2015-11-11 US: Deranged???
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US Defense Secretary Threatens Russia and China
By Patrick Martin
November 10, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "WSWS" - US Defense
Secretary Ashton Carter delivered a pointed warning of future wars
Saturday in an address to a forum at the Reagan Library in southern
California. The reckless and provocative character of the Pentagon
chief’s speech is underscored by the targets of his saber-rattling:
Russia, with the world’s second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons,
and China with the third.
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Giving only brief mention of the
ongoing US wars in Afghanistan and against Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria (ISIS), Carter said he wanted “to focus my remarks this afternoon
on another kind of innovation for the future, which is how we’re
responding to Russia, one source of today’s turbulence, and China’s
rise, which is driving a transition in the Asia-Pacific.”
...
The defense secretary claimed that both Russia and China, in different
ways, were challenging the foundations of international order laid down
by successive US administrations throughout the period since the end of
World War II. “The principles that serve as that order’s foundation,” he
said, “including peaceful resolution of disputes, freedom from
coercion, respect for state sovereignty, freedom of navigation and
overflight–are not abstractions, nor are they subject to the whims of
any one country.”
...
According to Carter, “Russia appears
intent to play spoiler by flouting these principles and the
international community. Meanwhile, China is a rising power, and growing
more ambitious in its objectives and capabilities.”
...
After denouncing Russia for “violating sovereignty in Ukraine and Georgia”...
...
Carter raised the danger of what he called “Moscow’s nuclear
saber-rattling,” which he said “raises questions about Russia’s leaders’
commitment to strategic stability, their respect for norms against the
use of nuclear weapons, and whether they respect the profound caution
nuclear-age leaders showed with regard to the brandishing of nuclear
weapons.”
Carter used this nonexistent danger to justify the vast
US expansion of its own nuclear arsenal, by far the world’s largest, in
an Obama administration initiative now estimated to cost more than $300
billion.
He then hinted enthusiastically at the potential of new
weapons for use against Russia, including “new unmanned systems, a new
long-range bomber, and innovation in technologies like the
electromagnetic railgun, lasers, and new systems for electronic warfare,
space and cyberspace, including a few surprising ones that I really
can’t describe here.”
The defense secretary reiterated the US
commitment to Article V of the NATO charter, which requires an all-out
war by NATO in the event of a conflict between Russia and one of the
Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, each ruled by rabidly
anti-Russian cliques and with large Russian-speaking minorities. Few
citizens of the United States—or Britain or Germany, for that
matter—realize that their governments are committed to war with a
nuclear-armed Russia in the event of a border clash with Estonia.
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