Dmitry Orlov

“We are on the verge of World War III!” Is this phrase beginning to sound familiar? And is the fact that it is being endlessly repeated somehow indicative of the fact that we are on the verge of World War III, or is this something else entirely? I believe that it is something else entirely: it is the fact that Europe’s politicians are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They are the product of negative selection performed by the CIA to select the most feckless and unprincipled bunch of nincompoops to perpetuate their policies in Europe. And now it is turning out that the US has become the most feckless and unprincipled of them all! It is past the stage of nervous breakdown (that happened during the first Trump administration) and is now in the throes of psychotic rage. There is more to say about the psychology of all this, but for now let us dismiss the notion that World War III is nigh.

There are currently three armed conflicts under consideration as the main candidates for starting World War III: the former Ukraine, the Jewish state in Palestine (I hesitate to use the term “Israel” since it’s more of a mystical-biblical thing than a real place) and Taiwan. With regard to each of these, a certain game is being played. It’s geopolitics and finance, not poker, but let’s use poker as a metaphor. The losing side, which is the collective West, does not have the option of raising the stakes beyond that which it can afford to put at risk. It also has the option of folding, theoretically, but not politically, since the act of folding is equivalent to political suicide for any Western leader. What I believe is going on is that the breathless talk of World War III is part of a psychological mechanism being used to mask the inevitability of folding — abandoning the conceit of world leadership and spending the next few centuries trying to patch things up and licking their wounds.

Let us dismiss the Zionist-occupied Palestine and the Nazi-occupied former Ukraine from further consideration. With regard to the Zionists, the Iranians recently showed them who is boss, the US very quietly and discretely folded and the Zionists went back to what they do best: killing Palestinians. As a result, we should expect the Zionists to be somewhat better behaved as their economy, down by a quarter to a third already, continues to spiral the drain. Nothing threatens the existence of the Zionist state as much as the fact that they are a bunch of Zionists and there is no nuclear escalation path that leads out of this predicament.

Similarly with the Nazi-occupied former Ukraine. There, we are witnessing the early stages of a certain awakening: the magic healing power of military defeat coupled with no electricity and no running water in major cities is reducing the effectiveness of Western anti-Russian propaganda. No matter how much the propagandists would like, there is no Ukrainian nation and never has been, while individually more and more notional Ukrainians (by passport, if not by culture or language) are realizing that their path to salvation runs through Russia. Some NATO states and statelets (France + the Baltics) are discussing sending their own troops to try to defend the Nazi-occupied former Ukraine against the Russians, but if those troops do join the fray they will get killed and their death will not result in any sort of escalation.

Starting nuclear Armageddon out of sheer embarrassment seems rather less than likely, for there are much easier and less expensive ways to distract public attention. Yes, the loss of the former Ukraine will be even more humiliating for the US than the loss of Afghanistan, but to cover it up Biden could take another pratfall and Kamala could suffer an aneurism from laughing too hard, and then the US national media could discuss nothing but that for a month, after which point the US public will no longer remember what is Ukraine and what that was all supposed to have been about. Instead of Ukraine in the news, there will be a vibrant new democracy called Hawyschtschynya with its capital Lwyw, and since nobody will be able to pronounce any of that, the less that’s said about them, the better.

>Moving on to our third global hot spot, Taiwan. Taiwan’s main trading partner is mainland China, to which it is tied culturally and linguistically (except for a bunch of extra strokes in the Chinese characters). Taiwan’s most highly prized asset is TSMC, the big chipmaking company, but China is making strides in making its own chips. The US is also trying to catch up but is mostly failing (as usual, money has been spent but there is nothing to show for it). Thus, both the US and China depend on Taiwanese chips and if they start a war there, both will lose.

The US is attempting to use its political technology, which it has used to destabilize countries all over the world, to drive a wedge between China and Taiwan, with mixed success. Here, the main determinant of the outcome is the relative rate of economic development (China is not too interested in fighting hot wars): China is developing, the US is decaying. The US is dependent on Chinese technology exports (spare parts of all sorts) to stay economically functional while China’s trade is with the entire world and it is less and less dependent on the US for anything critical.

Militarily, Taiwan is right next to China and across the Pacific Ocean from the US. If a military confrontation were to occur, it would be, first of all, on the high seas, and modern rocketry (which China has and the US doesn’t) makes it quite routine to sink any fleet the US tries to sail all the way over to China’s shores. After the sinking of one or two US aircraft carriers, the US will find that it can’t afford to raise the stakes any further without risking financial collapse and will be forced to fold; and then it will suffer political collapse because folding in the game with “America’s #1 enemy” is politically suicidal.

Thus, it is not in the national interest of the US to escalate to a hot war, and neither is it in China’s. They are both interested in feeding their respective military-industrial complexes, and that may look like they are arming up for war, but what they are really trying to achieve or maintain (and, in the case of the US, failing) is military parity and, in the case of the US, a stratospheric level of systemic corruption that makes the US defense establishment at least 10 times less cost-effective than Russia’s or China’s. The ultimate determinant of success or failure in the conflict between US and China is economic and societal success, and, if judged in this manner, China has already won.

There are those who are able to take this argument on board and yet persist in saying that the US endgame with China is inevitably nuclear war because the US establishment will take death over defeat: a sort of “suicide by China.” The problem there is that the state of the US nuclear triad will not allow the US to even attempt a nuclear attack. The Minuteman III’s haven’t been successfully test-launched from a silo in ages; the Trident II, submarine-based, recently almost killed the UK’s defense minister during an attempted test launch, and the nuclear-armed Tomahawk cruise missiles are none too reliable either and, being slower than a 737 passenger jet, rather easy to shoot down. Add to this the fact that the US is no longer able to produce fissionable materials for updating its nuclear arsenal and has not tested any of its existing arsenal in ages. Probably the best it can hope for is to cause some rather nasty nuclear contamination. But then pulverized uranium and plutonium, being twice as heavy as lead, have a tendency to disappear beneath the waves or underground, never to be seen or heard from again.

Looking at the other side, we have China, Russia and North Korea, each with up-to-date strategic weapons and delivery systems against which the US has no countermeasures. Also, Russia now has air and space defense systems that the US can’t even dream of developing — it is still poking around with its hopeless Patriot batteries which the Russians can blow up at will. The US will never launch a nuclear strike given such odds. There may be no money in abandoning the fiction of world leadership and simply folding, but there is even less money in getting killed.

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Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/099ad8cd-804c-4b07-b629-8892631cee20