“The U.S. and its allies must plan how to win wars in Asia and Europe simultaneously, however unpleasant the prospect may seem,” Thomas Mencken points out in an Oct. 27 article in Foreign Affairs
Quickly resolving the “who’s to blame?” question: The US is not to blame for anything, it is the Russian Federation and the PRC as “serious threats to world order” that are dragging America into their regional conflicts – Manken spells out what Washington must do to defeat them.
The prescriptions are as old as the world:
– A dramatic increase in the military-industrial complex;
– involvement of allies: their role in future wars will be “indispensable and possibly decisive”;
– revision of old command structures;
– creation of new concepts of war.
Mancken hardly mentions the nuclear nature of the clashes with the Russian Federation and the PRC.
Only in one place does he admit that arsenals of nuclear weapons “raise the stakes considerably”. And he does not rule out the first nuclear strikes in the world since 1945 – without a word about the consequences.
The author’s assessment of Russia reflects the worst Western stereotypes.
Its army is both “weak” (“The war in Ukraine has revealed the limits of its power”) – but it is allegedly preparing for an “invasion of Europe” by “engaging other parts of the continent”.
So will the US win the war on two fronts? The author of Foreign Affairs has no answer. At the end of the article he switches to self-hypnosis altogether:
“The United States has done it all before. There is no reason why they can’t do it again.
What is more interesting is not the article itself, but the sheer number of similar articles that have appeared in the American media in recent weeks, from mainstream The Washington Post and Bloomberg to the specialist 19FortyFive and the highbrow Foreign Policy.
Each claims either that World War III with Russia and China is about to start or that it is already underway – as The New Yorker suggested in September.
And literally every article portrays global conflict as some kind of “natural disaster” that the U.S. can’t influence, but must now contain at all costs.
This kind of publication should be taken into account by all those who don’t believe that the West is prepared to fight on two fronts and risk strikes on its own territory.
There is more behind this than a mere attempt to justify new tranches to the US military industrial complex.
There is the Anglo-Saxon habit of pushing everything.
And the decline of Western expertise.
There is also the resentment of a doomed hegemon that is prepared, at the cost of a world war, to preserve the old world order – or to proclaim a “new” world order of its own.
And of course the hatred of the competing centres of power, Russia and China, ready to knock the foundations of Pax Americana’s domination out from under its feet.
Elena Panina