US STRATEGY FOR RUSSIA - WAGE WAR BUT OT DELCARE IT
John Helmer
By John Helmer, the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears
Between August 9 and 12, 1941, taking their battleships in turn to meet in a Canadian bay, US President Franklin Roosevelt (centre, left) and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (centre, right) discussed what to do about their adversaries at the time, Germany and Japan. Roosevelt had whispered, and Churchill later reporting him as saying aloud: “I will wage war, but not declare it.”
Until February 21, 2014, President Barack Obama’s (right) whispers were audible; President Vladimir Putin (left) didn’t believe what he was hearing. Now there is armed US war against Russia on the Ukraine and Syria-Turkey fronts; exchanges of armed signals in the Black and Baltic Seas; and an all-fronts war against Russian capital. For the US, no declaration; for Russia, no way back.
Putin said as much at last week’s St. Petersburg meetings: “People feel no danger and that is alarming for me. Why can’t we see that we are dragging the world into an utterly new dimension? This is the problem.” “I am not interested in laying blame now. I simply want to say that if this policy of unilateral actions continues and if steps in the international arena that are very sensitive to the international community are not coordinated then such consequences are inevitable.” By consequences, Putin meant war, undeclared by the US against Russia, compelling Russia to forestall in its defence. “If we continue to act according to this logic, escalating [tensions] and redoubling efforts to scare each other, then one day it will come to a cold war.”
Cold is not the kind of war Putin means. “I don’t know where it [the deployment of the U.S. missile defense system in Europe] might lead to but I know for sure that we will have to respond.”
For the precedents of undeclared US warmaking, provoking the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, and that as the intended backdoor to US war with Germany, it’s necessary to open, The Challenge of Grand Strategy. This is a little-known collection of essays by US historians of the period between World War I and World War II. Open it here.
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