the Russian initiatives, and the recent creation of a Space Force is one more deterrent to a conciliatory dialogue.  Such a dialogue was the central key to improving relations between Washington and Moscow during the worst days of the Cold War.

Meanwhile, opeds in the New York Times and the Washington Post have defended the Trump administration’s latest salvo against arms control and disarmament, and even suggested that withdrawal from the Open Skies agreement is a “hopeful” sign for Russian-American relations.  Writing in the Post on May 22, David Ignatius, who typically supports administration positions on defense policy, argues that Trump himself favors “more engagement” with Moscow and that the withdrawal from the international treaty is in fact a “tactical tilt toward Russia.”  Ignatius bases that view on the expectation that Trump really wants to draw the Chinese into the disarmament dialogue and, furthermore, that Russia shares that goal.  It is far more likely, in my estimation, that Beijing currently has no interest in being drawn into a three-way dialogue on arms control and that U.S. emphasis on including China in any new strategic arms treaty is in fact a “poison pill” to kill the current strategic arms agreement that expires this winter.

The Times oped, moreover, would have you believe that so-called Russian abuses of the Open Skies accord are actually undermining American security.  Tim Morrison, a Russian hard-liner who formerly served on Trump’s National Security Council, argues that Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and its “invasion” of Syria justify scuttling an agreement that didn’t provide advance warning of such “military adventures.”  He fails to mention that satellites designed to provide such intelligence are not affected by the Open Skies Treaty.  Morrison fails to mention that the real value of the treaty was providing assurance to our European NATO allies regarding Russian troop movements on their borders.  (Morrison also should have mentioned that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad invited the Soviet deployment, which hardly counts as an “invasion.”

President John F. Kennedy ignored the Pentagon’s opposition to the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, and even President Ronald Reagan ignored the opposition of Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle to complete the INF Treaty in 1987.  There are no genuine arms control specialists in the Trump administration, which is staffed by loyalists and anti-Russian hardliners such as Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and the newly appointed arms negotiator Marshall Billingslea.  Once upon a time, the United States had an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency that served as a lobby for disarmament, but President Bill Clinton bowed to right-wing pressure in 1997 and killed the independence of the agency by folding it into the Department of State.  Thus, the rebuilding task for U.S. national security policy will be difficult and time-consuming.

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The Pentagon “failed to adequately respond” to the COVID-19 pandemic, charged ten Democratic lawmakers in a letter sent to the Pentagon Monday. The lawmakers say “lack of clear guidance” from Defense Secretary Mark Esper has put service members at risk because there has not been a clear coronavirus policy across the Defense Department.

The Trump administration decided in April to send the largest U.S. fleet ever to the Southern hemisphere to interdict “corrupt actors” in the Carribean, which led to the destroyer USS Kidd turning back for San Diego after reporting 47 cases of COVID-19. Last week, Fort Rucker had 100 percent of its nearly 2,000 soldiers wait nearly 10 hours for a drug test. As soldiers waited until nearly 2 a.m. for the test,they began to bring out couches and order pizza, in clear violation of social distancing. Post officials justified their decision to conduct a 100 percent urinalysis because they also had a test  “back in January” i.e. before COVID-19 hit U.S. shores. As it stands, the Army may have held the largest gathering in America during the pandemic.

There are plenty of examples like these to fuel the accusation that Esper’s response to the pandemic placed political considerations ahead of service members health. The Senators’ letter specifically focuses on other cases.

The Senators write that Esper placed politics above the health of the military forces and their families when he urged overseas commanders to not “make any decisions… that might surprise the White House or run afoul of President Trump’s messaging on the growing health challenge.”

There was no force-wide protocol because Esper delegated decision-making on how to address the pandemic to individual commanders of units, installations and vessels, which led to confusing and contradictory responses. While U.S. Forces in Korea acted quickly to contain the spread of the virus,  Navy commanders allowed the carrier Theodore Roosevelt to visit Vietnam, which resulted in more than 840 cases of COVID-19 on the vessel.

“Although local commanders know their units and operating environments better than anyone in the Pentagon, they are not public health experts,” the senators wrote. “They are now left to make decisions they should never have to make.”

Lawmakers also charge that Esper seems profoundly misled about COVID-19; he said as late as April 16 on NBC’s Today show that the spread on the Roosevelt of the novel coronavirus revealed a “new dynamic” showing the virus could be spread by asymptomatic carriers.

But by mid-March how coronavirus was contracted was already “extremely obvious,” the Senators write.

Signatories of the letter, including Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Patty Murray, D-Wash., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., also complain that Esper would not disclose military locations where COVID-19 cases are clustered. The Pentagon argues this information would compromise force security.

