John Bolton Declares Total War on Russia
John Bolton will go down in the annals of history as an unparalleled devotee of war and endless escalation. It’s often been said that he’s never seen a conflict he didn’t like.
He’s now published a rabble-rousing OpEd in the Wall Street Journal that’s so wantonly incendiary as to deserve its own article response. It is a total declaration of war on Russia, with the openly stated intent to see Russia completely destroyed, balkanized, and absorbed.
Original article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-american-grand-strategy-to-counter-russia-and-china-asian-nato-aukus-collective-defense-taiwan-da555cf
Un-paywall’d link: https://archive.is/YyDsU
It’s titled ‘A New American Grand Strategy to Counter Russia and China’. But nothing of the strategy is new, though it is decidedly American. The “strategy”, if it can even be called that, is breathtaking in its reckless brazenness.
I’ll summarize the main points. But first, it must be contextualized by calling to notice Bolton’s repeated invocation of NSC 68, which he mentions no less than three times in the relatively brief column. For those that don’t know, NSC 68 is the top secret document issued by Harry Truman in 1950 that effectively began the Cold War.
Sure, the start of the Cold War is typically thought of as even earlier, but this was the document that essentially cemented it with the types of hyper-militarization and massive spending the period was associated with. The document was existential in nature, invoking the end of all ‘civilization’, should the U.S. fail to stop the Soviet Union.
This mien is important to understand in order to truly comprehend the scale of what Bolton is now calling for; it is a cry of desperation of historical proportions. We know Bolton to be a war hawk without equal, but this is beyond the pale even for him.
So, here are the points:
As mentioned, he invokes NSC 68, and states that the U.S. should immediately enact a new contemporary version of said policy.
Washington and its allies “should immediately increase defense budgets to Reagan-era levels.” A major military buildup is ‘necessary’, at the expense of social programs and ‘income distribution schemes.’
He references modern advances like cyber, drone warfare, and hypersonic missiles, stating that the U.S. has fallen behind in critical areas, particularly in the nuclear stockpile.
He calls for the U.S. to resume underground nuclear weapons testing.
He calls for the massive expansion of NATO by adding Israel, Japan, Australia, and others, ignoring, of course, the fact that the N.A. of NATO stands for North Atlantic. I suppose they can always change it retroactively to simply ‘Nuclear Armed Terrorist Organization’, as we’ve all known it to be.
U.S. should “exclude Russia and China” from influence in the Middle East. He deliberately keeps the method by which he intends to carry this out vague, but we can only imagine what those methods might be.
U.S. should develop a prototypical Asian-NATO which includes U.S., Japan, and South Korea.
U.S. and European allies should provide Taiwan with much more military aid and also embed Taiwan into aforementioned alliances, presumably like the ‘Asian-NATO’.
He states directly that “After Ukraine wins the war, we must split the Russia-China axis.” To do this he believes, firstly, that losing the war will “unseat Putin’s regime,” and that Russia’s ‘fragmentation’ east of the Urals is even possible (with the implication that U.S. should obviously push for same).
This region holds ‘incalculable mineral wealth’ (one could picture him salivating into his moustache) and according to him, China must be certainly “eyeing this territory” (projection much?). Russia’s Bering Strait region should be offered to China as enticement.
Significant portions of this region were under Chinese sovereignty until the 1860 Treaty of Peking transferred “outer Manchuria,” including extensive Pacific coast lands, to Moscow. Russia’s uncontrolled dissolution could provide China direct access to the Arctic, including even the Bering Strait, facing Alaska.
In short, the U.S. should push for Russia to lose the war, then be instrumental in completely balkanizing and fracturing Russia, then selling off the pieces to China in a bid to woo them into a new Sino-American partnership a la the Kissinger/Nixon/Sino-Soviet split era.
The utter callousness and total disregard for any norms of international law with which he candidly calls for the complete breakup of Russia is both appalling and shocking to witness. And to think this is a creature who maintains a hefty influence on policy in the Beltway is a frightening notion.
With that said, his ideas are as pedantically fusty and outdated as his appearance, merely rehashing old-hat Kissinger-era memes which would merely provoke a belly-laugh from both Russia and China. Bolton is the prototypical low-IQ MIC apparatchik who apes the ideas of greater men. He is exactly the type of worm that the ancient, civilizational-wisdom-bearing statesmen of Russia and China could do nothing but mock behind his back.
If he thinks enticing China with some Siberian mineral wealth like a cheap drug kingpin giving a sniff will sway President Xi from his deeply-rooted partnership with Putin and Russia, then he must truly have a Bolt-on brain, and not one of natural make. What these one-trick apparatchiks never seem to grok is that China’s memory is as long as the roots of the Ginkgo tree. They have emerged from their ‘Century of Humiliation’ with lessons learned and will never again fall to the whims and wiles of abject, two-bit Western creatures like Dolt-on.
For all his simplicity, his calls for mass global hyper-militarization on the other hand are no less dangerous. His pleas are likely representative of the ‘old guard’ of war hawks’ sentiments, which means these are the types of blind Cold War Redux escalations we can expect to continue on indefinitely.
But the Dolt should really be careful of what he wishes for. With the direction things are headed in his own country, it’s far more likely it will be the U.S. that fractures and is forced to pawn Alaska back to Russia, rather than his juvenile fantasy of glomming off Russia’s Bering Strait territories to China.
With that said, we must take his urgent plea as an admission of the Empire to the seriousness of the current ground-shifting changes the world is undergoing. Bolton himself references the shift of history’s tectonic plates in his opener:
The U.S. and its allies can’t afford to drift aimlessly as history’s tectonic plates shift.
And the reverent tone with which he recalls both Xi and Putin’s recent remarks as to the ‘momentous’ nature of the world’s ongoing epochal changes, leaves one with the firm conclusion that the Empire, for the first time, is truly, duly worried.
They are scrambling to pit friend against friend in a desperate ploy to gain the upper-hand. But the civilizational giants with which the pipsqueak Eagle is toying with have no more patience for its flighty games. The era of Russian-Chinese dominance starts now, and the Bald Eagle will soon be just a plucked turkey.
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I get the impression the MSM keeps giving this lunatic air time in order to make the rest of the neo-cons appear sane and restrained by comparison.
That is no secret. What is remarkable is that Bolton said this out loud.