By Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
As nuclear weapons stockpiles worldwide rise and countries upgrade their warheads and missiles there is an unprecedented need to de-escalate tensions and prevent nuclear Armageddon.
Upon reading such a statement, one might regard it as roughly self-evident. But the important thing is that it wasn’t me or you, it was Deputy Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces General John E. Hyten who formulated it, expressing simultaneously the hope that the cooler minds will prevail. He made those statements during a speech at one of Washington’s most important think tanks, the Brooking Institution.
General Hyten’s speech at the Brookings Institution is important for three reasons. The first is that the General is the second-ranked American active duty military officer in command of an arsenal capable of wiping out life from the planet. He knows all too well what he’s talking about.
Secondly, because neither the American politicians nor the American military have made such statements for a quarter of a century, that is, since they felt as all – powerful Gods, after the fall of the Soviet regime. We are in the position of Rome after the destruction of Carthage, the Republican ideologue Charles Krautthammer put it.
And third because we have a lot of new evidence that confirms how close we came to nuclear war under Trump. Even on January 3rd this year, just four days before his departure from the White House, the proposal of unleashing a war against Iran, which would probably develop into a nuclear one, was examined in a meeting in the White House. The “mad” Christian evangelist Zionist vice-President Pence was for launching the war, the more pragmatist Pompeo against. Not because he did not want such a war, but because he feared that it was already too late and such an attack against Teheran would backfire and become a boomerang for the “Death International” (Pence, Pompeo, Bannon, Netanyahu and Trump himself among others). (http://www.defenddemocracy.press/netanyahu-urged-trump-to-attack-iran-after-he-lost-the-presidency/).
General Hyten recalled that “we never fought with the Soviet Union” and added: “Our purpose is to never go to war with China and Russia” because doing so “would destroy the world and the global economy. It’s going to be bad for everyone and we need to ensure we don’t take that road.’
Let us remind you at this point that a large American TV channel (which, like all of them everything, is finally controlled by the global oligarchy of Financial Capital) was pressing Secretary of State Blinken months ago to commit to a military response if China threatened Taiwan. (http://www.defenddemocracy.press/cbs-the-empire-of-finance-blinken-and-china-media-owners-want-war/). Which confirms that support for Biden and his policies from the Great American and global financial capital (as well as from the majority of American Jewish leaders), it is not unconditional and it is not extending to the entirety of Biden’s politics. After all, the American capitalist class began funding Biden only after Sanders’ defeat and it took two meetings of the top American capitalists, according to the Financial Times, for them to be persuaded to support the election result.
But the General said also something else quite unprecedented. He attributed the modernization of the entire Russian nuclear arsenal from Moscow’s concerns about the intentions and plans of the US, that is, indirectly but clearly he criticized his country’s policy after the “end” of the Cold War. He even admitted, also indirectly but clearly, that the West has underestimated the probability of Russia fully re-acquiring the status of a nuclear superpower.
Hyten on China
The general, although he added that progress has been made in improving US – Russian relations, he also stressed that we are far from total stability, while no progress has been made in the field of American-Chinese relations.
General Hyten expressed particular concern about the unprecedented rapid development of the Chinese military nuclear program and the rapid construction of hundreds of nuclear missile launch silos by China. He added that “there is no limit to what China can put in these silos. With Russia we are limited to 1550 nuclear warheads each (as a result of the US-Russian arms control agreements)… with China there is no such limit … and one has to wonder why they are building this huge, huge nuclear capability?”. He also complained about the bureaucracy prevented the rapid implementation of the US nuclear modernization program.
Hoping to help the querulous general at this point to answer this riddle that concerns him, let us also risk, even if we do not have the information and analysis of the North American state, of its agencies and institutes, the assumption that the Chinese probably did not like Mr. Trump’s games with North Korea and his threat that it will make this country disappear, when he spoke from the podium of the UN General Assembly, in 2017. They obviously realized that if this threat was directed at Korea, it was also directed at themselves. We assume the whole Cold-War climate that the Americans have since developed against China must not have helped matters.
If the Biden administration has taken serious steps to deescalate the Cold War with Russia and to avert Israel from launching an attack on Iran, it has been very “timid” regarding China, probably because of the heavy pressure it receives from important sectors of the establishment and out of fear it will be accused from the Trumpian Far Right. A great problem is that all those shifts in policy are not formulated clearly and are not discussed clearly. Often the political debate is completely irrelevant (*)
The statements of the deputy commander-in-chief of the American armed forces should not be considered as accidental. They are certainly a signal by the US military itself to the US establishment and also to Moscow and Beijing. The US Armed Forces declare that way their support for the current US President’s policy of stopping or reversing the most dangerous trends of the policies of his predecessor, affecting world security. General Hyten is the official representative of the military pillar of the American “Deep State”, not to be confused with “Deep world Finbance”, and as such he seems to send a double message on the one hand to those Western players who insist on unconditional escalation with China and to Beijing that it must cooperate to de-escalate a dangerous tension.
