Poles in Belarus / Russians in Lisbon or a Sane and Multipolar World?

My headline is inspired by today’s column from Gilbert Doctorow (Gilbert Doctorow). He asks why were Europe and the USA so unprepared for the land war with Russia, given their merciless taunting of Russia ever since 2014, amidst astonishing disparities, in Russia’s favor, in weapons production?

To flesh out Doctorow’s argument I will point to Russian shell production, which is currently around 200,000 rounds a month and, as Simplius the Thinker has recently calculated, will likely increase by three or four times that rate in the next year or so. The current level of production is insufficient to meet Russia’s current consumption of shells in NATO’s proxy war with Russia (at a cost of over 300,000+ Ukrainain and 40,000 Russian lives so far) but Russia started the war with a stock of some 19 million shells and its rate of production, as just stated, will, in a relatively short time, match the quantities that it consumes. And the quantities that it currently consumes are at least four times the quantities consumed by Ukraine while its production is already four or five times the rate of production of the US/EU combined. Similar disparities can be found acros a wide range of weapons, including the production of advanced Russian T90Ms (currently about 100 a month). Borrowing half a million rounds from South Korea so that the US can then release shells for Ukraine from its own stocks is a pathetic response from the collective west to the magnitude of its weapons crisis.

But all that is something of an interesting aside. Back to Doctorow, who talks of the “gross irresponsibility and incompetence…and, surely, vast corruption” of the collective west that lie behind its inability to realisticially size up the threats of the conflict with Russia, especially in view of the trillions of dollars spent on weapons over the past twenty years by the collective west as against the comparably very modest Russian military budget of around $80 billion a year. (Terms such as obsene profiteering, and purchasing price parity come to mind).

Doctorow does not see much evidence that western leaders have developed in wisdom as a result of their experience of the war so far. He notes with some concern the underreported buildup of NATO forces along the Eastern frontier with Russia and, in particular, threats from Poland that it might support an armed uprising against the Lukashenko government in Belarus. This threat strikes a note of resonance with the recent Ukrainian (or Washington-backed?) attacks on Belgorod. A Belgorod-style strike might provoke a response of panic, confusion, and distraction in Russia which, according to the leaked Pentagon papers, is something that Ukraine counteroffensive strategies consider to be important to achieve within the first two days if Ukrainian forces are to have a chance of breaking through Russian defenses.

The panic element could be achieved by a Belgorod-style incident, followed up, among other things by a Polish strike on Belarus - or both together could trigger the required panic while Ukraine ramps up its major offensive from Zaporizhzhia. I have to say, though, I am unconvinced by the “panic” logic (although, for sure, there have been indications of panic following recent Ukrainian pinprick but media-optic attacks), as I think that Russia is already learning from these experiences, will now be better able to sustain its focus on its main objectives even under seducements to distraction and diversion of its forces, and will put these experiences to good use in its own strategic response planning. It will be helped of course by superior air surveillance facilities, its more advanced technologies of electronic warfare against enemy drones and missiles, and superior air control generally, given the degradation of Ukrainian air-defenses.

Doctorow cites former Polish deputy minister of defense General Skyzypczak as advocating for Poland to intervene militarily in favor of an “uprising” in Belarus, possibly similar to the false flag “uprising” staged in Belgorod by alleged anti-partisan Russian forces (AKA Ukrainian Nazis). Lukashenko has many times expressed concern about Poland and it is for precisely this reason that Russia in collaboration with Lukashenko, has deployed many of its own forces and, even more significantly, nuclear capabilities, to Belarus.

One consequence of the possibility of any such Polish manouver, as Doctorow notes, is a likely accentuation of Russian nationalist sentiment along the lines of full war footing, and martial law - which Doctorow sees as the direction of Prigozhin’s comments about the progeny of Russia’s elites basking in the sun while the sons of the poor lie dead in the mud of Bakhmut. This is a sentiment which I cannot help but feel sympathy for, given what I know of the luxuriously but ill-founded and misinformed pro-western attitudes prevalent in sectors of the professional and business classes of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and given what I feel is the inevitable socialist correction to the rise of the oligarchs that must come about in payment to the Russian people for their sufferance.

What might such a revived nationalist impulse entail? Doctorow notes that the Ukraine regime can be decapitated at any time with hypersonic missiles (without nuclear warheads, which are inadvisable, of course, given Kiev’s close proximity to the Russian border). But more importantly, he cites Putin’s assurance - given as recently as this week - that Russia will intervene if there is any move of the kind just described in Belarus, which could, if NATO follows up by moving against Russia along its front line, lead Russia to deploy tactical nuclear weapons against NATO forces, destroying them, moving its tanks past them to the next line of resistance, whereupon it would again use nuclear weapons, proceeding in this leapfrog manner as far as the Atlantic (somewhere near Lisbon, Doctorow calculates). Doctorow considers that the US would do nothing in this scenario, as it would rather sacrifice Europe before seeing the destruction, as I would express it, of its East coast, whether or not the USA decides, either just before or just after Russia launches such an attack, to then retaliate.

