A reminder: Russia’s nuclear policy changed from a strict No First Use posture to a more active posture in that they said that incoming missiles will be treated as nuclear. It is still a defensive policy and not offensive.  They still maintain a posture that a nuclear war cannot and must not be fought.  This has been the posture for a while now  The US maintains a First Use posture and China maintains a No First Use posture.

The following article by Karaganov burst into the Russian consciousness. The idea that forms it, is that the other major nuclear power, namely the US and NATO itself, still has an overt First Use policy and they are not fearful of the Russians, as they believe the Russians will do nothing in terms of red lines.

Those who read the latest Michael Hudson, will remember this and I quote:

“They realize that the only kind of war that America can win is an atomic war. It doesn’t have troops of its own. It can’t mount an invasion. It can’t take over a country. All it can do is destroy. That’s the American policy.

This is a demonstration to China. What will happen to your dams if you insist in keeping China as one country and not doing as we recommend breaking China into five parts. If you try to keep controlling Xinjiang and other provinces, we’ll just have to blow up the dams and make sure that you’re not one country anymore. This is just like we’re doing in Ukraine for Russia. This seems to be the Western strategy.

In America, they said Russia doesn’t have any red lines. Again and again, Putin has said that this is a red line, that’s a red line, and yet he hasn’t done anything. A number of generals have given speeches this week, saying, “There is no red line for Russia, and we can see there’s no red line for China either. We’re sending our boats into the Straits of China, and China’s letting us send the boats right there. We can do anything we want.”

There is more.  A new Seymore Hersch article colors in the state of the US State Department:

Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman has resigned, and her last day in office is June 30. Her departure has triggered near-panic inside the State Department about the person many there fear will be chosen to replace her: Victoria Nuland. Nuland’s hawkishness on Russia and antipathy for Vladimir Putin fits perfectly with the views of President Biden. Nuland is now the undersecretary for political affairs and has been described as “running amok,” in the words of a person with direct knowledge of the situation, among the various bureaus of the State Department while Secretary of State Antony Blinken is on the road. If Sherman has a view about her potential successor, and she must, she’s unlikely ever to share it.

With that background, we go directly to the machine translation of Karaganov’s bombshell article with main thesis: The fear of nuclear escalation needs to be restored. Otherwise, humanity is doomed, and no matter who wins this war, a long term and lasting peace cannot be restored.   The subtext here is that nukes must be used.

Russia in Global Affairs

June 13, 2023

A difficult but necessary decision

The use of nuclear weapons can save humanity from a global catastrophe

By SERGEY KARAGANOV

Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, Academic Supervisor of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Honorary Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy

Machine translation: https://globalaffairs.ru/articles/tyazhkoe-no-neobhodimoe-reshenie/

MAGAZINE “PROFILE”

https://profile.ru/politics/primenenie-yadernogo-oruzhiya-mozhet-uberech-chelovechestvo-ot-globalnoj-katastrofy-1338893/

I will share a few thoughts that I have been nurturing for a long time, and they took shape after the recent Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy – one of the brightest in its 31-year history.

A growing threat

It seems to me that our country and its leadership are facing a difficult choice. It is increasingly clear that the clash with the West will not end if we win a partial or even crushing victory in Ukraine.

If we completely liberate the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, this will be a minimal victory. A little more success will be the liberation of the entire East and South of present-day Ukraine within a year or two. But there will still be a piece of it with an even more embittered ultranationalist population, pumped up with weapons – a bleeding wound that threatens inevitable complications, war again. Perhaps the worst situation can arise if, at the cost of monstrous sacrifices, we liberate the whole of Ukraine and remain in ruins with a population that mostly hates us. His “re-education” will take more than a decade.

Any of these options, especially the latter, will distract Russia from the urgently needed shift of its spiritual, economic, military-political center to the East of Eurasia. We will be stuck in a hopeless western direction. And the territories of present-day Ukraine, primarily central and western, will take on resources – managerial, human, financial. These regions were deeply subsidized in Soviet times. The enmity with the West will continue, it will support a sluggish guerrilla civil war.

A more attractive option is the liberation and reunification of the East and the South, and the imposition of surrender on the remnants of Ukraine with complete demilitarization, the creation of a buffer, friendly state. But such an outcome is possible only if and when we can break the will of the West to incite and support the Kiev junta, force it to retreat strategically.