The senators’ letter “does not even remotely accurately reflect our record of action against the coronavirus and the great lengths we have gone to to protect our people,” Jonathan Hoffman, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, wrote in a response to Military.com. The senators “cherry-picked false and repeatedly debunked assertions that do not reflect reality.”

“Secretary Esper has made a clear, unambiguous decision to provide constant guidance to senior civilian and military leaders on how to confront the crisis,” Hoffman wrote.

The Pentagon issued basic force protection guidelines on January 30 and continued to update the guidance nine times. He also pointed out that the Pentagon has deployed 60,000 personnel to respond to COVID-19, including 4,000 health care professionals, two hospital ships, 14 Army medical task forces and two Navy expeditionary medical facility detachments. The Pentagon also provided 20 million N95 masks to the states.

Esper has until May 11 to respond to the lawmakers’ series of questions.

theamericanconservative.com

Alan MacLEOD

During a discussion at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies yesterday, United States Secretary of Defense Mark Esper claimed that North Korea and Iran ­– two countries that have drawn the ire of Washington in recent weeks – were “rogue states” that require our “constant vigilance.” The Oxford English Dictionary describes a rogue state as “a nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.” Yet historian Mark Curtis argues that if Esper wanted to find a country that routinely flouted international conventions and threatened the world, he could look much closer to home, to one of the U.S.’ key allies. In a new exposé published today, Curtis revealed 17 separate and ongoing British government policies that did so, leading him to label his own nation as a rogue state.

Many of the most blatant violations of international law stem from British actions in the Middle East. For example, the U.K. military has been operating a fleet of Reaper drones since 2007, assisting American missions. From four English bases, the Royal Air Force (R.A.F.) has remotely bombed Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. Amnesty International, Curtis notes, described British actions as “absolutely crucial” to the American drone campaign providing surveillance, intelligence and logistical support. Last week MintPress reported on the new video game tool the U.S.A.F. is using to recruit new drone pilots.

The U.K. is a key enabler of Saudi crimes in Yemen. The U.N. claims that Yemen has “all but ceased to exist” as a state and estimates 24 million Yemenis are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance as the country is racked by famine, disease and war. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Saudi Arabia is by far Britain’s most important arms customer, responsible for 49 percent of total weapons purchases, buoying the booming industry. In addition, the R.A.F. repairs and maintains Saudi warplanes involved in the destruction while storing and issuing bombs used against the Houthis. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had promised to end all arms sales to Saudi Arabia if elected. The U.K.’s own House of Lords ruled that the government was breaking the law by continuing to send arms to the region. But the Conservative December landslide ensured the policy remained intact, sending weapons manufacturers’ stocks soaring. British covert operations in the Syrian Civil War, Curtis argues, also violate numerous laws and put civilians at risk.

While illegally spying on its own citizens, collecting massive amounts of data on them, the British government has also arbitrarily detained and tortured those that risked their lives and liberties to expose the practice. Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, for example, remains incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison in London, only being moved out of solitary confinement after coordinated protests from the other high-security inmates. Nils Meltzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture, has demanded the government immediately release the Australian, blasting the government’s “indifference” to his abuse.

(1/6) Just out: My letter to the #UK Govt of 29 Oct 2019, detailing serious due process violations, expressing alarm at #Assange’s detention conditions & health, reiterating my queries & calling for his prompt release. Direct link: https://t.co/mqDEFuYowZ (60 days & no response) pic.twitter.com/bCG2nzmRAn

— Nils Melzer (@NilsMelzer) December 31, 2019

While Britain, according to Curtis, qualifies for the term “rogue state,” Americans should perhaps not be so quick to judge, as former State Department official William Blum’s book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, catalogs how the U.S. government has attempted to overthrow over fifty foreign governments since 1945, concluding that the U.S. is the number one threat to the world.

Curtis has been a consistent critic of British government policy for many years, exposing Britain’s collusion with radical Islamic groups to overthrow secular Middle Eastern states. In his book Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, he calculated that the U.K. was complicit in the deaths of around ten million people since 1945. Despite this, it is unlikely that the U.S. will be pronouncing its ally a rogue state any time soon, as the term seems to be reserved only for enemies of the empire.

mintpressnews.com

The immediate termination of Chewning and Sweeney, at the same time as the assassination of Soleimani and Iran’s response raises some big questions. In the near future it will be of critical importance to get to the bottom of any possible relationship that Esper and his subordinates Chewning and Sweeney – who both served as Defense Secretary Esper’s Chiefs of Staff – had to the assassination of Soleimani. The assassination and any number of possible Iranian responses, can push the U.S into a broad and open military conflict with Iran. Such a war would also be Trump’s undoing.

