1 Second to Midnight — WW3 will last an hour
Regime change, Ukraine, and Russia
In the end, only the fact we are teetering on the brink of nuclear war, matters in this current conflict between the United States and the Russian Federation. Ukraine is a proxy. Whatever anyone might think of Russia’s leader — Europe, NATO, and the United States are now facing a nuclear war after years of dedicated work by the West to get here. The Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday clock to 90 seconds to midnight in 2024. For Russia, having its “soft underbelly,” a historical invasion route into Russia, join NATO, is an existential threat. The same existential threat goes double for having leaders in Ukraine operating under the de facto orders of the White House. This is an absolute line in the sand. Russia will not allow it. And Russia has more nuclear weapons than any other nation on earth.
In addition, Russia is the only nation on earth that has facilities for its citizens to survive nuclear war. In the calculus of nuclear war, the USA would be largely incinerated and incapable of coming back. Russia has told the USA about this threat, to this Biden administration. Russia announced it clearly. They ran exercises in spring of 2024, which were barely reported. Russia announced that field commanders now have launch authority in June of 2024. Barely reported. Oct 4th 2024, Russia’s ambassador went back to Moscow saying he could not get through to this White House. This is what a nation does that is ready to launch. They mean it.
This is not bluffing. A bluff is when you pretend to have cards you don’t have. Russia has a royal flush in this game. We have, at most, 3 of a kind. Not a contest to enter. I will clarify the why of this by the end of this article. But first, we have some education to get out of the way. Some facts.
Methods of Acquisition: Regime Change, and debt trap diplomacy
There are two basic kinds of regime change and influence — political regime change and debt trap diplomacy. Regime change encompasses overt (6 times) and covert (64 times) interventions [1], although it is arguable that the boundary is sometimes fuzzy. Ukraine, for instance, is not particularly hard to see. O’Rourke solves this fuzzy boundary by classifying based on apparent intent to be overt or covert. The mechanism of debt trapping is simple — loan packages in foreign currency, US dollars. The goal of debt trap diplomacy is control and acquisition of resources as a rule [2].
In O’Rourke’s analysis none of the theories/justifications about US involvement in regime change bear out as explanatory: not overthrow of autocrats, not spreading liberal democracy, not installing autocrats, nor constraints of norms and law, not democratic peace theory, not economic interest, and not national security. None of those explain US history of regime change by themselves. And all of them are true sometimes, often many of them at the same time. I think this reflects the changing politics and views of changing administrations and internal conflicts in the White House within every administration over decades.
Debt trapping is executed by providing very large loans to a nation in a different currency than their own. When borrowing from their own central bank, a nation never runs out of money. However, to pay off foreign currency loans, the nation must earn foreign exchange with exports. Large loans require a large amount of exports to pay for them, but the buyer can collude to set the price. (Price fixing.) Within the United States, at a local scale, corporations like WalMart contract with suppliers, and require them to expand their capacity, which forces them to go into debt. Then the corporation cuts the price, forcing the supplier into bankruptcy. Once bankrupt, the supplier’s company or assets can be acquired for very little. This strategy has been executed domestically for centuries. This is why companies are counseled to not put all their customer eggs in one basket.
The World Bank and the IMF are the primary historical providers of debt trap loans globally. In recent years, China may have entered this game as part of the Belt and Road initiative, providing large loans in yuan ¥ [3]. (I believe that China’s perception of the value of this game to achieve dominance is a major reason why the BRICS nations basket of currencies has remained weaker than it should be by now.) The inception of the World Bank in 1944 as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the formation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), followed on the great depression. It occurred because of the need to rebuild the Axis nations, Germany and Japan. Rebuilding was carried out well and fairly, in the post-war years. It was later that the potential was recognized.
It may be noted that the slave labor camps Stalin used to build Siberian industry, which is the primary industry that fought WW2 and won, arguably were required because of a lack of money — because the USSR did not understand central banking at the time, in large part due to Marxist ideology — and the USSR was cut off from international loans. Not until roughly 2004, did the successor Russian Federation take up normal practice for developed nations, and converted to exclusively borrowing from its own central bank. In terms of timing, this coincided with serious sanctions on Russia by the US Congress.