And here I come to the most important, but almost non-discussed issue. The deep, even the main reason for the Ukrainian crisis, as well as many other conflicts in the world, is the general increase in the military threat – the accelerating failure of the modern ruling Western elites created by the globalization tour of recent decades – for the most part comprador in Europe (the Portuguese colonialists called the local merchants who served them compradors – SK). This failure is accompanied by an unprecedentedly rapid change in the balance of power in the world in favor of the Global Majority , the economic locomotive of which is China and partly India, and history has put Russia forward to the role of military-strategic support.This weakening infuriates not only the imperial-cosmopolitan elites (Biden and Co.), but also frightens the imperial-national (Trump). The West is losing the opportunity it had for five centuries to suck wealth from the whole world, imposing, first of all, by brute force, political and economic orders and establishing its cultural dominance. So a quick end to the defensive but aggressive confrontation deployed by the West cannot be expected. This collapse of moral, political and economic positions has been brewing since the mid-1960s, was interrupted by the collapse of the USSR, but resumed with renewed vigor in the 2000s (the milestones were the defeats of the Americans and their allies in Iraq, Afghanistan, as well as 2008 – the beginning of the crisis of the Western economic model).

To stop this avalanche-like slide downwards, the West temporarily consolidated. The United States turned Ukraine into a shock fist in order to use it to tie the hands of Russia – the military-political core of the non-Western world freeing itself from the shackles of neocolonialism. Ideally, the Americans would like, of course, just to blow up our country, thus radically weakening the rising alternative superpower – China. We, either not understanding the invitability of a collision, or, accumulating strength, hesitated with a preemptive strike.And besides, following in line with modern, mainly Western military-political thought, they imprudently overestimated the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, inaccurately assessed the situation in Ukraine and did not quite successfully launch a special operation.

Falling inside, the Western elites began to actively feed the weeds that made their way on the basis of seventy years of well-being, satiety and peace – all these anti-human ideologies: the denial of the family, homeland, history, love between a man and a woman, faith, service to higher ideals, everything that makes up the essence of man. Those who resist are weeded. The goal is to manipulate people in order to reduce their ability to resist the increasingly unjust and harmful to man and humanity, modern “globalist” capitalism.

Along the way, the weakened United States is finishing off Europe and other countries dependent on them, trying to throw them into the furnace of confrontation after Ukraine. The elites in most of these states have lost their bearings and, panicking over the failure of their own positions inside and outside, obediently lead their countries to the slaughter. At the same time, due to the greater failure, the feeling of powerlessness, centuries-old Russophobia, the degradation of the intellectual level and the loss of strategic culture, their hatred is almost fiercer than in the United States.

The vector of development of most Western countries unequivocally indicates a movement towards a new fascism and (so far) “liberal” totalitarianism.

Further, and this is the most important thing, it will only get worse there. Truce is possible, but reconciliation is not. Anger and despair will continue to grow in waves and with maneuvers. This vector of movement of the West serves as an unequivocal sign of a drift towards the outbreak of the Third World War. It is already beginning and may flare up into a full-fledged fire due to accident or the growing incompetence and irresponsibility of the ruling circles of the West.

The introduction of artificial intelligence, the robotization of war increases the threat of unintended escalation. Machines can get out of the control of confused elites.

The situation is aggravated by “strategic parasitism” – over 75 years of relative peace, people have forgotten the horrors of war, have ceased to be afraid even of nuclear weapons . Everywhere, but especially in the West, the instinct of self-preservation has been weakened.

I have been studying the history of nuclear strategy for many years and have come to an unequivocal, albeit not entirely scientific, conclusion for myself. The emergence of nuclear weapons is the result of the intervention of the Almighty, who was horrified to see that people, Europeans and the Japanese who joined them, unleashed two world wars in one generation, claiming tens of millions of lives, and handed over to humanity the weapons of Armageddon, showed those who had lost their fear of hell that it exists. On this fear rested the relative peace of the last three-quarters of a century. Now that fear is gone.The unthinkable is happening from the point of view of previous ideas about nuclear deterrence – the ruling circles of a group of countries, in a fit of desperate rage, unleashed a full-scale war in the underbelly of a nuclear superpower.

