Four days have passed since Russia delivered their unexpected answer to the West’s latest escalation. The launching of U.S. ATACMS missiles, targeted and guided by U.S. forces, into undisputed Russian territory last week was supposed to be part of a pre-rigged game, where the geopoliticians have calculated that they can take the next step in degrading and breaking Russia. After all, the reasoning goes, we can keep ratcheting up the pressure on Russia and they would never go to a nuclear exchange, cause they would lose everything. But Russia unleashed not a nuclear bomb, but a new hypersonic missile with remarkable precision, that indeed could have carried a nuclear bomb.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been open and candid for years now that their focus on an asymmetric response to NATO’s military threat, coming closer and closer to Russia’s border, involved new types of missiles that could not be defended against by NATO anti-ballistic missile systems. Why was that not taken seriously? Why, instead, was of gobs of money and effort made to counter the so-called Russian threat in the ‘information space’ and their so-called devious manipulation of gullible American voters?
The ugly truth is that the cynical Western world no longer believes in new physical principles, in actual scientific work, in human creativity. It believes in magic, where the dollar system and its financial institutions a the tail wagged by massive betting games in “financial derivatives.” The addiction is a true strategic disaster.
Today, after four days of the West having been caught off-guard, and four days of being tongue-tied, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov delivered the cold, hard message: Russia has, for now, the only deployable hypersonic missile system, so their need to try to win the West over to a reasonable deliberation of a security architecture is no longer their only option. He stated: “The time has come when persuasion and some arguments can continue to be applied, but practice shows that they do not have the proper effect, so more powerful means are needed.” He then cited the successful deployment of the Oreshnik missile on Nov. 21 as an example of what they will now rely on for deterrence.
Call it the “hypersonic gap” or simply a big fat slap in the face—but Western cynicism, that soul-sickness, has left the London-Washington so-called “unipolar” hegemon exposed to both military and financial disasters.
The good news is... Moscow did not include a nuclear bomb in that Nov. 21 attack. Rather, Putin announced openly and candidly, on Nov. 7 at the [Valdai Discussion Club](President Putin: A Polyphonic World System In Which All Voices Are Heard), his polyphonic approach to statecraft. If one listens closely, that means he thinks that there is a fundamental value to voices that differ from his—including Europe’s Renaissance and America’s anti-colonialism—which is real, regardless of whether Europeans or Americans have strayed from their positive identity. So, instead of gathering up his super-weapons to gain the advantage in a pre-emptive nuclear war, he sent over a sample of what they’ve accomplished. Call it tough love, but it was underlined today by Ryabkov.
It were better that another four days did not pass with tongue-tied leaders in the West. How to make them find their actual voice? Today, there was one small but curious example, when Germany’s Angela Merkel—who spent 16 years as the head of state mumbling her way through quite a bit of hypocrisy and cover stories—clearly stated that Russia has a lot of nuclear weapons and that the central mission now is to take whatever measures are needed to pre-empt nuclear war.
What measures are needed? The central road was expressed in today’s press release by the Schiller Institute, laying out the demonstrable reality that the road to peace is economic development. That central road is entitled, “Development Drive Means Billions of New Jobs, No Refugees, No War"—the necessary and happy centerpiece of deliberation for the next twelve days, to make [the Dec. 7-8 conference](In the Spirit of Schiller and Beethoven: All Men, Become Brethren!) a turning point—actually, a polyphonic success, the only type of weapon capable of rooting out the soul-sickness at the root of our strategic disasters. So, it takes work. That could start, in the U.S., by giving proper thanks for the necessary and joyful task immediately before us.
Clearly, the Pilgrims, along with the U.S.’s founding fathers, knew that the world could not stumble along, suffering from the lack of real development. Perhaps it is time to do them proper homage.