Political regime change
To accomplish covert regime change requires identifying a group that is ready and willing to fight and potentially die to accomplish the change. Most people, in most countries, are not interested in making war. Those that can be interested in war have a motive, or an ideology that motivates them. In the Middle East it is mostly Islamic fundamentalists, and those are mostly under the theological shade of the Muslim Brotherhood. In South and Central America it was often the narcos for the US side. On the Soviet side, it was Marxist revolutionaries. Only recently have the former communist nations evidenced possible flirting with proxy war using Islamists — the presence of Chinese military engineers in Hamas tunnels in Gaza was suggestive.
Regime change is pursued for multiple reasons, and as the USA has done it, this often includes resources to acquire or hold onto, from banana plantations (Central America), to oil (South America, the Middle East, and Central Asia). A primary motive in Central and South America was national security during the Cold War as well. In the 1950's and 1960’s it appeared that the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe and North America, would become Stalinist or Maoist by revolution. Men like Richard Nixon, and many others, men who saw the communist revolution juggernaut in South America and Africa, having seen the Iron Curtain descend, having done the Berlin Airlift, carried that view into elected office.
The age gap between experience and leadership tends to be a problem in foreign policy, because just as generals prepare to fight the last war, politicians tend to operate based on ideas largely formed 20 or more years before attaining high office. High office can also create a bubble that is out of touch with the world as it changes, and so does great wealth. Both high office and great wealth are correlated with an age period when flexibility of thought is less. In addition, leaders entering senility tend to act on the basis of a world that is 30 or more years in the past, and history shows that senile leaders are quite difficult to remove. Senility usually begins anywhere from late 50’s to 90 years of age.
Ukraine regime change gambits
First was the debt trap gambit starting in 1992 when Ukraine joined the IMF. Twenty-two years later, Ukraine was a member of the IMF, and as with other members, the IMF imposed austerity measures that eventually became unacceptable to Ukraine. In other words, things were progressing nicely along the usual path to acquisition of Ukraine’s valuable assets. Russia proposed an alternative package without conditions, and Ukraine made the sensible decision to take it. The debt trap gambit depends on the subject nation having no alternatives. The Russian Federation may have been entering the debt trap game, but given how inexperienced they are with it, Russia was probably just protecting its flank and acting sensibly. Ukraine is to Russia, like an independent Texas would be to the USA.
Second was the coup and war. When Ukraine turned to a better deal from Russia, we saw Ukraine’s democracy overthrown in a few months. In Ukraine, the group willing to fight was the Banderas, who are named for Stepan Bandera who was imprisoned at the start of the Nazi invasion. (Make no mistake, the Banderas were eager volunteers who executed pogroms against Jews in Ukraine to cozy up to the Nazis prior to Stepan’s arrest.)
After spending WW2 from 1941 onward in Gestapo prison for wanting an independent Ukraine, Stepan was provided with approval in 1945 by Nazi Germany of the Ukrainian National Army, and Ukraine as his country, and released. This was six months before the end of WW2. The Banderas of today use the swastika symbol as their sign of independence struggle from the USSR, literally covering their bodies with the symbol. Their paramilitaries became the tough core of the Revolutionary Ukraine’s armed forces in 2014. The easiest way to understand the post-revolution fault-lines and the immediate civil war is the ethnic map of Ukraine from the CIA’s web site that I copied in above. (But this is an old map I pulled down 11 years ago. The current one shows none of this ethnicity data.)
Cold war needs of the United States. The Ukraine war on the US side is rooted in the beginnings of the Cold War. At the close of WW2, former Nazis and collaborators were brought to the USA from Germany, Poland and Ukraine to populate the USSR/Russia desk in what became the CIA. Most Americans know Werner von Braun, who was brought to the United States to jump start missile defense and the space program. There were many others brought over to populate the USSR desk at the OSS that became CIA. Some, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski rose to significant power, with something of an obsession, or at least strong focus, on Russia [4] This included training, arming, and provision of intel to Islamists in Afghanistan months before the USSR invaded, hoping the invasion would occur [5]. The year following the revolution in Ukraine, in 2015, predictions of the breakup of the Russian Federation and China were taken seriously [6]. I believe this Stratfor presentation was taken seriously by backers in upper tiers of Wall Street, looking to find trillions in profits — it is what they presumed would be happening after the decade of Boris Yeltsin. Joe Biden made clear in 2022 that regime change in Russia was his intent [7].
