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hasanejaz88 said:
I don't understand this, the notion is that governments, or atleast the bigger ones, already know Russia did it but aren't announcing it. Wouldn't they be retaliating already if this were the case?
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Soviet pilots in Soviet fighters fought in Korea. It was an open secret. If the Soviet Union was officially and directly involved, the conflict would escalate further, but they weren't so it didn't. It might seem like silly charade, but it matters.
 

africanspur

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hasanejaz88 said:
Didn't Biden openly say if Russia attacks Ukraine they will make sure Nordstream 2 gets stopped, it even surprised the German journalists how blatantly he said it? Suffice to say if it were Russia or another terrorist organization then they would have announced it, don't understand why they would want to hide that.
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Didn't Russia say multiple times they were going to reduce Western cities to the ground and nuke their countries into oblivion?
 

stefan92

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africanspur said:
Didn't Russia say multiple times they were going to reduce Western cities to the ground and nuke their countries into oblivion?
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Well Russia is waging a war and declared that they are fighting NATO, so of course they do.

Biden hinted at the possibility to use military force to destroy a strategic asset of an ally (Germany), which caused quite some unhappiness here. Nothing wrong with a firm diplomatic approach, but that simply went to far.

Comparable would be if Putin threatened to destroy stuff in Belarus, which he never did.
 

CassiusClaymore

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How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p...tream?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.

The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy, involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and warfare centers.” The at-sea event would be held off the coast of Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them.

It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.

The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.

And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.

Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”
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VorZakone

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So...that Nordstream article has received quite the reception.

 

berbatrick

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https://www.firstpost.com/world/ex-...of-peace-between-russia-ukraine-12112962.html

In an interview to Israel’s Channel 12, Naftali Bennett said that his efforts as middleman between Moscow and Kyiv was almost a success with both countries agreeing to make concessions and call for a truce.

However, he added that it did not happen as Western backers to Ukraine stopped it from taking place.

“I think there was a legitimate decision by the West to keep striking [Russian President Vladimir] Putin… I mean the more aggressive approach,” he said, adding, “Basically, yes. They blocked it,” to a question if US and its allies ‘blocked’ the peace process between Moscow and Kyiv.

Bennett, however, clarified, “I claim there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire. But I’m not claiming it was the right thing.”
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VorZakone

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Not entirely sure what thread to post this in but figured I post it here.

 

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Red in STL said:
Not really, the Israeli's will do what they always do and the US is basically sayimg we'll not stop you
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Yes really, because the US has the ability to put pressure on the Israelis to act in a certain way. Biden can pressure Netanyahu to not act or else create tension in the bilateral relationship or he can tell him he won’t object if Bibi opts to launch a massive operation against Iran.
 

neverdie

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War Economy.

Thinking about war economy lately. Does anyone disagree with the following?

Babylonian war-economy has led the way for at least seven thousand years.

What is War-Economy?

The attempt of nations to make the world in their own image. And it is deductively doomed from the offset. No nation can possibly make the world in its own image. It has been proven by history. And yet it sitll goes on .

The Romans couldn't.

The British couldn't.

The Americans couldn't

Genghis Khan couldn't.

It was logically "easier" to do back then, when no nations had "end the world" weapons. Now many nations have them. It has never been possible but not it is obviously impossible.

A nation's internal and external borders. That is war economy. The larger a nation gets, the more it attempts to push outward.


War economy is only 2 trillion, direct, of the entire world's GDP. Indirect, it is like poison which is potent enough to destroy an entire reservoire. Thinking about the idea of war as contagion and the areas it is fought in as black holes, like narco blackholes, and you see that the entire world's economy is thus soaked in blood. Capital works in such a way, I think, that all the legitimate capital, of people with no direct involvement in war, gets tangled up in all the illegitimate. War Economy capital. Then you see the idea of sides on the street.

Topic. Spark a debate. Generate a schism. People take the Ukrainian side or the Russian. Or whatever war. It has never been otherwise so why does it keep happening?

You can predict it. Something happens, controversial, like war, and the media paints it in such a way that there are two sides to it, or more. Every time. The schisms just multiply. People forming all kinds of hatreds against each other even when they have nothing directly to do with the war.

