by Pepe Escobar for PressTV, cross posted with the author’s permission
The Doomsday Clock, set by the US-based magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has been moved to 90 seconds to midnight.
That’s the closest ever to total nuclear doom, the global catastrophe.
The Clock had been set at 100 seconds since 2020. The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board and a group of sponsors – which includes 10 Nobel laureates – have focused on “Russia’s war on Ukraine” (their terminology) as the main reason.
Yet they did not bother to explain non-stop American rhetoric (the US is the only nation that adopts “first strike” in a nuclear confrontation) and the fact that this is a US proxy war against Russia with Ukraine used as cannon fodder.
The Bulletin also attributes malignant designs to China, Iran and North Korea, while mentioning, only in passing, that “the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between Russia and the United States, New START, stands in jeopardy”.
“Unless the two parties resume negotiations and find a basis for further reductions, the treaty will expire in February 2026.”
As it stands, the prospects of a US-Russia negotiation on New START are less than zero.
Now cue to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov making it very clear that war against Russia is not hybrid anymore, it’s “almost” real.
“Almost” in fact means “90 seconds.”
So why is this all happening?
The Mother of All Intel Failures
Former British diplomat Alastair Crooke has concisely explained how Russian resilience – much in the spirit of Iranian resilience past four decades – completely smashed the assumptions of Anglo-American intelligence.
Talk about the Mother of All Intel Failures – in fact even more astonishing than the non-existent Iraqi WMDs (in the run-up to Shock and Awe in 2003, anyone with a brain knew Baghdad had discontinued its weapons program already in the 1990s.)
Now the collective West “committed the entire weight of its financial resources to crushing Russia (…) in every conceivable way – via financial, cultural and psychological war, and with real military war as the follow-through.”
And yet Russia held its ground. And now reality-based developments prevail over fiction. The Global South “is peeling away into a separate economic model, no longer dependent on the dollar for its trading needs.”
And the accelerated collapse of the US dollar increasingly plunges the Empire into a real existential crisis.
All that hangs over a South Vietnam scenario evolving in Ukraine after a rash government-led political and military purge. The coke comedian – whose only role is to beg non-stop for bags of cash and loads of weapons – is being progressively sidelined by the Americans (beware of traveling CIA directors).
The game in Kiev, according to Russian sources, seems to be that the Americans are taking over the Brits as handlers of the whole operation.
The coke comedian remains – for now – as a sock puppet while military control over what is left of Ukraine is entirely NATO’s.
Well, it already was – but now, formally, Ukraine is the world’s first de facto NATO member without being an actual member, enjoying less than zero national sovereignty, and complete with NATO-Nazi Storm troopers weaponized with American and German tanks in the name of “democracy”.
The meeting last week of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group – totally controlled by the US – at the US Air Force base in Ramstein solidified a sort of tawdry remix of Operation Barbarossa.
Here we go again, with German Panzers sent to Ukraine to fight Russia.
Yet the tank coalition seems to have tanked even before it starts. Germany will send 14, Portugal 2, Belgium 0 (sorry, don’t have them). Then there’s Lithuania, whose Defense Minister observed, “Yes, we don’t have tanks, but we have an opinion about tanks.”
No one ever accused German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of being brighter than a light bulb. She finally gave the game away, at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg:
“The crucial part is that we do it together and that we do not do the blame game in Europe because we are fighting a war against Russia.”
So Baerbock agrees with Lavrov. Just don’t ask her what Doomsday Clock means. Or what happened after Operation Barbarossa failed.
The NATO-EU “garden”
The EU-NATO combo takes matters to a whole new level. The EU essentially has been reduced to the status of P.R. arm of NATO.
It’s all spelled out in their January 10 joint declaration.
The NATO-EU joint mission consists in using all economic, political and military means to make sure the “jungle” always behaves according to the “rules-based international order” and accepts to be plundered ad infinitum by the “blooming garden”.
Looking at The Big Picture, absolutely nothing changed in the US military/intel apparatus since 9/11: it’s a bipartisan thing, and it means Full Spectrum Dominance of both the US and NATO. No dissent whatsoever is allowed. And no thinking outside the box.
Plan A is subdivided into two sections.
1. Military intervention in a hollowed-out proxy state shell (see Afghanistan and Ukraine).
2. Inevitable, humiliating military defeat (see Afghanistan and soon Ukraine). Variations include building a wasteland and calling it “peace” (Libya) and extended proxy war leading to future humiliating expulsion (Syria).
There’s no Plan B.
Or is there? 90 seconds to midnight?
Obsessed by Mackinder, the Empire fought for control of the Eurasian landmass in World War I and World War II because that represented control of the world.
Later, Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski had warned: “Potentially the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition between Russia, China and Iran.”
Jump cut to the Raging Twenties when the US forced the end of Russian natural gas exports to Germany (and the EU) via Nord Stream 1 and 2.
Once again, Mackinderian opposition to a grand alliance on the Eurasian landmass consisting of Germany, Russia and China.
