Game, Set & Match to Russia

Putin, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller, and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Photograph Kremlin Ru, Public Domain

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…unless NATO carries out a pre-emptive strike

by Richard Steinhardt

We can all agree that the political situation in the world today is grave. Has the geopolitical situation ever been more precarious? The German leader, Chancellor Mertz, says he is preparing for war and the head of NATO says Europeans must prepare “for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured” and  Air Chief Marshal Knighton says British families must be prepared to send their sons and daughters to war against Russia. The wall-to-wall messaging is Orwellian and Manichean. This is a truly alarming situation that needs to be diffused, not made worse. Wherever your sympathies may lie in the war in the Ukraine the last thing we want is a European-wide war that would lead, inevitably, to a global conflagration.

If you were alive then, try to recall the atmosphere of dread we felt in Great Britain in the 1980s. Back then people were so worried about nuclear destruction that the anti-war movement grew to huge proportions, and the women at Greenham common surrounded the US missile base at Greenham Common in protest against US first strike weapons.

Today, there is far more to worry about and yet the penny doesn’t seem to have dropped. People have been caught at unawares and the anti-war movement is only just starting up in earnest. None of us truly believe the worst will happen, and we remain confident it won’t, but this is to be irrational. The possibility does exist. Listen to our bellicose European leaders who pretend they are willing preparing to lead us all into the valley of death in their game of poker with the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China.

Remember that in the 1980s the Northern Hemisphere and Australia were nearly turned into a cinder as a result of the Abel Archer incident of 1983, when the Soviets mistook a NATO military exercise for the real thing. One wrong move and we all die in this Ukrainian standoff.

The positive development is that Finance Capital is in decline. The arguments for this assertion are complex, but in general terms, the shift in power towards a multipolar world with the People’s Republic of China at the centre means that the real economy and manufacturing and commodities and hard work is reasserting itself. From this recalibration, the most significant transformations are emerging.

From the perspective of developing world nationalists, a profound shift has occurred. China and Russia have formed an exceptionally close alliance, the China-Russia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of Coordination for a New Era (Xinhua, 2023). This partnership effectively rescued the Russian Federation from the U.S.A. and the U.S.A’s proxy wars and attempted coups. Predatory U.S. capitalism has met its Stalingrad.

The response from the Western metropolis has not been intelligent. Instead of seeking accommodation after the nationalist elements (originating in the former USSR) reasserted themselves in order to stop the corruption crime and pillaging of the 1990s, the US metropolis of capitalism, guided by its think tanks, opted for another Brzezinski-style operation, attempting yet again to effect regime change, but this time in the Russian Federation. The idea was to apply pressure from all sides. The beginnings of this were visible almost as soon as Vladimir Putin became President and put an end to the war in Chechenia.

All the Russian Federation’s overtures to the west were ignored and consequently NATO was expanded until the enemy was at the Russian Federation’s gate. It was only then that the government of the Russian Federation finally came to terms with the reality of the implacable enmity of Western imperialism and decided to act. President Putin— again, a representative of the old guard, the former Soviet nationalist branch within the state apparatus—delivered a seminal speech in Munich in 2007 in which he said:“NATO expansion… is a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust” (Kremlin.ru, 2007) . The implication was that if Western capitalism did not cease its efforts to carve up the Russian Federation like a cake, Russia would have no alternative but to re-arm. This was not an idle threat. This warning was issued even as NATO expanded further in increments, and sought to destabilise formerly neutral buffer states.

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Constant attempts were made by the NATO group to pull Ukraine, Georgia, and others into the capitalist, Anglo-Western orbit. As is well known, Ukraine is naturally divided. The possibility of a stable, wholly pro-Western Ukraine never existed. Thus, the U.S., with its allies, prompted by financial capitalists in petroleum and armaments, needed to orchestrate the change in Ukraine and sponsored and supported a nationalist putsch. They failed in other bordering states but in Ukraine proceeded to foster extreme right-wing and historical collaborationist nationalist forces—similar to those cultivated in the Baltics and Poland—and to build a massive Ukrainian army. The expectation was that a Russian Federation with an economy the size of Italy’s could not resist any onslaught.