We might otherwise be led to believe that Chewning and Sweeney’s sudden departure has something to do with Ukraine and the recent release of unredacted emails relating to L3Harris Technologies and funding in Ukraine. These of course also relate to the case against Trump and any possible impeachment. But the timing and symbolism of these as concurrent with the provocation against Iran and the blowback, as well as Esper’s backing of the ‘Kerfuffle theory’, lends strong credence to an Iran connection.

The connection to impeachment cannot be denied, but the necessity of uncovering its potential relation to Iran is tremendously important because it directly relates to larger constitutional and practical questions of the president’s ability to have a Department of Defense that works either for or against U.S strategy as formulated and executed by its democratically elected leadership, as opposed to its permanent bureaucratic administration. This is what Trump and his supporters quite rightfully refer to as the ‘Deep State’.

Were elements in the defense department working towards a heightened brinksmanship that the president did not really want? It would be far from the first time in history that such was the case.

Because the proverbial excrement rolls down-hill, was Esper involved in ordering Soleimani’s assassination which Trump was not informed of until it was too late, or until after? Chewning and Sweeney’s fate may be understood here. The ‘kerfuffle’ which was the withdrawal statement would then be a simple ruse to distract from the actual reasons that Chewning and Sweeney were terminated – acting without orders, insubordination, and even treason.

Trump’s Balancing Policy on Iran and America’s leadership crisis

One undeniable point is that a war with Iran works entirely against Trump’s middle-east policy and his prospects for re-election.

What the Trump administration seeks most now is a de-escalation with Iran. Given that Trump has fueled a rumor mill including the possible ending of sanctions if Iran doesn’t respond, or that there will be no further attacks if Iran’s response is ‘reasonable’, all exists in the unspoken framework that Trump inherently recognizes the ‘guilt’ of the U.S in its irrational act, while it is nevertheless politically impossible to frame it overtly as such.

Impeachment against Trump has now been used several times to push him to act aggressively in the middle-east, contrary to his policy and self-interest. On all the ‘impeachment threat – then strike’ occasions, Trump ordered strikes on predictable targets – targets so predictable and oddly executed, that Syrian and Iranian forces barely felt them. There appears to be at the very least an ‘unspoken communication’ at play, where strikes are made to assuage political needs but not to inflict serious damage. If Trump really wanted an excuse to strike Iran, he’s had it before.

There was precisely such an opportunity when subversives in government hatched a plan to push Trump into a war with Iran, when two planes were sent to violate Iranian airspace – one manned, the other unmanned – flying in close proximity. This created the chance that Iran’s downing of either plane could be used as a pretext for a major war-creating strike on Iran.

Despite Trump’s acting reasonably, government actors and media attempted to create a sensation where Trump was ridiculed for ‘calling off’ a planned retaliation in the aftermath of the downed drone. The same liberal media and Democratic Party establishment that attacked Trump’s de-escalation then from a hawkish perspective, today manifest as doves who suddenly oppose Trump’s reckless hawkishness.

Here, in the aftermath of the drone incident, a Trump policy was formulated – and it’s a policy that figures prominently in de-escalation in the aftermath of the assassination of Soleimani and Iran’s measured response.

The policy is this – if Iran kills Americans, then the U.S escalates. If the U.S does something provocative, then Iran is actually allowed to respond militarily, so long as American personnel are not killed.

Iran’s striking of the al-Asad airbase was predictable. That Trump has decided to officially declare that there were no U.S casualties has indicated his real stance. In all reality, the predictability of the target was such that American soldiers would have been repositioned out of that base, so that Iran could assuage its own popular-democratic needs in terms of legitimacy, without forcing the U.S. to respond again further.

Between an AIPAC rock and an Anti-War Hard-spot

A war with Iran would push the anti-war sentiments of independent voters away from Trump, and towards a more revitalized and mobilized Democrat Party anti-war base. Trump needs an anti-war base to be re-elected, and war with Iran pushes that base towards nearly any Democrat candidate.

At the same time, Trump also needs the continued support from America’s Christian Zionist evangelical ‘Israel Firsters’, as well as the infamous AIPAC, not only to be re-elected, but to maintain the support in the senate against impeachment.

That conflict between Trump’s two greatest populist strengths – between Trump’s anti-war base and his Christian Zionist base – largely defines his weakest political spot. That’s why it’s the best place to attack him.

Trump for his part, has a frenemy relationship with AIPAC, and has worked hard to build his profile with Christian Zionist voters even to the extent that this might limit AIPAC’s influence on them. He has purchased a lot of AIPAC support along the way by tearing up the JCPOA and recognizing the Golan Heights and Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. This is capital he will have to spend to maintain support in the Senate.

