Wednesday, March 10, 2021

US-NATO-EU Choose Threat of Nuclear War as First Option of China-Russia Policy

Peace - The only path to economic security for Canada

Prime Minister Trudeau at his first meeting with US President Biden aligned Canada with top NATO, EU and G7 planners to contain and disrupt the economic cooperation between the Russian Federation (RF) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).  Russia is one of many countries that align with China as a more reliable guarantor of peaceful economic development than the USA or the EU.

Why is the Trudeau Government with the support of all of the opposition parties so willing to side with the US NATO alliance at the expense of the social and economic needs of Canadian wage earners? The NATO alliance has nothing to offer other than cost sharing in arms expenditures, wars, occupations and sanctions.  On close study maintaining the vast global military reach of the USA is the main contributing factor in its decline as a global economic power. States most heavily invested and reliant on the US military power and war production, such as Canada, are declining with it.

Canada’s “defence” budget for 2020-21 is an estimated $23.4 billion or 1.31% of GDP. This is a 25% increase since the 2016. Projected increase to 2031 is 70% or $40 billion.  This amounts to a $76B increase over 10 years from the 2017 budget of $18B (See Page 43 of the National Defence report Strong Secure Engaged).

To fund the NATO war business treasuries, member states are compelled to transfer hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of the largest US and EU corporate suppliers of advanced nuclear weapons systems.  Canada’s “defence” budget for 2020-21 is an estimated $23.4 billion or 1.31% of GDP. This is a 25% increase since the 2016 budget or $70B increase since 2016.  The multi-billion JFS F35 (Joint Strike Fighter) program with Canada’s participation stretching back to 1996, is on going.  Billion-dollar upgrades of naval assets offensive capability both surface and undersea is well advanced.

The US military industrial complex absorbs the brightest and best, appropriates the discoveries of science and technology from NATO allies and in the process distorts the non-military sectors of the economy by inflationary competition for raw materials, science and technology and wage labour.

Canada, via NATO and NORAD is being drawn deeper into the maw of this expanding war business.  The sheer weight of US military expenditures is the primary cause of the brain drain from Canada to the USA and compels tens of millions of North American workers to sell their labour power to arms manufacturers.

Unifor, the largest private sector union in Canada, with 313,000 members and 11,000 employed in the aerospace industry, issued a report that included appealing to the Federal Government to assure that Pratt and Whitney JFS F35 contracts come to Canada to employ aerospace workers.  The union confronts layoffs of highly skilled workers as De Havilland suspends production of the Dash 8 civilian aircraft and seeks to expand jobs in defence production.

The union report called upon the federal government to:

“Reinforce the commitment to the Industrial Technological Benefits Program through the Joint Strike Fighter Capability Project and expand the program to additional military purchases when a Canadian made option is not available.

“Recognize the capabilities of Canadian aerospace companies in filling orders for government, military and emergency response aircraft by including a preference for Canadian content and made in Canada solutions”.

China and Russia’s trade policies provide an alternative to war expenditures as the principal driver of economic development.  That is why many developing states opt for the no-strings-attached trade and development opportunities with China.

China in the near future will surpass the US in overall economic development.  China attracted $163 billion direct investment in 2020 and the US $134 billion according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.    World Bank and OECD figures for 2019 listed US GDP at $21.4 trillion and China GDP at $14.3 trillion.  China growth rates continue at 2-6%/yr. even during the pandemic.  Predictions are it will overtake the USA in GDP in a decade.  China’s growth threatens US dollar dominance in international trade and investment.  The US dollar as the global reserve currency wanes as its economy falters, and more countries are opting to hold a basket of top global currencies including China’s yuan which the IMF and World Bank list as among the top global reserve currencies.

The rise of China-Russia economic and political cooperation has divided the strategic planners of NATO, the US and the EU as to what to do.  NATO seeks by all means to rally public support around a war consensus.  The speech of Jens Stoltenberg NATO general secretary at the February Munich Security Conference defined China and Russia as alliance “adversaries” and emphasized the obligation of member states to uphold Article Five of the NATO Charter.  Article Five obliges all NATO states to join in joint military action if one member state is attacked.

