Throwing More Good Money After Bad 

Meanwhile, back in Imperial Washington, the respected political newspaper Politico reports that there are an increasing number of cold feet in the Pentagon and the Biden administration about throwing more good money after bad and further depleting US and NATO munitions reserves by continuing to send more weapons to Ukraine to be lost, destroyed and wasted by brave but untrained forces and their inept commanders against the Russian Army.

This is certainly consistent with the frank admission of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, four-star Army General Christropher Cavoli to the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 26 that the Russian Army has not “suffered significant degradation” and “will likely rebuild its future Army into a sizeable and more capable land force” the US commander of European forces tells the House Armed Services Committee.

Russian air, maritime, space, cyber, and strategic forces have not suffered significant degradation in the current war, Cavoli acknowledged in comments that were carefully prepared in advance.

Cavoli’s admission is an indirect but stunningly clear admission that the strategic assumptions under which US weapons have flowed like Niagara to Ukraine to encourage its brave, but costly and bloodstained resistance to Russia invasion over the past year have failed catastrophically.

That aid was publicly justified as being the key to Ukraine winning a war against Russia.

Privately but completely openly around Washington, legions of neoconservative, neoliberal and frankly openly Russia-hating analysts, pundits and policymakers in both the Pentagon and the myriad of war-salivating think -tanks – these days as man liberal Democrat as conservative Republican – boasted of the second reason: That it would drain Russia dry and cause a popular revulsion that would topple the government of President Vladimir Putin and leave chaos in its wake.,

The flood of reports about Putin’s alleged poor health and the increasing challenges to his position and very life – not one of which have been independently verified – were all fostered to fan enthusiasm for this policy.

But it hasn’t worked out that way: instead this dangerous, aggressive, supremely irresponsible policy has already backfired catastrophically.

For, despite endless testimonies, speeches and hand wringing in Congress neither the national legislature nor the Biden administration has taken any serious action to expand the hugely depleted US military-industrial base to make up the shortfall for all the weapons and ammunition that have flooded into Ukraine with nothing to show for it.

It is Russia, quietly supported by China, the largest concentration of industrial might on the planet, that has remorselessly and steadily expanded its own military-industrial base to gear up for the challenges of fighting full-scale industrial war.

Is the Biden administration therefore now preparing to cut its losses and bolt from Ukraine as it did so humiliatingly and ineptly from Afghanistan in August 2021? That would indeed be a much more prudent and realistic course of action, but it is extremely unlikely.

First of all, Victoria Nuland remains securely placed as Under Secretary for Political Affairs at the State Department telling Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin what to think – and do. There is not the slightest indication this is going to change.

Second, President Joe Biden, in the disastrous manner of so many phony toughs before him with no experience of war, military command, diplomacy or grand strategy, imagines that empty fake bluster can somehow compensate for total incompetence and ineptness in all other areas. of statecraft.

Like any rube at the poker table challenged to prove his questionable manhood, Biden therefore will plunge in even further and bet the second mortgage on an obviously losing hand.

Judged in this context, the reports of US military forces massing in eastern Poland appear all too credible: They are there not to guard Poland and NATO’s eastern flank if Ukraine collapses but on the contrary, to occupy and ostensibly “protect” Catholic, pro-Western and fiercely anti-Russian western Ukraine and even to rescue the toppling regime in Kiev when (not “if”) the poor Ukrainian Army finally collapses under its repeated pummeling. 

Thus, NATO’s relentless now 34-year-long march to the east since the collapse of the Berlin Wall will continue, and Russia’s fearful reaction will come ever closer.

The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists still stands at only 90 seconds to midnight – the hour when nuclear world war, Armageddon, strikes.

It is soon going to get a lot closer.

Janus is the Nom de Plume of a veteran US correspondent who has covered the Soviet Union and Russia for generations.