All together this means that while Trump may or may not have personally sought the assassination of Soleimani, he must take credit for it for any number of reasons. In brief, these relate again to the Zionist base and AIPAC, as well as needing to appear in control of the very country that he is nominally the president of. When Trump refused to go to war over the downing of the un-manned drone, the liberal media monopoly accused him of being soft on Iran and indecisive.

Israel for its part is not tremendously happy with either of the two competing U.S policies. They have been pushing a ‘bomb Iran’ line for years, so that Israel’s conquest of Iraq may come to be. They are also not happy that the U.S presence in the region will come to an end. Trump may or may not have green-lit Soleimani’s assassination, but in either even its result will be the purchase of political capital that he can use towards ending the anti-ISIS campaign in Iraq. The reality is that the U.S is being pushed out either way. Soleimani’s assassination has only strengthened that resolve.

Simultaneously, the anti-war sentiment in the U.S. is one that both led to Trump’s election and can lead to Trump’s undoing. Americans love sabre rattling and posturing. They also hate war.

To wit, in the immediate aftermath of the Soleimani assassination, the well-known American communist group – the PSL – and its anti-war front organization ‘ANSWER’ have already received incredible donations from deep-pocketed Democrat Party sponsors at the local party level, to stage the first significant anti-war demonstration since the Bush presidency. While PSL/ANSWER members and activists have been laudable in their consistent opposition to all American wars for capital and empire, they only seem to magically receive the funds for permits, advertising, organizing, and staging anti-war marches when a Republican is president. The secondary slogan of these mobilizations was ‘Dump Trump’. ‘Dump Obama’ was never a slogan seen at the non-existent mass mobilizations against the Libyan, Ukrainian, and Syrian wars.  Trump’s refusal to take the Democrat-laid war bait, means he can pull off an end-run around the Democrat and deep-state plot.

Democrats also don’t want war with Iran, they only want that Trump loses the anti-war vote. They can force him into these compromised positions by coordinating with the ‘permanent administrative military-intelligence bureaucracy’, by coordinating with AIPAC. The Democrat’s plan is therefore pretty simple: use impeachment to force him to strike at Iran (or get Trump to take credit for a strike that the deep-state pulled off), and then use that entanglement to tank his re-election prospects. Then Democrats ride in on an anti-war ticket, restart JCPOA, and move towards integrating Iranian elites into the EU economy. Israel could ultimately guarantee its piece of Iraq and its Greek pipeline deal in due course, with a reformed and EU friendly Iran, ready to make major compromises with Israel. Maybe this is what Biden means by ‘restorationist’ – restoring the traditional left/right political divide which has empowered the Atlanticist status quo.

A Backroom deal? Iran’s Measured Response and Trump’s face-saving

The successful attack on the US’s al-Asad airbase in Iraq was characterized by Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei has characterized as a ‘slap’.

Interestingly, Khamenei’s language used is strategic, and uses a sleight of hand to take the steam from possible opponents. It is clear that Khamenei has said today that while the attack on the airbase is just a slap, and that Iran’s full response will come in the future, he has in fact set up that the solution will be political and diplomatic. He did so in a creative way which appeals to hardliners, saying that any solution could not simply be political and diplomatic, but rather more than this. This sort of double-speak does not reflect any moral lapsus, but is necessary for Iran’s greater geopolitical aims and serves the greater good.

De-escalation requires that both parties save face, and can come away with tangible minor victories and agree that the real underlying dispute is resolved in the future.

This reluctance to engage militarily is beyond the mere politics of justifying American casualties, but points to broader considerations of U.S power projection in the region in the aftermath of the failure of the Obama administration policy of overthrowing the government of Syria.

To understand the events at play requires a multi-dimensional and realist understanding of motivations and relationships, and how relationships work at the level of statecraft. And so in a way that would be popularly understood – as in Game of Thrones – just because you’re invited to the banquet or receive a high-honored appointment, doesn’t mean that are you indispensable or even a friend. Trump’s ‘GoT’ relationship with Israel and even his own cabinet, needless to say any number of Pentagon bosses, is precisely this. Bolton and Pompeo are such frenemies, as have been any number of ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ members of the Trump administration, more or less foisted and forced upon the chief executive by Trump’s opponents in the permanent administration and his partisan opposition, and within the Republican Party itself.

Did Trump make a backroom deal with Iran? Probably not – there was a high public dimension to Trump’s offers, and a recent history where an unspoken language was developed. Iran has demonstrated a high level of intelligence, restraint, intuition, and strategic thinking in its several thousand year-old civilization. There is no reason to think that they wouldn’t have understood and inferred everything explained in this article, and much more, without needing a direct conversation with Trump which no doubt would have led to yet another impeachment fandango.