The Straussian neo-con and neoliberal-con psychos in charge of US foreign policy could even absorb a strategic alliance between Russia and China – as painful as it may be. But never Russia, China and Germany.
With the collapse of the JCPOA, Iran is now being re-targeted with maximum hostility. Yet were Tehran to play hardball, the US Navy or military could never keep the Strait of Hormuz open – by the admission of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Oil price in this case would rise to possibly thousands of dollars a barrel according to Goldman Sachs oil derivative experts – and that would crash the entire world economy.
This is arguably the foremost NATO Achilles Heel. Almost without firing a shot a Russia-Iran alliance could smash NATO to bits and bring down assorted EU governments as socio-economic chaos runs rampant across the collective West.
Meanwhile, to quote Dylan, darkness keeps dawning at the break of noon. Straussian neo-con and neoliberal-con psychos will keep pushing the Doomsday Clock closer and closer to midnight.
Pepe Escobar is a Eurasia-wide geopolitical analyst and author. His latest book is Raging Twenties.
While the war in Ukraine is an existential issue for Russia, for the USA the “dollar primacy” (world reserve currency) is its existential issue. For the rest of us (USA population) and other nations, our existential issue is avoiding a nuclear war between the USA and Russia over this conflict.
Mr Escobar
It is allways very interesting to read your comments, And I am afraid you are rigth. That the world is so twisted as you point too.
One sentence got me thinking:
“Oil price in this case would rise to possibly thousands of dollars a barrel according to Goldman Sachs oil derivative experts – and that would crash the entire world economy.”
World crash!! Would that be so bad for the USA? They have enough energy. They do not have manufacturing capacity anymore so if the would world crash?
The US have energy and the rest are loosing what america dont have. If i dont have that toy, I will crush your toy!
Just a tougth- thank you for decoding the world.
Keep up the good work and stay safe
paul
You know, that might be the only ray of sunshine in this heart breaking mess.
Perhaps Iran, or even Russia, should shut down the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf, leading to a final collapse of the world economy. The US could not survive that, and neither could the European vassals. The dollar would collapse, and the Europeans might finally confine the traitors running their countries. There would be no energy or resources to maintain the Ukraine war then. At lease things would cool down, perhaps saner heads would come to power.
Could be a crazy idea. Perhaps useless.
By US has energy! do you mean the fracking industry or the Canadian tar sands around Athabasca or maybe the so-called Strategic Oil Reserves? These resources are all very expensive and difficult to extract, making it impossible for the US to continue behave as the globe’s self-designated police officer. Cheap, abundant oil/gas supplies from Russia, Iran, Persian Gulf Sheikhdoms, Venezuela and other producers to countries like India, Brazil, China and South East Asia will have a tremendous impact on industrial competitiveness of giant Eurasian, BRICS+ economies versus the ones in little West. That would lead to a complete deindustrialization of the Western economy then replaced by something like a mammoth entertainment industry, which isn’t that bad anyway for the man from Eurasian mainland.
@Maskazer: “That would lead to a complete deindustrialization of the Western economy”
Might not be such a bad life. According to this reconstruction of what normal life was like in Tudor England — without electricity and with wood as the only cheap reliable fuel.
How did Mediaeval England make a living?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNPe-dh9GY0
@A.Deplorable
Great video from historyhit channel. Titled “Chronicle: Fight to Survive”, it actually looks much better than merely surviving. But would be backbreaking work. The community life looks wonderful. Very cohesive. And different careers were possible, if you qualified, including alchemist. Still, it would certainly not be an easy life.
Checking in on other possibilities, from the past or from the present time really adds to my perspective. Thanks for the link.
I am coming to the conclusion that we are as much doomed to a fast catastrophic collapse by the mentality of those consider to be intellectual leaders as anything else. Again, stupidity and lack of understanding uderpins all.
Due to my never ending curiosity and desire to always learn, and expand my understanding {It is also my opinion that, whereas “knowing” can often and to varying extents, rely on others, understanding you have to do for yourself}, I investigated a man being given much in the way of plaudits for his great knowledge and exposition. This is the Frenchman, historian, anthropologist, demographer, sociologist and political scientist Emmanuel Todd.
I read this:
“Emmanuel Todd, one of the greatest French intellectuals today, claims that the “Third World War has started.”
He says “it’s obvious that the conflict, which started as a limited territorial war and is escalating to a global economic confrontation between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war.”
He believes that;
“Putin made a big mistake early on, which is [that] on the eve of the war [everyone saw Ukraine] not as a fledgling democracy, but as a society in decay and a “failed state” in the making. […] I think the Kremlin’s calculation was that this decaying society would crumble at the first shock. But what we have discovered, on the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of balance, and even a horizon, a hope.”
I find no mention here of the fact that in 2014 the Ukrainian troops were contained in a cauldron, calling for help from their European friends which had the generous Russians call off hostilities in order for negotiation, which led to Minks Accord, the truth of which we now know.