Eisnehower famously said, "new in the American experience". But it's very old in World experience which is why he said it that way.

The mode of production then alters to accomodate perpetual war-footing. It becomes war economy which gets masked as "defense", with very few people buying the mask.

War Economy is like the ring in Lord of the Rings. It says, to any potential wearers, Tsars and Ceasars,you can be the one who finally does it. Who makes the world in your image. But the ring, to give it telos, knows that all wearers will destroy themselves. And that is how the cylce, war to war, keeps going. No nation, or collection, want to say, "perhaps this cannot ever work".

It isn't possible. Literally imopssible. Seven thousand years of empire and all the bullshit that came and went with it proves it.
 
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neverdie

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Propaganda.

It only works because people are generally good. If that wasn't true, then atrocity propaganda would not work. You would not be offended into false dichotomy, often, side-taking. But it conceals the truth as it selectively shows it. The universal fact that all nations, varying in size and military power and so on, are doing this to each other mutually. We hear of Russian warcrimes and occasionaly of our own. The Russians hear of the Ukrainian.

It's madness.

Russia: nazis.
Nato: tyrant.

But Russia has a far right. Nato supports tyrants elsewhere, as does Russia. It's just so much nonsense used to whip up hysteria and cause divisions. Among the people.
 

berbatrick

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MTF said:
I'd say Russia's appeal to the world is more defined by what they're against, which is the US, "the West", etc. And there's maybe a bit more receptiveness to this around the world than you might think, mainly because there are a lot of people in developing countries that are resentful of the larger, richer countries, some of which were their former colonizers.

I'm not at all arguing it's a great pitch (it has no overarching coherence) or that it's widely received well, but I just wouldn't fully dismiss how much resentment there is out there.
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also stuff like this


plus, for india at least, historical strong relations with the ussr have become an increasingly ideology-free partnership now.
 

berbatrick

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RedDevilQuebecois said:
Reeks of the same shit that was done during the Korean War and during the Vietnam War: doing just enough to maintain the independence of an allied country, but still never enough to whoop the aggressor's ass into oblivion.
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I guess they should have nuked everyone on the peninsula?

"Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population," Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed "everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another." After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.
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Dissatisfied and frustrated with the inefficacy of bombing operations that had failed to root out the North Vietnamese, Nixon ordered Kissinger to call for mass carpet bombing over the small country—as Kissinger passed on to General Haig, “It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.”
Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II. Pound for pound, it remains the largest aerial bombardment in human history.
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RedDevilQuebecois

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berbatrick said:
I guess they should have nuked everyone on the peninsula?
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It may only be me, but the bombings of Pyongyang and around Hanoi don't appear to be talked about in the same vein as the bombings of Dresden, Cologne and Tokyo.

My point in the other thread is that Western politicians seem bent on using far more restrain than they should in front of the enemy. If the Ukrainians can get the required hardware faster to make the war end any quicker by reconquering lands and by finishing it off in Crimea, then so be it. What would happen in Russia after a defeat is not what matters the most now.
 

berbatrick

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RedDevilQuebecois said:
It may only be me, but the bombings of Pyongyang and around Hanoi don't appear to be talked about in the same vein as the bombings of Dresden, Cologne and Tokyo.
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The bombing in the Korea and Vietnam wars used far more tonnage and killed far more people than any WW2 examples. Laos is the most bombed nation on earth, and just the unexploded bombs there have killed about as many people as the entire bombing of Dresden or Cologne. Rolling Thunder killed more people than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Roughly 75% of solid structures in Pyongyang (and North Korea as a whole) were destroyed by bombing, compared to 50% of Tokyo. In Korea, bombing continued till there were no more targets - targets could mean military installations, infrastructure, or a city or village. The 15-20% population loss for the North in the Korean war is comparable to Poland and USSR in WW2, or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Incendiaries made famous by Tokyo were used in Pyongyang and all over North Korea and later Vietnam, and in Vietnam the US added Agent Orange to the mix. Using agent orange didn't just mean deaths, cancer, and birth defects (still continuing), but the permanent loss of massive amounts of forest and farm land - salting the earth. In contrast, chemical weapons were not used against the Axis in WW2.