The defense secretary may deny the number, but an internal struggle over the Iran ‘threat’ suggests there will be deployments.

Gareth PORTER

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is denying reports that he is considering a proposal to increase the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf by as many as 14,000 additional troops. But the wording of the denial appears to suggest that dispatch of a smaller number of military personnel is still under consideration.

The Pentagon issued a statement on Friday quoting Esper as saying, “As the Department [of Defense] has stated repeatedly, we were never discussing or considering sending 14,000 additional troops to the Middle East. Reports of this are flat out wrong.”

The specificity of the denial focusing on the 14,000 total rather than ruling out any increase is a clue that Esper still has a significant increase in mind, which could involve additional ships as well as ground forces.

Further evidence of some sort of planned increase came during congressional testimony Thursday by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood, whose answer to a question about a proposed troop increase was equivocal, leaving open the possibility of “dynamic adjustments to our posture” to deter Iran.

“We are evaluating the threat situation, and the secretary, if he chooses to, can make decisions to deploy additional forces based on what he’s observing there,” Rood said. “Based on what we’re seeing with our concerns with the threat picture, it is possible we would need to adjust our force posture.”

Esper’s Friday denial came in response to a story by TheWall Street Journal, which first reported the 14,000 figure on Wednesday. Later, after President Trump called the report“fake news,”CNN reported that the troop deployments could be much smaller, closer to 3,000 or 4,000, indicating that Rood may have put forward a range of possible options for Esper’s consideration.

Rood and others supporting a further increase in U.S. presence in the region are arguing that it is necessary to “deter” Iran because of alleged new intelligence. “We’re concerned about the threat stream that we’re seeing,” he told the committee. The New York Times reported December 4 a claim by U.S. intelligence and Pentagon sources that Iran has brought more short-range missiles into Iraq in recent months, increasing the Iranian threat to U.S. forces and interests in the region. That same day Rood told reporters that there were “indications…that potential Iranian aggression could occur.”

Iran had already deployed such missiles to Iraq, however, as early as 2018, and additional missiles are hardly surprising given the Israeli campaign to carry out bombing against any weapons that could be used to deter Israeli military action in the region, including Iraq.

Citing alleged new intelligence of an Iranian military threat was a tactic used by then-national security adviser John Bolton and his bureaucratic allies to justify the escalation of tensions with Iran last May. That earlier alleged intelligence included what turned out to be a misreading of an Iranian directive to be prepared for a possible U.S. military attack in the region.

The leading figure in the group calling for more troops today is Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command, responsible for the entire Middle East region. McKenzie was also one of the central actors in the group led by John Bolton that agreed last May on sending a squadron of 12 jet fighters, several spy planes a B-52 bomber task force, and the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group to the Gulf.

McKenzie has the most direct personal and institutional stake in the proposed the U.S. buildup in the Middle East, all of which would come under his command. McKenzie was undoubtedly pleased with the idea that “dozens” of additional ships may be included in the proposal, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. In remarks to a security conference in Bahrain last month, he alluded with a hint of regret to the shift in U.S. military assets from the Middle East to the East Asia in recent years. He described the situation “not too many years ago” when the United States maintained a “near constant presence” in the Gulf, “with an aircraft carrier battle group in close proximity… .”

McKenzie then referred in broad language to the shift in U.S. military focus from the Middle East to East Asia. “[W]e have positioned strategic assets globally to provide capabilities and deterrence against multiple adversaries and threats,” he said. Then he referred to the marine security arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz involving Albania, Australia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE and the UK, suggesting that it was not aimed at Iran but merely at freedom of navigation. What McKenzie did not mention is that the U.S. contribution to the coalition effort is limited to providing intelligence capabilities rather than warships—-a limitation that was presumably imposed on him by the White House.

McKenzie suggested to reporters covering the conference that the United States should do more to deter Iran. “My judgment is that it is very possible [Iran] will attack again,” he declared. That warning evidently came before any claim of evidence of new Iranian missiles in Iraq, because McKenzie cited no specific evidence for his warning, except the September cruise missile and drone strike against the Saudi oil facilities.

Although McKenzie supported the idea of deterring Iran, he was much more precise  than Rood about what was to be deterred. Rood declared in remarks to the same conference in Manama that Iran’s intent is to “pursue a pattern of aggressive behavior that is destabilizing.” McKenzie said that Iran would be reacting to the administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy of trying to choke off Iran’s oil sales. “Iran is under extreme pressure,” McKenzie said, and it was trying to “crack the campaign” with attacks aimed at provoking an American military response.

