Biden Aims to Go Out With a Bellicose Bang!
Eve Ottenberg / CounterPunch

WASHINGTON (December 13, 2024) — Having failed thus far to ignite Nuclear Armageddon, what’s up next for the US military industrial complex? I’ll tell you: New bases in Europe, 47 of them, to be exact, in Scandinavia in coming years. That’s Joe Biden’s legacy, a blood transfusion to NATO’s moribund carcass by adding Finland and Sweden and thereby ballooning the Empire’s global military footprint, a footprint of over 800 imperial foreign military bases already bankrupting us.

Welp, we’re gonna get 47 more, per journalist Patrick Hennigsen, and they’re gonna be near Russia. If you’re a Finn or a Swede, you might want to consider emigrating, since the pusillanimous NATO to which you now belong has set you up as a tripwire for the Atomic Apocalypse. That’s Biden’s legacy.

Don’t think for a minute these bases make anyone safer. Quite the contrary. Besides being hugely provocative and thus endangering the local population, the bases’ US soldiers are in harm’s way. Moscow eloquently demonstrated this on November 25. That was when Russia retaliated for recent ATACMS assaults, manned and operated by US personnel. Most of that personnel are now dead. That’s because Russia shot its unstoppable Iskander missiles at the launchers, killing at least 30 US operators.

Also “up to 40 fighters, mostly from the US were eliminated in a missile strike on a command center…in the city of Kharkov on November 25,” RT reported November 28 [“Russian Defense Ministry reveals response to long-range Ukrainian strikes”].

This is the fate that may await US soldiers on foreign military bases, because Russia’s extensive weapons menu is chock-a-block with all types of hypersonic missiles against which the west is defenseless. And Washington’s so busy provoking Moscow, that the Kremlin will much more eagerly share this technology with its allies — China, Iran and North Korea — than it did before Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden idiotically triggered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

So dozens of Americans have or will be coming home in body bags, and US weaponry got crushed and surprise! Not a peep in US corporate media. That’s because our news outlets report American, ahem, “Ukrainian” strikes on Russia, using our vaunted but really mainly symbolic ATACMS, and report it with great fanfare, groveling before supposed superlative American weapons, but the consequences?

The punishment? Not so much, since, Gee, that might make Biden and by extension Washington look bad. Can’t have that in American legacy news media. But hey, the Hindustan Times reported it, with headlines, like, “Russia Reduces Ukraine’s Western Weapons to Rubble,” and “Ukraine Loses All ATACMS, Storm Shadows? ‘NATO Train’ with Long-Range Missiles Blown Up by Russia.” How reassuring to know some nations still have a free press, even if they are halfway across the globe.

Meanwhile, all-around nitwits in the Biden administration chatter blandly about “Ukraine taking the fight to Russia.” Ukraine? Hello? Is that the new shorthand for the United States? Because make no mistake, the Kremlin isn’t under any illusions about who’s firing ATACMS into Russia. Moscow’s leadership knows full well the info downloaded from US satellites is classified and thus only Americans can eyeball it, and that only Americans are allowed to do the targeting.

A Ukrainian may push the last button, but everything done before that comes from Washington. And the Russians are mad as hornets. For those of us who dwell in or near major American cities, that paints a big bulls-eye on us; in fact, the only thing stalling such targeting is the patience and sanity of Russian president Vladimir Putin. But remember, he’s a politician too, and one under tremendous pressure from his right flank to retaliate hard against the US.

Luckily, for those of us oddly averse to being incinerated, the recent Russian Iskander strikes, as the Hindustan Times reported, may well have destroyed much of the ATACMS and Storm Shadow cache. And we all know the West lacks the military industrial production depth to replace them quickly. Once the western military cupboard is bare, it will stay that way for a good while. The US simply ain’t the manufacturing behemoth it once was.

In fact, much of our military production depends deeply on supply chains linked to China and, indeed, directly on Chinese manufacturing. And clouding the American defense picture, on December 1, Beijing’s sanctions on “the export of about 700 dual-use items took effect,” reported Asia Times that day, although what really grabbed headlines two days later was Beijing’s ban on sale of three rare earth minerals — gallium, germanium and antimony — to the US, a ban predicted in these CounterPunch pages, long ago.

China has also sanctioned multiple American defense firms and senior executives. And more such export controls are coming. Bye the way, dual-use refers to civilian-military. So at the very least, Beijing’s new export control list will “prevent the US from obtaining China’s critical metals, rare earths and key electronic parts.” China, long in the cross-hairs of voluble American congressional nincompoops, finally took their blather seriously. Incidentally, it’s not at all clear how these sanctions will affect China shipping weapons materials to Russia. My suspicion is, they won’t.

According to one Chinese military writer quoted by Asia Times: “The launch of the export control list is a precise attack to the heart of the US military industry. This is not an ordinary ‘embargo’ but an all-round blockade to completely cut off the Chinese supply chain that the US relies on.” So Biden’s oft-repeated, imbecilic crowings about war over Taiwan, and congress’ dimwitted howls for attacks on China have consequences, namely, Beijing taking steps to defang the American military beast, a monster directed, apparently, by birdbrains.

Does the White House get it, any of it? No. See the RT headline, December 2: “White House touts ‘massive surge’ in arms shipments to Kiev.” The article quotes Jake “World War III” Sullivan blabbering about throwing more money down the endless Ukraine drain. You’d think he might have got the November election message that half the country has had it with this war. But no, the morons in charge shout from the rooftops that they will not be deterred from their wickedness and stupidity.

China’s list of weapons-necessary products now prohibited from sale to the US includes “computers, electronic devices, chemicals, sensors, lasers and aviation navigation systems. If China uses the list to fight a technology war, the US won’t be able to find alternative products elsewhere.”

So, um, about arming and equipping those 47 military bases in Scandinavia, I suppose Uncle Sam could always cannibalize dishwashers and washing machines to propel American weapons, the way the Biden team’s supposed geniuses like commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told us the Russians did in Ukraine (ho, ho!). Or we could use shovels, like the bubbleheads in our corporate media claimed those desperate Slavs did. Those were the same news outlets that told us, early on, Russia would soon run out of missiles.

Well, now we learn that, in addition to Russia positively BRISTLING with missiles, Moscow has all sorts of unstoppable hypersonic missiles, some of them as powerful as nuclear bombs without the radiation, and evidently, to judge from the Oreshnik, far more precise and capable of busting bunkers hundreds of meters underground. We in the West have failed to assemble even one hypersonic missile, while a few Russian Oreshniks could likely wipe out an entire military base. I guess now they’ll all be pointed at Scandinavia.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Hope Deferred. She can be reached at her website.

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