Why they're not talked about, you can judge for yourself.
 
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neverdie

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How this managed to get published in the New York Times, being truthful, with respect to actual war-economic stuff, I have no idea, but well worth the read.


NATO isn't What it Says It IS


By Grey Anderson and Thomas Meaney
Mr. Anderson is the editor of “Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance Since the Cold War,” to which Mr. Meaney is a contributor.

NATO leaders convening this week in Vilnius, Lithuania, have every reason to toast their success.

Only four years ago, on the eve of another summit, the organization looked to be in low water; in the words of President Emmanuel Macron of France, it was undergoing nothing short of “brain death.” Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the situation has been transformed. As NATO plans to welcome Sweden into its ranks — Finland became a full-fledged member in April — and dispatch troops to reinforce its eastern flank, European Union allies are finally making good on long-deferred promises to increase military spending. Public opinion has followed suit. If Russia sought to divide Europe, President Biden could plausibly declare last spring that it had instead fully “NATO-ized” the continent.
This turnabout has understandably energized the alliance’s supporters. The statement of purpose from Jens Stoltenberg, its secretary general, that “the strength of NATO is the best possible tool we have to maintain peace and security” has never had more loyal adherents. Even critics of the organization — such as China hawks who see it as a distraction from the real threat in East Asia and restrainers who would prefer that Washington refocus on diplomatic solutions and problems at home — concede that NATO’s purpose is primarily the defense of Europe.

But NATO, from its origins, was never primarily concerned with aggregating military power. Fielding 100 divisions at its Cold War height, a small fraction of Warsaw Pact manpower, the organization could not be counted on to repel a Soviet invasion and even the continent’s nuclear weapons were under Washington’s control. Rather, it set out to bind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a U.S.-led world order, in which American protection served as a lever to obtain concessions on other issues, like trade and monetary policy. In that mission, it has proved remarkably successful.

Many observers expected NATO to close shop after the collapse of its Cold War rival. But in the decade after 1989, the organization truly came into its own. NATO acted as a ratings agency for the European Union in Eastern Europe, declaring countries secure for development and investment. The organization pushed would-be partners to adhere to a liberal, pro-market creed, according to which — as President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser put it — “the pursuit of democratic institutions, the expansion of free markets” and “the promotion of collective security” marched in lock step. European military professionals and reform-minded elites formed a willing constituency, their campaigns boosted by NATO’s information apparatus.

When European populations proved too stubborn, or undesirably swayed by socialist or nationalist sentiments, Atlantic integration proceeded all the same. The Czech Republic was a telling case. Faced with a likely “no” vote in a referendum on joining the alliance in 1997, the secretary general and top NATO officials saw to it that the government in Prague simply dispense with the exercise; the country joined two years later. The new century brought more of the same, with an appropriate shift in emphasis. Coinciding with the global war on terrorism, the “big bang” expansion of 2004 — in which seven countries acceded — saw counterterrorism supersede democracy and human rights in alliance rhetoric. Stress on the need for liberalization and public sector reforms remained a constant.

In the realm of defense, the alliance was not as advertised. For decades, the United States has been the chief provider of weapons, logistics, air bases and battle plans. The war in Ukraine, for all the talk of Europe stepping up, has left that asymmetry essentially untouched. Tellingly, the scale of U.S. military aid — $47 billion over the first year of the conflict — is more than double that offered by European Union countries combined. European spending pledges may also turn out to be less impressive than they appear. More than a year after the German government publicized the creation of a special $110 billion fund for its armed forces, the bulk of the credits remain unused. In the meantime, German military commanders have said that they lack sufficient munitions for more than two days of high-intensity combat.

Whatever the levels of expenditure, it is remarkable how little military capability Europeans get for the outlays involved. Lack of coordination, as much as penny-pinching, hamstrings Europe’s ability to ensure its own security. By forbidding duplication of existing capabilities and prodding allies to accept niche roles, NATO has stymied the emergence of any semiautonomous European force capable of independent action. As for defense procurement, common standards for interoperability, coupled with the sheer size of the U.S. military-industrial sector and bureaucratic impediments in Brussels, favor American firms at the expense of their European competitors. The alliance, paradoxically, appears to have weakened allies’ ability to defend themselves.