McKenzie was thus suggesting that deterring Iran was significantly more difficult than Rood acknowledged.

Changes in both senior positions in the Trump administration and the broader political situation since the pivotal May 2019 decisions have shifted the balance against those pushing for more U.S. military power in a potential theater of war. The third major figure who supported the May decisions, along with Bolton and McKenzie, was Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford. He later supported Trump’s decision not to retaliate over the shoot-down of the U.S. drone in June, however, and he was replaced on September 30 by Gen. Mark Milley, who is not likely to support the new proposal for troop escalation.

In his confirmation hearing in July, Milley was vocal in warning against war with Iran, on the ground that it would disrupt and the strategic shift by the Pentagon from dominant emphasis on the Middle East to a primary focus on “great power competition” with Russia and China. The Wall Street Journal cited Pentagon sources as confirming that the United States currently has only five aircraft carriers—not enough to deal simultaneously with Russia, China and the Middle East.

Milley sought to distinguish between a single-strike against Iran such as the one that Trump decided on and then canceled in June, and a broader conflict. He and  experienced senior military officers like him are highly skeptical about being able to control a conflict with Iran once it begins. As former CENTCOM commander Gen. Joseph Votel recently told an interviewer, the idea that a war with Iran could be carefully limited to a single strike is “preposterous.”

The latest suggestion that the United States is gearing up for a confrontation with Iran comes after the political atmosphere for such a policy has already started to cool. Although the hardliners accuse Trump of betraying American interests by failing to use force against Iran over its alleged attack on Saudi oil facilities, more of the political and media elite now understand that Iran is far more capable of striking U.S. troops and facilities in the region than a decade ago, as the Pentagon’s own analysis implies.

The reality that military a confrontation with Iran would be very unpopular is more widely understood today. Certainly Trump himself has become much clearer about that, even if he does not understand that his “maximum pressure” policy risks precisely that outcome. Trump is even less likely to risk another symbolic step toward military confrontation with Iran as he seeks to consolidate his political base going into an impeachment struggle and a presidential election year.

Nevertheless, Esper may still propose to the White House sending a smaller number of troops and or other military assets to the Persian Gulf, forcing Trump to make a decision he would probably rather avoid.

theamericanconservative.com

The man is so beautifully bland. In fact, I’d wager that only a tiny segment of Americans could name the current Secretary of Defense—and far fewer could pick him out of a lineup. Perhaps that’s the point. President Trump, a celebrity ham, has tired of sharing the stage with big-name advisers such as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser John Bolton. So they’re both gone. In their place, Trump has installed faceless bureaucrats to run the most powerful national security state in human history. And the rest of us hardly notice.

Trump’s appointment of Mark Esper as head of the largest and most active Cabinet department, and the new Defense Secretary’s near unanimous approval by the U.S. Senate, is no less of a scandal than Trump’s apparent efforts to seek foreign interference in the 2020 elections. Only it isn’t.

Still, the nomination of Esper, a recent lobbyist for the defense contracting corporation Raytheon, ranks as one of the most egregious illustrations of the “revolving door” between lobbyists and the Defense Department. It’s crony capitalism in fatigues, and while nothing new, a clear indication that things have only worsened under our reality-show-mogul-president.

Of course, seen through the rose-colored glasses of American empire, Esper is highly qualified to head the Defense Department. He’s a West Point graduate, former Army infantry officer, recipient of a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard and a doctorate in public policy from George Washington University, and has past experience working in the Pentagon.

If one digs further, however, Esper is wildly problematic—loaded with conflicts of interest, a veteran of the (should be) discredited neoconservative Bush-era DOD, and little more than a corporate “company man.” He didn’t just work for Raytheon, he lobbied on the defense contractor’s behalf only recently. Under rather sharp questioning by Sen. Elizabeth Warren during his confirmation hearings, Esper refused to recuse himself from participating in government business involving Raytheon. In typically lifeless language, Esper replied that “On the advice of my ethics folks at the Pentagon, the career professionals: No, their recommendation is not to.” How’s that for accepting responsibility? No matter, he was swiftly and quietly confirmed by a vote of 90-8 in the Senate.

Expect another banner year for Raytheon. It’s already the third-largest U.S. defense contractor, and produces, among other tools of destruction, Paveway precision-guided missiles—the very weapons that Congress recently sought to stop shipping to Saudi Arabia due to (rather tardy) concerns about the heads of Yemeni civilians upon which they’re dropped.