The fear of nuclear escalation needs to be restored. Otherwise, humanity is doomed.

Now, on the fields of Ukraine , not only and not even so much what Russia and the future world order will be decided. But also whether the world we are used to will be preserved at all or whether radioactive ruins will remain on the planet, poisoning the remnants of humanity.

By breaking the West’s will to aggression, we will not only save ourselves, finally liberate the world from the Western yoke that lasted five centuries, but also save all of humanity. By pushing the West towards catharsis and the abandonment of hegemony by its elites, we will force it to retreat before a global catastrophe occurs. Humanity will get a new chance for development.

A nuclear strike on the territory of Ukraine will not stop anyone, a strike on the territory of Europe will not be considered critical, but a strike on the territory of the United States is another matter. About why it is important to return a sense of fear to geopolitics, Fyodor Lukyanov talked for the program “International Review” with Dmitry Trenin. We publish the full version of the conversation.

Proposed solution

Naturally, there is a tough fight ahead. It is also necessary to solve internal problems – to finally get rid of Western-centrism in the minds and Westerners in the managerial layer, from compradors and their characteristic thinking. (However, here the West, unwittingly, helps us with might and main). The three-hundred-year voyage to Europe has given us a lot of useful things, helped to shape our great culture. Of course, we will carefully preserve the European heritage in it. But it’s time to go home, to ourselves. Start, using the accumulated baggage, to live with your mind. Our friends, the Foreign Ministry, recently made a real breakthrough, calling Russia a state-civilization in the Foreign Policy Concept.I would add – a civilization of civilizations , open to both the North and the South, the West and the East. Now the main direction of development is the South, the North, first of all, the East.

The confrontation with the West in Ukraine, no matter how it ends, should not distract us from the strategic internal movement – spiritual, cultural, economic, political, military-political – to the Urals, Siberia, the Great Ocean. We need a new Ural-Siberian strategy, which includes several powerful uplifting projects, including, of course, the creation of a third capital located in Siberia. This movement should become part of the urgently needed formulation of the “Russian dream” – the image of the Russia and the world to which one wants to aspire.

I have written many times, and I am not the only one, that great states without a big idea cease to be such or simply go nowhere. History is strewn with shadows and graves of the powers that have lost it. This idea must be created from above, without relying, as fools or lazy people do, on the fact that it will come from below. It must meet the deep values ​​and aspirations of the people and, most importantly, lead us all forward. But it is the responsibility of the elite and the country’s leadership to formulate it. The delay in putting forward such a dream idea has been unacceptably delayed.

But in order for the future to take place, it is necessary to overcome the resistance of the forces of the past – the West. If this is not done, a full-scale and probably the last World War for humanity will almost certainly begin.

And here I come to the most difficult part of this article. We can fight for another year or two or three, sacrificing thousands and thousands of our best men and grinding tens and hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of the territory that is now called Ukraine who have fallen into a tragic historical trap. But this military operation cannot end with a decisive victory without imposing a strategic retreat or even surrender on the West. We must force the West to abandon its attempts to turn back history, to abandon attempts at global domination and force it to take care of itself, digesting its current multi-level crisis. Roughly speaking, it is necessary for the West to simply “fall off” and not interfere with Russia and the world moving forward.

And for this, it is necessary to restore in him the lost sense of self-preservation, convincing him that attempts to wear down Russia by setting Ukrainians against it are counterproductive for the West itself. It will be necessary to restore the credibility of nuclear deterrence, lowering the unacceptably raised threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, prudently but quickly going up the ladder of deterrence-escalation. The first steps have already been taken by the relevant statements by the president and other leaders, the beginning of the deployment of nuclear weapons and their carriers in Belarus, and an increase in the combat capability of the strategic deterrence forces. There are a lot of steps on this ladder. I counted a dozen or two.It may go so far as to warn compatriots and all people of good will about the need to leave their places of residence near facilities that could become targets of nuclear strikes in that provide direct support to the Kyiv countries regime. The adversary must know that we are ready to launch a preemptive retaliatory strike for all his current and past aggressions in order to prevent a slide into global thermonuclear war.