Neither does he mention that indeed, shortly after Russia launched the SMO in Feb 2022, by end March Ukraine was almost at the negotiating table to bring about a peace on Russian terms – largely. And that it was the enormous pressure of US and UK interests which stopped this, and has been almost 100% behind the continuing massacre. That it had nothing to do with the “balance, horizon, hope of a burgeoning democracy”
And this man is held up as the shining light of intellectual achievement and “understanding”. No wonder the West is floating like a lead balloon in a hurricane.
“Ukraine is the world’s first de facto NATO member”.
Minor quibble: I think that honour belongs to Israel. First, Israel was given a $Billion NATZO contract about 20 years ago, to service Turkey’s tanks. Second, when the Great NATZO Armada came in for the kill against Syria in 2013, Israel’s nuclear-ready submarine (gift of NATZO member Germany) was given the honour of firing the first 2 cruse missiles at Damascus. Fortunately, Russia’s EW sent both missiles off course; they plopped harmlessly into the sea, and the Great NATZO Armada scuttled away — electronically blinded.
“Here we go again, with German Panzers sent to Ukraine to fight Russia.”
It’s deja vue all over again. The last time German Panzers were sent to the Ukraine to fight Russia, it ended in tears for Germany:
“It’s not my fault we lost. Our experts assured me it was impossible for any country to manufacture so many and so good tanks as Russia used against us.” — taped statement by the German Chancellor.
Perfect analysis of the current situation. Thanks to Pepe Escobar for helping us understand what’s happening in the world. That Grand Chessboard Polish megalomaniac russophobe wasn’t stupid after all. He knew very well what would happen when a true Eurasian alliance of Russia, China and Iran turns into reality like happening today. But the Anglozionists still continue to outsmart everybody as they did two/three centuries ago. They need to be reminded that the world has changed and it’s no longer possible for them to play the same game when the British Navy was considered invincible or when a US aircraft carrier scared people. There was in the news that Russia has already placed several Poseidon missiles on its submarines. If I was one of the Anglozionist think tanks I would have been really worried knowing a Poseidon is staring at me. The massive bomb can go up to 100 megatons, it’s not a joke. The best option for the head of the Anglozionist family is to make a deal so that they can keep a small portion of their wealth maybe in gold and let go of the neoliberal finance capitalism allowing the collapse of the petrodollar for a smooth transition. The North – South corridor by itself will change the world dynamics once it fully becomes operational, irrespective of the events in Ukraine. Unless NATO somehow manages to stop the construction of the corridor, the West is doomed.
It is easier to destroy than to build. Asia builds, the US destroys. The time will come when each attack from the US will receive one in the US. Keystone for Nordstream, Akron for Mariupol, for example.
Can anyone refer me to evidence, eyewitnesses, whatever, that Zelensky is a cokehead?
@ Jonabark on January 27, 2023 · at 8:32 pm EST/EDT
Can anyone refer me to evidence, eyewitnesses, whatever, that Zelensky is a cokehead?
————————————————
Meaning, a video of Zelensky blowing coke through a rolled $100.00 bill?
Just the question is a joke.
Just google “zelensky cocaine videos” you will find plenty of evidence. However, I seriously doubt your question has anything to do with evidence.
It has to do with trolling.
Lone Wolf
“Oil price in this case would rise to possibly thousands of dollars a barrel according to Goldman Sachs oil derivative experts – and that would crash the entire world economy.
This is arguably the foremost NATO Achilles Heel. Almost without firing a shot a Russia-Iran alliance could smash NATO to bits and bring down assorted EU governments as socio-economic chaos runs rampant across the collective West.”
If Russia and its allies could increase the price of oil such that the American/European Ponzi Scheme economies deservedly implode that would be an excellent asymmetric answer to the America-driven proxy war against Russia.
Let’s see if the American Empire can continue to wage its thinly disguised wars of aggression throughout the globe, if it’s economy burns to the ground.
As Henry Kissinger once boasted about America’s destabilization campaign and coup d’etat against Chile and its democratically elected President, Salvador Allende, the Americans wanted to make Chile’s “economy scream.”
“Make the Economy Scream”: Secret Documents Show Nixon, Kissinger Role Backing 1973 Chile Coup
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2Ki6nWSeVQ
And this is what America has been inflicting on many other nations through its economic siege warfare/terrorism spree in which the Americans starve and subjugate countries through economic sanctions.
It’s long overdue to give the United States of Aggression a taste of their own medicine: Make the American economy scream.
Absolutely correct. One of the best way to achieve that goal as mentioned by Pepe would be to block the Hormuz Strait to western economies.
@xvfsb
Completly agree with your comments. The uS need to feel the lesson – they certainly deserve it.
The Doomsday Clock is soon to strike midnight. While interests divide, allies become enemies and enemies allies. If Israel were to push for an attack on Iran, its interests would undermine those of the US. We are still the marionettes of history.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/
At 90 seconds to midnight BORZZIKMAN released a You Tube video,
Titled, “It’s a Caribbean Crisis 2.0 l ‘ZIRCON’ Hypersonic Missiles were Put on Alert off the Coast of the U.S”
There is no mention in MSM of this now conundrum and it seems US Diplomat (Deep State) Victoria Nuland cannot be found. No sight of CIA Director General William Burns. We wait.