I predict more deals and more taxpayer billions for Raytheon with Esper at the Defense helm. Not that the company has done poorly during the Trump years. In 2018, Raytheon CEO Thomas Kennedy candidly quipped that “It’s the best time that we’ve ever seen for the defense industry.” Not for indebted taxpayers, bombed-out Middle Easterners or U.S. soldiers still dying in endless wars, it’s not. But sure, it truly is the best of times for what prominent American leaders—once upon a time—labeled the “merchants of death.”

Conflicts of interest, sliding seamlessly between defense contracting boards and the Pentagon, and securing post-government largesse on corporate boards, that’s an old story indeed. Looking back to 2001, most Defense Secretaries have troublesome private sector connections. Donald Rumsfeld entered the Pentagon after a 24-year business career; Robert Gates was on the board of directors of Fidelity Investments and the Parker Drilling Company; Chuck Hagel served on the boards of Chevron and Deutsche Bank; Ash Carter—an exception—was mostly an academic and a bureaucratic wonk, but still consulted for Goldman Sachs. All made millions.

That covers the Bush and Obama years. What we’ve seen in the Trump administration, is, however, something far more brazen. His three Secretaries of Defense (one of whom, Patrick Shanahan, was only acting head) have been unapologetically ensconced in the world of defense contracting and corporate lobbying.

“Saint” Jim Mattis had, while still a general, encouraged the military to buy the blood test products of Theranos, then dropped the service and joined its corporate board. But Theranos’ products did not work, the deal described by the Securities and Exchange Commission as an “elaborate, years-long fraud.” Mattis also served, both before and after his Pentagon stint, on the board of General Dynamics, the nation’s fifth largest defense contractor. Nonetheless, Mattis easily slid through his confirmation and was praised by all types of mainstream media as the administration’s “adult in the room.”

After Mattis resigned, he being unable to countenance even Trump’s hints at modest withdrawal from the wars in Syria and Afghanistan, Patrick Shanahan stepped in as interim defense chief. Unlike his predecessor, Shanahan didn’t emerge from the military, but rather from yet another defense contractor, Boeing, for which he’s worked some 30 years. Trump thought that was dandy and nominated him to officially replace Mattis, but Shanahan decided to withdraw due to alleged personal scandals. Enter Mark Esper, Raytheon lobbyist extraordinaire.

Esper’s in good company in Washington’s military-industrial swamp. Recent reports by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO)—a vital organization that hardly any American has heard of—identified “645 instances in the past 10 years in which a retired senior official, member of Congress or senior legislative staff member became employed as a registered lobbyist, board member or business executive at a major government contractor.” POGO also noted that “those walking through the revolving door included 25 generals, nine admirals, 43 lieutenant generals and 23 vice admirals.”

All of which begs some questions and provides some disturbing answers. Perhaps we ought to ditch the myth that the Defense Secretary simply heads the Pentagon, and admit that Esper is really the emperor of a far grander military-industrial complex that includes a veritable army of K-Street lobbyists and venal arms dealers. Maybe it’s time to concede that unelected national security czars, and not a stalemated bought-and-sold Congress, run national defense and set the gigantic Pentagon budget. Perhaps we should confess to ourselves that the nation’s vaunted soldiers are little more than political pawns in a game that’s far bigger, far more Kafkaesque, than those troopers could begin to fathom. And, finally, let’s admit one last thing: Few of us care.

truthdig.com

To begin to appreciate this fight, it is useful to conduct a short survey of the 3 weeks of fanatical neocon maneuvers led by Bolton, Defense Secretary Esper, Sen. Marco Rubio, and VP Pence. These maneuvers were instigated by two “unforgivable sins” conducted by Trump when the latter: 1) stated his wish that Russia be re-introduced to the G7 on August 21 stating “I think it would be better to have Russia inside the tent than outside the tent”, and 2) his defense of President Xi Jinping as “a great leader” who must resolve the Hong Kong chaos without American interference. These initiatives had to come undone at all costs.

Rubio, Esper, Pence and Bolton Push For War

First, neocon war hawk Marco Rubio ranted at length in the Washington Post calling for the US government to intervene into the Hong Kong mess which itself has been stirred up by American intelligence outfits like the CIA-affiliated National Endowment for Democracy.

In his September 3 editorial, Rubio stated “the administration should make clear that the United States can respond flexibly and robustly in Hong Kong” and called for the Congress to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act co-sponsored by Rubio, Ben Cartin (Democrat), James Risch (Republican), and Robert Menendez (Democrat). The act, if passed would force the US government to fully support the Hong Kong color revolutionaries while sanctioning all

Chinese officials who “have undermined the city’s autonomy”.

Just before Rubio’s belligerent words went public, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper had already exclaimed publically that America had to confront China directly in support of US allies in the Asia-Pacific over territorial issues and containment of China’s growth. Esper shocked many Asian and western statesmen alike when he stated that there is a “coming shift” from “low intensity conflict… to high intensity conflicts against competitors such as Russia and China”.

