Are We Going to Wake Up with a Nuke in Our Soup? — Germany’s Markus Becker Points to What Should Be Obvious

© 2015 Peter Free

 

13 February 2015

 

 

The United States’ stubbornly complacent mindlessness is often exasperating

 

Germany’s Spiegel International published a “Hey, look at the dead canary!” warning from Markus Becker:

 

 

Deep mistrust has developed between the West and Russia, and it is having a massive effect on cooperation on security matters.

 

In November 2014, the Russians announced that they would boycott the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit in the United States. In December, the US Congress voted, for the first time in 25 years, not to approve funding to safeguard nuclear materials in the Russian Federation.

 

A few days later, the Russians terminated cooperation in almost all aspects of nuclear security. The two sides had cooperated successfully for almost two decades. But that is now a thing of the past.

 

Instead, Russia and the United States are investing giant sums of money to modernize their nuclear arsenals, and NATO recently announced that it was rethinking its nuclear strategy.

 

At the same time, risky encounters between Eastern and Western troops, especially in the air, are becoming more and more common, a report by the European Leadership Network (ELN) recently concluded.

 

The current rhetoric coming from the rivals in the East and West seems poorly suited to reducing the threat.

 

Recently Philip Breedlove, the head of NATO Allied Command Operations in Europe, even called for a new "red telephone," alluding to the direct teletype connection established in 1963 between the United States and the Soviet Union after the Cuban missile crisis. A direct line had been set up between NATO and the Russian military's general staff in February 2013, but it was cut as a result of the Ukraine crisis.

 

"In the Cold War, we created mechanisms of security. A huge number of treaties and documents helped us to avoid a big and serious military crash," says former [Russian Federation] Foreign Minister Ivanov.

 

"Now the threat of a war is higher than during the Cold War."

 

© 2015 Markus Becker, Nuclear Specter Returns: 'Threat of War Is Higher than in the Cold War', Speigel International (13 February 2015)

 

One would think that these events would have prompted concerned attention from someone on our side of the Big Water. But no.

 

We seem to be content that our capacity for making perpetual (losing) war will insulate us from Russia’s building irritation with our obtuse swagger.

 

 

The moral? — It is a poor miner who ignores the dead canary at his feet

 

I am beginning to think that we can detect a person’s situational awareness by the level of concern he or she displays regarding the dangerous game that the United States is playing with the Russian Federation. After decades of pushing the European Union and NATO into regions where History will not have them, the US is still oblivious to the fact its overreaching is stripping increasingly cornered Russia of non-violent choices. No less than George Kennan (architect of the West’s Soviet containment policy) and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger have warned about this provocatively dumb American tactic.

 

Being a nation comprised of (mostly) ignoramuses hurts us. Lacking historical and cultural insight, we are incapable of intelligently assessing opponents’ motivations and resolve. Mistakes of this magnitude eventually become fatal.

 

The farther the US travels the road of incomprehension, the more likely it is that President Putin is going to trigger a tactical nuke just to wake us up to operational confines of Realpolitik. What are we going to do then?

 

Ignoring the end game — as we characteristically do in our enthusiastic pursuit of war profits — is probably going to bite some of us where we live(d).