President Putin and his strategically minded government anticipated these actions. They intervened on behalf of regions of Ukraine that declared they did not wish to be part of the nationalist Ukraine that was now shelling them. The intention of the Russian Federation in launching its Special Military Operation was to bring the whole situation in Ukraine back to neutrality through hard negotiation. However, the piratical British and the oligarchic structures in the U.S., (now fully controlling a media, Word Wide Web, apparatus acting to guarantee the compliance of their citizenry) decided to go all-in. NATO instructed Ukraine to reject the peace accords it had already signed, and pushed Ukraine into waging a war of attrition to incur sufficient costs on Russia to trigger internal regime change, a gamble that appeared worth the candle given the Western self-perception of technical and military superiority and, of course, the West had assets and allies within Russia.

Prior to the launch of the invasion, a pandemic began (speculated in some circles to have originated from a virus leak in China linked to American experimental research lab). The West blamed China, even as entities with shares in pharmaceutical companies (and with an interest in the very same laboratory in Wuhan that released the virus) were gathered in by Western governments to organise the global response. After analysis, it seems that the lock down was not only a measure designed to improve public safety, but also an experiment in social engineering and leveraged in order to accustom Western populations to new emergencies, the destruction of norms, and top-down control—this was a project planned in the deep, dark recesses of a multi-billion dollar security state that was and is increasingly controlling the internet and that would release AI in 2022.

What the dominant financial, military, energy and tech elites in the capitalist metropolis failed to fully understand was that by threatening both Russia and China simultaneously, they would inevitably bring them together. This alliance awakened the historical memory of all peoples who have experienced the evils of U.S. imperialist hegemony. An alliance of sovereign states with mutual interests—not imperialist, but centered on national development and multipolarity—was forged. This bloc includes not only Russia and China but also Brazil, India and South Africa and BRICS has recently expanded to Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates. Partner nations to BRICS are Belarus, Cuba, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam. More nations have applied to join.

Critically, due to structures inherited from the past and capacity for long-term planning, between 2008 and 2022, the Russian Federation was able to advance the development of a series of highly sophisticated weapons systems such as the Sarmat ICBM, the Burevestnic nuclear powered cruise missile, the Poseidon nuclear torpedo, the Oreshnik and the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles. Meanwhile, as noted in BRICS defence analyses, corruption in NATO armaments corporations had led to systemic failures—over-designed, over-cost systems that underperformed.

Concurrently, U.S. and global capital’s offshoring of production to China created a dependency it now regretted. China, with its vast market and burgeoning technology sectors—from chips to weapons—achieved strategic independence. An alliance with Russia created an oppositional force more formidable than NATO itself. NATO’s only remaining option became deception and the threat of force and an underhand first nuclear strike.

We have now reached a stage where, to reinforce the West’s negotiating position against a defeated Ukrainian army, the unspoken threat of a NATO attack has been voiced by an Italian Western military official. Italy’s Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, the chairman of NATO’s military committee, who suggested that NATO might carry out a pre-emptive strike (he later clarified that he meant a pre-emptive cyber attack). The response from President Putin, as reported by TASS and Xinhua, was immediate and unambiguous: any attack would be met with a “devastating response, after which opponents will have no chances left”. The peace movement now looks like it drags along like a tin can behind NATO’s tank. NATO and western imperialism’s final, speculative, mind bogglingy dangerous move was countered by Russia. Game. Set. Match.

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Richard Steinhardt is a committed socialist and a radical humanist and has published in the Morning Star and a variety of other communist and socialist publications. He believes that human conscience and understanding should always precede dogma and deterministic formulas posturing as ‘social science’.