The Lead

Wall Street Channels Dr. Strangelove

by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Aug. 11, 2024

We again draw our readers’ attention to the urgent warning voiced by Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov on Aug. 4 in an interview with Rossiya-1 TV: “The problem is that there are no circuit breakers anymore…. Strikes on the territory of Russia are allowed. The Americans’ assurances that no such decisions have been made and no indulgences were granted to Kiev, are worthless.”

And we again remind our readers of what Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated: that Russia’s public nuclear war doctrine permits Russian use of nuclear weapons only if attacked first with nuclear weapons, or if other attacks threatening the very existence of the Russian state occur.

In light of those two reminders, consider this week’s ongoing Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, with reported support from Georgian, Polish, British and French mercenaries. That incursion doesn’t threaten the existence of the Russian state; but the intention of those behind it, does—as Ryabkov warned.

Consider the clinically insane, Dr. Strangelove-like ejaculations from the financial Establishment circles calling the shots in Ukraine, such as a Wall Street Journal editorial statement of Friday, Aug. 9:

“The bold Ukraine move is also a lesson to the Biden Administration, which in June finally changed its policy to let Ukraine use some U.S. weapons to strike Russian territory…. But the best response is to flow even more weapons into Ukraine, including long-range missiles that target bases and supply lines in Russia, and remove limits on the use of ATACMS missiles. The more Ukraine can put Russia’s war machine at risk, the sooner Ukraine will have more leverage to get more of its own territory back.”

The Atlantic Council on Aug. 8 went so far as to compare the Ukrainian attack on Russia—the world’s great nuclear superpower—with George Washington crossing the Delaware. An Aug. 11 Time magazine article by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, William Taylor, Gen. Barry McCaffrey (ret.), Lt. Gen. James Clapper (ret.), and Stephen Henriques, tried to go one better, comparing the Kursk incursion with the taking of Iwo Jima, the Battles of Trenton and Princeton in the American Revolution, and more.

The extreme danger posed by such “thinking” in policymaking circles in the West was summarized a half-century ago by Lyndon LaRouche, in a June 4, 1975 article “Two Suicidal Fallacies of RAND Doctrine.” Just replace “Soviet Union” with “Russia,” and “Rockefeller” with “Jaime Dimon” or “BlackRock,” and LaRouche’s analysis is fully applicable today.

“It is axiomatic to the circumstances of any direct warfare between the U.S.A. and Soviet Union that once either potential opponent convinces the other that some form of such warfare is about to occur, the other military command has no rational option but to immediately launch efforts directed to quickly administering the preconditions for decisive defeat against the other in terms of the maximum potentials for action of that opponent.

“Any limited war between the two principal powers would result in a decisive loss of the potential of future strategic defense capability by the loser of such a (hypothetical) limited war. At the point such a limited-war loss was seen, continuing the hypothetical case, the potential loser must resort to maximum counteraction on the assumption that this will be his last opportunity to elect such an ultimate defense. Any rational commander, after reviewing such hypothetical schemas, would therefore elect to model his capacities for initially committing his forces to winning a full-scale thermonuclear war at all costs should any warfare between the two principal powers be imminent….

“In summation of this general point, it is overwhelmingly clear that the arguments presented in behalf of the RAND ‘confrontation options’ doctrine depend upon the arbitrary exclusion from consideration of the fundamental analytical problem which the various computer-programs, scenario writers, and gaming teams were purportedly directed to overcoming. It is exactly analogous to such RAND incompetence to suggest the hypothetical case of the mathematician who successfully squared the circle with ruler-and-compass methods by the simple ruse of making the word ‘circle’ mean square….

“In today’s world depression we are immediately confronted with a mass of debt-service and debt-rollover demands which cannot be met even approximately without resorting to literally genocidal intensities of austerity in respect of incomes, working conditions and essential services….

“Confronted with the U.S. Executive’s drive to place the world in immediate jeopardy of general thermonuclear holocaust, confronted with the alternatives of suspending debt payments or abetting the mass murder of their nation’s people and productive potentials, nation after nation throughout the capitalist sector simply will not pay the debts, and will quickly seek new institutions of monetary relations, trade, and credit outside the reach of the Rockefeller-allied institutions.”