In this surreal relay race to Armageddon, Vice-President Mike Pence next took the baton during his September 2 speech in Warsaw, Poland alongside Polish President Andrzej Duda. It was here that Pence here took the opportunity to demonize Russia when he said “with its efforts to meddle in elections across Europe and around the world, now is the time for us to remain vigilant about the intentions and the actions taken by Russia.” Pence went further to state without any evidence that “Russian forces still illegally occupy large parts of Georgia and Ukraine.”

Pence was joined in Poland by ex-US National Security Advisor John Bolton, who ended his tour of four former Soviet nations begun a week earlier (Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and Poland). Beginning his tour on August 26 in Kiev, Bolton took the opportunity to attack Ukraine’s growing relationship with China which is on the verge of finalizing a deal to purchase the beleaguered Ukrainian aerospace giant Motor Sich. Ever since the Russian sanctions began, the Ukrainian company has lost over 40% of its markets with the Chinese providing the only chance for its salvation. Exhibiting his usual flare for hypocrisy, Bolton attacked China saying: “The Chinese are not afraid to use corruption – or to put it bluntly, bribes – to get the decisions they want”, calling for Ukraine to reject the deal.

The New Silk Road: A Nightmare for all Neocons

It is important to note that Ukraine signed an action plan to join the Chinese-led Silk Road Economic Belt and 21^st century maritime Silk Road already 18 months ago with recent plans to accelerate that cooperation. Ever since the BRI and Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union increasingly began merging into a unified program, western NATO-philes have realized that their years of hard work to de-rail a pro-Eurasian alliance in Ukraine could easily come undone.

Having made a mess of Ukraine, Bolton then headed to Belarus, and Moldova pushing an anti-Russian line, ending his trip in Poland where he solidified the location for the additional American 1000 troops to be added to the 4500 US troops already operating in the nation- many of whom operate America’s anti-Russian ABM system.

The ABM system which has been built up around Russia’s southern perimeter and which Poland plays a key role, is part of a larger agenda identified by the Russian government as “Full Spectrum Dominance” and seeks a unipolar nuclear first strike monopoly. Poland’s only hope to avoid being caught in the middle of a nuclear exchange between NATO and Russia is to break free of this program and accept China’s offers to join the BRI which experts have recently stated would make Poland “The Buckle of the Belt and Road”.

It was not lost on Bolton and Pence that Poland is also a key member of the 17+1 Central and Eastern European nations + China group which has deeply tied itself to the BRI while Belarus is a member of the Eurasian Economic Union- making their allegiance to the western technocracy more fragile than some would like to admit.

Breaking Free of the Self-Destructive Psychology of Empire

When objectively assessing the psychological state of the western oligarchy at this particular moment in history, it must be concluded that certain forces operating on behalf of the City of London and Wall Street would go to any length– not excluding nuclear war- in defense of their failing system. There is thus no solution to this dark chapter of the human experience unless:

The bankruptcy of the financial system now sitting atop a $800 trillion derivatives bubble is fully acknowledged such that a serious discussion centered on bankruptcy re-organization can finally occur.

That the neocons and other deep state operatives be flushed from power- following Bolton into the trash bin of history.

That the need for a new system premised upon cooperation and long term development is adopted post-haste. This new system would have to contain certain non-negotiable features such as nationally-guided capital controls to prevent speculative fluctuations of currencies and other vital resources, the separation of investment banking from normal commercial banking functions as was done under the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (repealed in 1999 in the USA), and long term credit generation for major infrastructure projects.

The BRI as the Foundation for a New System

Russia, China and India are increasingly becoming the foundation for a new multipolar world order founded upon the respect for sovereign nations and improvement of conditions of life of the people driven by Putin’s Far East/Arctic vision and China’s New Silk Road which are winning over dozens of nations to a new paradigm of political economy.

For all of his problems, Donald Trump has maintained a generally consistent (albeit flawed) intention to re-build American industry and infrastructure after decades of post-industrial decay and combat the Deep State which has worked on overtime to overthrow his presidency. On top of this, he has seriously worked to keep the nation out of foreign entanglements while avoiding any new wars (a first for any president in over 50 years). Most importantly, he has attempted repeatedly to create positive relations with Russia and China.

Whether the neo cons infesting the US administration successfully subvert this potential for a new paradigm which would be unstoppable under a Russia-China-India-USA alliance, or not remains an open question, but Trump’s firing of Bolton will hopefully represent a new purge of war mongering sociopaths while opening the door to a new foreign policy doctrine.