I have said and written many times that if you properly build a strategy of intimidation and even use, the risk of a “retaliatory” nuclear strike, or indeed any other strike on our territory, can be minimized. Only if a madman sits in the White House, and besides, who hates his country, will America dare to strike at the “defense” of the Europeans, incurring a response, sacrificing conditional Boston for the sake of conditional Poznan. Both the United States and Europe are well aware of this, they just prefer not to think. And we contributed to this thoughtlessness with our peace-loving statements.Having studied the history of American nuclear strategy, I know that after the USSR acquired a convincing ability to retaliate with a nuclear strike, Washington did not seriously consider, although it bluffed in public, the possibility of using nuclear weapons on Soviet territory. If the possibility of using nuclear weapons was considered, it was only for the “advancing” Soviet troops in Western Europe. I know that Chancellors Kohl and Schmidt fled from the bunkers as soon as the question of such use arose during the exercises.

You need to go down the deterrence-escalation ladder quickly enough. Given the vector of development of the West – the degradation of most of its elites – each of their next calls is more incompetent and more ideologically blinkered than the previous ones. And so far it is not to be expected that these elites will be replaced by more responsible and reasonable ones. This will happen only after catharsis – the abandonment of ambition.

It is impossible to repeat the “Ukrainian scenario”. For a quarter of a century, we did not listen to those who warned that NATO expansion would lead to war, tried to delay, to “agree”. And as a result, we got a heavy armed conflict. Now the price of indecision is an order of magnitude higher.

But what if they don’t back down? Have you finally lost your sense of self-preservation? Then you will have to hit a group of targets in a number of countries in order to bring those who have lost their minds to their senses.

This is a morally terrible choice – we use the weapons of God, condemning ourselves to heavy spiritual losses. But if this is not done, not only Russia may perish, but most likely the entire human civilization will end.

We’ll have to make this choice ourselves. Even friends and sympathizers won’t support you at first. If I were Chinese, I would not want to end the conflict too soon and decisively, because it delays US forces and makes it possible to accumulate forces for a decisive battle – direct or, in accordance with the best precepts of Sun Tzu, forcing the enemy to retreat without a fight. I would also oppose the use of nuclear weapons because the rise of the confrontation to the nuclear level means a shift to an area where my country (China) is still weak. In addition, decisive action is not in line with the Chinese foreign policy philosophy, which emphasizes economic factors (with the accumulation of military power), avoiding direct confrontation.I would support an ally, providing him with a rear, but I would hide behind his back, without interfering in the fight. (However, perhaps I do not understand this philosophy enough and attribute motives to my Chinese friends that are not peculiar to them). If Russia had used nuclear weapons, the Chinese would have condemned it. But I would also be glad in my heart that a powerful blow has been dealt to the reputation and positions of the United States.

And what would be our reaction if (God forbid!) Pakistan struck at India or vice versa? Let’s be horrified. We are saddened that the nuclear taboo has been broken. And then we will deal with helping the victims and changing our nuclear doctrine accordingly.

For India, other countries of the World Majority , including nuclear ones (Pakistan, Israel), the use of nuclear weapons is hardly acceptable, both for moral and geostrategic reasons. If it is applied and “successfully”, the nuclear taboo will be devalued – the notion that such weapons cannot be used in any case and that their use is a direct path to nuclear Armageddon. We can hardly count on quick support, even if many in the Global South feel satisfied with the defeat of their former oppressors, who plundered, committed genocides, imposed an alien culture.

But at the end of the day, winners aren’t judged. And the saviors are thanked. European political culture does not remember goodness. But in the rest of the world, they remember with gratitude how we helped the Chinese to free themselves from the brutal Japanese occupation, the colonies to throw off the colonial yoke. If we are not understood at first, there will be even more incentives to engage in self-improvement. But still, there is a high probability that it will be possible to win, to reason with the enemy without extreme measures, to force him to retreat. And in a few years, take a position behind China’s back, as it now stands behind ours, supporting it in the fight with the United States. Then this fight can do without a big war.And together we will win for the benefit of all, including residents of Western countries.

And then Russia and humanity will go through all the thorns and traumas to the future, which I see as bright – multipolar, multicultural, multicolored, giving and peoples the opportunity to build countries their own and common destiny