Yet the paradox is only superficial. In fact, NATO is working exactly as it was designed by postwar U.S. planners, drawing Europe into a dependency on American power that reduces its room for maneuver. Far from a costly charity program, NATO secures American influence in Europe on the cheap. U.S. contributions to NATO and other security assistance programs in Europe account for a tiny fraction of the Pentagon’s annual budget — less than 6 percent by a recent estimate. And the war has only strengthened America’s hand. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, roughly half of European military spending went to American manufacturers. Surging demand has exacerbated this tendency as buyers rush to acquire tanks, combat aircraft and other weapons systems, locking into costly, multiyear contracts. Europe may be remilitarizing, but America is reaping the rewards.

In Ukraine, the pattern is clear. Washington will provide the military security, and its corporations will benefit from a bonanza of European armament orders, while Europeans will shoulder the cost of postwar reconstruction — something Germany is better poised to accomplish than the buildup of its military. The war also serves as a dress rehearsal for U.S. confrontation with China, in which European support cannot be so easily counted on. Limiting Beijing’s access to strategic technologies and promoting American industry are hardly European priorities, and severing European and Chinese trade is still difficult to imagine. Yet already there are signs that NATO is making headway in getting Europe to follow its lead in the theater. On the eve of a visit to Washington at the end of June, Germany’s defense minister duly advertised his awareness of “European responsibility for the Indo-Pacific” and the importance of “the rules-based international order” in the South China Sea.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/opinion/nato-summit-vilnius-europe.html

You can read the full article on the NYT.
 

neverdie

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RedDevil@84 said:
Because enough US citizens don't care??
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They do care, widely, and are fairly educated on the topic, but there just really isn't the editorial space, in America, or England, for that matter, for the kinds of essays you can read above. They might agree or disagree, but you cannot say they do not care.
 

Red in STL

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neverdie said:
They do care, widely, and are fairly educated on the topic, but there just really isn't the editorial space, in America, or England, for that matter, for the kinds of essays you can read above. They might agree or disagree, but you cannot say they do not care.
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No doubt some do care and are fairly educated but the majority are not

If they were how do explain the popularity of Trump and the far right, the notion that common sense gun laws are impossible due to the constitution and so on?
 

neverdie

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Red in STL said:
No doubt some do care and are fairly educated but the majority are not

If they were how do explain the popularity of Trump and the far right, the notion that common sense gun laws are impossible due to the constitution and so on?
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Trump gets the racist vote but also a fair proportion of the non-racist vote. I think it was the liberal class who elected him in 2016 (have to double-check that but that's what an academic told me: was elected, difference maker, by the liberals, not the working class).

The common talking point, geopolitically, for Trumpists is that "he keeps us out of war" and "he'd have done a deal with Russia" (or some iteration of "he knows how to handle these people"). The "keeps us out of war" thing is dubious, the American state planning, long-term, goes beyond any given president even as the president makes critical decisions within that frame. Now, would he have sanctioned aid to Ukraine? He did. Just before the war, not during it. That's when build-up, cited in the NYT, happened. Americans are as educated as anyone, the difference, really, is a racial history which makes things pretty difficult and the most propagandized society (outside North Korea) upon the face of the planet (and the most propagandizing, at least until China starts outpacing them, which, qualitatively, I find unlikely for linguistic reasons).

Benefit Street would have you believe that all British people are like that. That's how you explain "Trump" supporters, when symbolic caricatures, in debates like these: primarily fictions. As for gun laws, I don't wade into that, but there are left-leaning Americans here, on this forum, who will tell you, easily, that they don't have a problem with guns, many of them own guns, but with semi-automatic (or automatic) military grade weapons being made available. The right to bear arms is not the right to bear nuclear weapons. But America has its own particular history. More guns than people. I find the debate, beyond banning certain ammunintion, and types of weapon, pointless because the cat is out of the bag.
 
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