Doctorow underestimates the factors of radiation and fire that could impede a Russian leapfrog advance of the kind he describes. Also. Doctorow’s ruminations do not take account of the considerable, if only junior, nuclear capabilities of France and the UK, which might, but might not, arrest any manouver of the kind he envisages that Russia might take. But if France or the UK did respond to Russian tactical nukes, then they could expect to see the disappearance of, say, Paris and London, Manchester and Rouen. At this stage nothing matters since the end of the world will have already been ignited.

The very fact that we as intellectuals and commentators are engaged in these considerations, of course, signifies that we have already entered a phase of madness - that we ourselves may already be contaminated by its lunacy - as prelude to extermination.

On a slightly more cheerful note, perhaps, we can ask whether the USA, our rapidly sinking unipolar superpower, is in fact serious about anything at all.

Consider for a moment reports that in Washington there is an influential column, including many neocons and possibly spearheaded none other than by General Milley’s replacement as head of the Chiefs of Staff, General Brown, that the collective west needs to wrap up Ukraine fast in a frozen-conflict Korean-style solution so that the USA can move on to deal with its bigger nemesis, China, using as a typically fabricated neocon regime-change pretext, the case of Taiwan. Taiwan is, of course, recognized by the USA itself as part of China, under the One China Policy that Nixon agreed to in the first place, after decades of US support for the reactionary Kuomintang’s retreat, with a great deal of mainland China’s treasury wealth, to Taipei.

Nixon did this in order to create bluer water between China and Russia and to enhance US prospects in the Vietnam war. Washington has since done everything possible in its power to force Russia and China into an alliance of great strength and astonishing promise, strong enough to destroy the USA.

Is that madness? Quite possibly, as one contemplates how India, now the world’s most populous country after China, is at relative peace with China, is establishing strong and durable bonds to Russia, and, with Russia, also to Iran, and through Iran, now, to Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Syria, not to mention other members of the original BRICS and other countries are likely to seek membership of the BRICS in the very near future. This is indeed a formidable and aggrieved opposition to Washington.

In addition we should take account of the successful meeting this week in Moscow of members of the EurAsian Economic Union which is moving to consolidate free trade and movement. Countries that have previously looked as though they may be drifiting westwards, such as Khazakhstan (which says that integration into the Union is a priority) and Georgia are now looking like fairly solid members of the this grouping which Putin has described an emerging new pole of the new multipolar world. Georgia has undertaken to remove blocks in relations between Russia and Georgia taht among other things will allow direct flights between Moscow and Tbilisi. In this same week and in the context of the EurAsian union meeing we have witnessed a peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which Armenia recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh as belonging to Azerbaijan, and Azerbaijan agreeing to extend a strong measure of autonomy to NK, all guaranteed by Russia.

So certainly, when we consider US policy on Taiwan we are contemplating something that does begin to look like madess. Not only because Taiwan, like Ukraine today, will be decimated by any conflict that the US provokes with China, and that China, like Russia today, will have its fingers nervously poised over its not inconsiderable nuclear options.

Even if the world survives an ensuing nuclear war, which is itself unlikely, the US will be pinned down between far greater giants, its economy in tatters, its people impoverished, its leaders humiliated.

Is it the case then, that Washington leaders are indeed clinically mad? I truly don’t dismiss this as a possibility because these leaders have allowed the USA to descend culturally into a pit of the blackest, most sinister and evil behavior that every day more suggests madness, including daily mass killings, police shootings, and evidence of episodes of sheer lunacy within distressed family and community groups, breezy tolerance for mass homelessness, opiate genocide and drug addiction. Episodes that have become so common that mainstream media reporting cannot keep up with more than a mere fraction of them.

There is some possibility, on the other hand, that the privileged and materially cosetted individuals who have clambered into the cockpits of power in Washington, do sustain a fundamentally rational engagement with their deranged world. Perhaps they understand the empire is sinking and are engaged in what the US is just so very good at: theatrical drama and distraction, the non-existent clothes of a naked emperor, to sustain the game for as long as possible but always running the risk of its bluff being seriously called, as I think is now happening in Ukraine and may happen again in Taiwan before China and the expanded BRICS finally seize control of the wheel.