The State Department’s announcement on
August 8 that the US government was going to impose sweeping new economic sanctions
on Russia over the still mysterious and unresolved Skripal Affair was a truly
fateful one. The famous Doomsday Clock of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists should have
immediately been moved forward to one minute to midnight on receipt of the news.
(It already is set at only two minutes to the midnight that signifies
catastrophic global thermonuclear war.)
For the lesson of history is a clear one: Such sanctions do far worse
than prevent constructive dialogue and efforts to settle major differences of
policy and interest between great nations. When they are seen as an existential
threat to the very existence of that nation, they drive the targeted country’s
government to consider all-out war.
That is exactly how the trans-oceanic
total war between the United States and Japan – the very first and so far
thankfully only war that has seen the use of nuclear weapons against cities and
human populations – began. And it was the United States that triggered it.
Japan had been remorselessly expanding into China and across the
Pacific Theater for a decade and its ferocious war of conquest against China
was already four years old and had claimed millions of lives by the summer of
1941.
It was then that US code
breakers learned of Japan’s plans also to occupy the French colonial
territories of Indochina – today the nations of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
In response therefore, and at
the insistent urging of his assistant secretary of state for economic affairs
Dean Acheson, President Franklin D. Roosevelt imposed a devastating embargo on
the US export of raw materials that Japan could use for war.
This left the governing
classes of Japan and its military chieftains with the choice of either ending
their policies of ferocious imperialist aggression or of accelerating them and
seizing the resource –rich territories of the United Kingdom, France and the
Netherlands in Southeast Asia to sustain their war economy. They chose the path
of continued and intensified aggression.
That decision in turn led
Tokyo’s war masters to adopt Combined Fleet Commander Admiral Isoroku
Yamamoto’s daring plan to launch a surprise preemptive attack to destroy the US
Navy’s Pacific Fleet at its base in Pearl Harbor. That strike launched the
total war that destroyed Japan.
Roosevelt clearly understood
– and said so at the time – that the new economic embargo could lead directly
to war with Japan. As talks to resolve the crisis between Washington and Tokyo
went nowhere and clearly deadlocked over the following six months, US Navy and
Army chiefs in Washington, with Roosevelt’s knowledge and approval warned their
forces in the Pacific to be prepared for war.
Nevertheless, the daring and
effectiveness of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took all US policymakers
entirely by surprise. The Japanese sank all eight battleships of the Pacific
Fleet (Six of them, remarkably were salvaged of which five participated with
devastating effect in the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf).
Roosevelt ironically had been
seeking to provoke a naval war with Nazi Germany in the Atlantic. He regarded
the Nazis as a far greater strategic threat to the United States than the
Japanese. But both Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
catastrophically underestimated the capabilities of the Japanese army, navy and
naval air force. Had they not made that mistake, they would not have been so
ready to carelessly provoke Tokyo into a full scale war.
The lesson for all the armchair hawks who dominate the Republican and
Democratic sides of both chambers of Congress today should be clear. US
politicians and policymakers and pundits see their endless rounds of sanctions
on Russia as a risk free, safe way to weaken, humiliate and eventually to undermine
a country and economy whose capabilities they grossly underestimate and
despise.
They could not be more wrong. Up to
now, Russia has thrived in the face of all the sanctions Washington can muster
against it and this state of affairs could well continue.
But if it does not, then Moscow policymakers and the Russian public
will both look upon the sanctions as a deliberate attempt to re-inflict on them
the collapse of society, chaos, corruption and suffering that followed the
disintegration of the Soviet Union.
President Vladimir Putin rescued
the Russian people from that nightmare almost immediately on taking office first
as prime minister in 1999 and then as president. But everyone over the age of
30 in Russia today remembers that awful decade of the 1990s all too well.
I visited Russia often during those years, saw the suffering of the
Russian people and ached for their plight.
If the new, supposedly “super” sanctions to be imposed this November do
threaten to plunge the Russian people back into that awful time of nightmare,
they will therefore be seen as an existential threat to national survival.
If that happens, the clueless poseurs and policymaking clowns in
Washington will risk setting off a terminal catastrophe for their own people
and the entire world.
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Strategic Culture Foundation.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/08/no_author/one-minute-to-midnight-latest-us-sanctions-propel-nations-towards-risk-of-war/