The NATO general secretary made this astounding claim:

“For over 70 years, NATO has secured peace in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

One need only read the scrubbed version of US NATO wars of intervention to expose how utterly false the NATO secretary’s claims are.  The violation of the UN Charter, sovereignty of nations, appropriation of wealth and resources, civilian lives lost, massive civil infrastructure destruction, civil war, banditry, misery, famine and disease that followed each NATO incursion is nowhere to be found.  Here is NATO’s list and self-serving descriptions of its aggressions.

Membership in NATO comes with consequences for the people of Canada.  Canada’s membership in NATO effectively contracts out the decision of war and peace from the elected Parliament of Canada to NATO headquarters in Brussels.  Abject all-party support in the House of Commons for subordinating Canadian foreign policy to the US-NATO alliance, commits Canada to participate in future US-NATO wars and in the event of an all-out nuclear war its assured extinction.

Out of a list of 20 missions only one, the US-NATO war on Serbia was European.  Canadian government participation assigned ground forces and the Canadian Airforce, which dropped 20% of NATO ordinance which included depleted uranium bombs, on civilian targets in Belgrade and Kosovo.

Most NATO engagements are in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.  Canada’s longest NATO war, Afghanistan, from 2001 to 2014 resulted in 132 dead, innumerable wounded and suffering PTSD, burdening the health care system. The ISAF operation left hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians dead and wounded and a country in ruins with none of the internal problems resolved to this day.

NATO trades on the specious argument that there are ideologies and existential threats worse than global annihilation.  Such a view of humanity is the perverse domain of anti-communist fanaticism and the insane.  It is not ground to be shared by any Government claiming to be for peace.

Everyday the reckless far right is given mass media platforms to promote war on Iran, Russia, China, North Korea and Syria.  Such neurotic voices applaud sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua and promote a new cold war with Russian and China.

The US-NATO attempt to militarily coerce Russia and China, both nuclear powers, cannot be separated from the US-NATO doctrine of the first strike use of nuclear weapons.  The doctrine requires a never-ending futile effort of US military planners to achieve US nuclear weapons superiority.  The attempt to achieve nuclear weapons superiority goes together with the lunacy theory of survivability in the event of a major nuclear war.

The Bulletin of the American Atomic Scientists on February 6, 2021 issued another scathing denunciation of the futility of the production of new versions of nuclear weapons.

The Bulletin writes that the US government authorized the development of a rocket the length of a bowling alley to carry a nuclear weapons 6000 miles (9656 km) with a warhead 20 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and that could kill hundreds of thousands at one shot.  The US Air Force is planning to order 600.

The US-NATO doctrine of first strike use of nuclear weapons removes any duality in warfare.  Today the production of conventional military weaponry in the age of cybertechnology is designed to be supportive of the primary offensive capability of nuclear weapons systems.  All US-NATO air, outer space, ground, surface and undersea systems are designed to be inter-interoperable with nuclear weapons warfare.  There is no separation between conventional and nuclear weapons.  Nuclear weapons systems have evolved from ultimate use to operational use.  Future major conflict is assured to be nuclear.

The practical application of the first strike use of nuclear weapons accounts for forward positioning of NATO nuclear offensive capability on the territory of European allies and on the borders of Russia.  Nuclear weapons and its means of delivery are deployed on US vessels operating in close proximity to China.  Under NATO nuclear-weapons-sharing, the United States has provided nuclear weapons for Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey to deploy and store.

Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) is a component part of the first strike US-NATO nuclear doctrine. BMD was unleashed when the USA withdrew from the Anti-ballistic missile treaty (ABM) in 2002 which effectively re-kindled the nuclear arms race.

The predictable Russia and China response to US-NATO nuclear strategies is spun by the media circus as evidence of being “adversarial”.

It is a fatal mistake for US-NATO compliant governments such as Canada, to participate in or allow ground based and outer space nuclear weapons delivery systems on its sovereign territory.  Such reckless pandering to US-NATO military plans assure the citizens of such countries to certain annihilation in the event of a major nuclear war.

US-NATO nuclear strategy imperils the survival of every European and Asian country within range of its nuclear forward positioned nuclear weapons systems.  A sober assessment of Russian nuclear defense doctrine should be obligatory reading.

The US NATO war planners by all means seek to convince the working class that a world without capitalism is not an option.

The labouring masses of Europe, North America, South America and Asia and Australia confront a stark choice, to align with the imperialist forces of war or align with all of the forces of peace and nuclear disarmament.  That is the only real option.

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