Greenlighting the Escalation

We should expect with a fairly high degree of certainty that the US and UK will greenlight the use of Western long range missiles on targets in Russia. They will likely do this at the end of the week so as to minimize public awareness of or appreciation for the significance of the decision.

The nature of these Russian targets for NATO weapons may be limited to certain categories. In the meantime, Japan is permitting the stationing in Japan for some months of the US Typhon land-based intermediate range cruise missile system.

These developments exacerbate Russian vulnerability from both west and east.

We can debate whether these attacks will be initiated before or after the US presidential election. Given the speed of Ukraine’s defeat in Donbass and stalling in Kursk I suspect sooner rather than later.

We can debate whether the intent is to further pressure Russia into negotiation or whether it signals an escalation into an extended period of war or both. I suspect the former. But the endeavor is hopeless because Russia will concede nothing that the West values and certainly nothing short of Ukrainian neutrality and Russian retention of Crimea and Novorussiye.

We can debate whether the escalation will provoke Russia into a nuclear response. While we have several times heard Russian people of influence say that the West will only ever listen to the reality of a nuclear bomb, I don’t expect Russia to do anything so reckless that would usher in World War Three and nuclear annihilation of the species.

Given the miserable quality of Western leadership we could expect the West to resort to nuclear weapons before Russia does.

For the moment we should anticipate fiercer Russian attacks on Western missile systems in Ukraine (whose data, servicing and operation depends considerably on NATO personnel); together with release by Russia of more lethal weaponry to Western enemies in countries such as Yemen, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela; and closer strategic coordination between Russia, China and Iran.

Russian weapons will give much greater backbone to Islamic retaliation against Israel for the Gaza and West Bank genocides, and to the responses of Iran, Syria and Iraq to daily Israeli murder and other aggression, even as the US reduces its aircraft carrier presence in the region down to one (with the return home of the Theodore Roosevelt).

Russian missiles will sustain the Houthi crippling of Western international trade (trade through the Red Sea already down 80%) and precipitate the economic collapse of Israel.

The greenlighting of long range missiles from Ukraine is premised in part, by what Blinken claims is Iranian supply of ballistic missiles to Russia.

Iran denies this, and also says that in the past it has refused Russian requests for such missiles.

There is little doubt in my mind that Russia has found it useful in the past to import Shahad drones from Iran but I am skeptical that Russia is in any sense dependent on Iran for missiles, given what we know of the extent and sophistication of Russian manufactured missiles, Russian manufacturing capacity and expertise.

Perhaps Iran can provide certain categories of missile more cheaply. And perhaps Iranian supply of weapons to Russia has the symbolic advantage of demonstrating to the peoples of both countries the degree of political, military and economic solidarity between these two important members of the BRICS.

Blinken’s unlikely claims about Iran are merely a pretext that justify yet more Western sanctions on Iran and continue the West’s decades’ old demonization of Iran on one false pretext after another, disguising how this vindictiveness maintains a divided Middle East to US advantage.

More worryingly, Western propaganda against Iran may make it easier for the US to succumb to Netanyahu’s provocations designed to lure the US into a regional war that Israel cannot possibly fight and win on its own.

In a possible bid to distract Chinese attention to the gathering crisis in the region of the world on which China depends for a substantial proportion of its energy supply, the US is ratcheting up anti-Chinese tensions in East and southeast Asia, pretending that China is about to invade Taiwan.

Perhaps the US should be more mindful of China’s own ramping up of its nuclear force. ahead of what almost certainly will be the end of START early next year and the demise of restraints on nuclear weapon production by both the US and Russia.