Others have discussed the Ukraine overthrow in 2014, Mearsheimer has more detail, and Napolitano the moral outrage. So I will just mention a few basic facts. First, the Obama White House immediately declared the people of Ukraine that remained loyal to their democracy, “the rebels.” This designation is straight out of George Orwell, and indicates preparation. The second is that revolutionary Ukraine, this new ally of the USA, sold ICBM technology from their rocket factory to North Korea after February 2014. As a result of that, North Korea can now hit any city in the USA.
The sale of ICBM tech to North Korea I believe was an instance of the gangsters of Ukraine operating out of control. This is normal, because the people that one makes a deal with for regime change are not usually stupid, and they have their own agenda. This ICBM tech agenda was probably just money. My guess is they figured North Korea would get ICBMs working anyway, so may as well be them making some money.
Feb 19, 2022, president Zelensky declared his intent to acquire nuclear weapons — by building them if necessary — in a speech in Munich. This was then denied and the language scrubbed from reportage online, but I read it. Feb 24, 2022, Russia invaded. Most recently, Kyiv denied, on Nov 14, 2024 that Ukraine was building nuclear weapons as reported by the Times [8,9]. If it is true that Ukraine is months away from nuclear weapons, as the Times says, then Russia must act. As with the invasion, which took 8 years from initial response to the 2014 coup before war, I expect Russia to have a long fuse, but they will act. Last, proxy warfare entails a lot of embezzlement of funds, and this appears true of Ukraine as well [10].
Ukraine appears to be a case study for regime change. It appears engineered to provoke Russia similarly to the 1979 Carter gambit that drew the USSR to invade Afghanistan [5]. The gambit is so close it is hard to ignore.
Russians understand this type of gambit now. They are not stupid. After 9–11, I happened to be passing through Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow on a connection to Tbilisi. There I saw a group of Russian military brass toasting to the USA invading Afghanistan, saying things like, “They shall get what they gave us!” The difference between the Russian celebration of the USA’s entry into Afghanistan and the Carter gambit is that there is no evidence that Russia helped or backed Osama bin Laden prior to 9–11 to get America to attack. The 9–11 event appears to be blowback dating from Carter’s gambit. In practice, Bill Clinton backed Osama’s side of the Kosovo war, coming in on the side of the KLA, which was commanded by a top lieutenant of Osama.
The difference in Ukraine is that Russia was more wary now, and so it was necessary for the Ukraine revolutionary government to attack Russian ethnics inside Ukraine. But Russia kept cool and fought that as minimally as possible. Then the world saw a demand for NATO membership or else Ukraine would build nuclear weapons. Just as with Afghanistan, the Russian invasion was portrayed as random bullying by Russia, and an unconscionable breach of international law. The attack was blamed on one man, Vladimir Putin. In fact, Vladimir Putin has mostly been the one holding back the dogs of war.
The military point of the Ukraine war is to have Ukraine’s army grind down Russia’s conventional forces, and stress the Russian economy and society. The goal is political and economic collapse. This worked using Afghanistan as the instrument in the 1980’s, producing Gorbachev’s Glasnost, so it’s a straightforward strategy for the ambitious West Wing foreign-policy-wonk on the make to get approval for. It can be capsulized in three words. “Rope a dope”.
There are serious unconsidered problems with this rope-a-dope war strategy. First, Russia is not the USSR, and is no longer a nation of citizens who do not believe the guiding ideology. Second, the USSR did not have a properly functioning central bank, which was in large part an ideological problem. Third, and most important, Russia has the largest number of nuclear warheads in the world [11].
People, it should not be rocket science to see that the less Russia can depend on its conventional forces, the more it must depend on nuclear weapons. It is also not rocket science to realize that this is not a wise position to force Russia into. This last problem is why the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday clock to 90 seconds to midnight [12].
The Ukraine war has not just depleted Russia’s conventional weapons. This war has depleted US military weapons stores due to supplying Ukraine and Israel. And Elbridge Colby agreed the US needed to avoid a two-front war back in 2021 [13]. It is now 2024, and it is not much better now for the US. We have walked ourselves right into a conventional war scenario with China that we cannot fight effectively.
This policy on Ukraine and Russia was implemented by Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken. They have repeatedly interfered to stop peace from breaking out [14,15]. The objective appears to be to achieve the Stratfor prediction of breakup of Russia, if not China, by the 2025 deadline [6]. And here we are.
The Popularity of Vladimir Putin
This war-hawk policy toward Russia and support of Ukraine is justified to the American people by demonized portrayals of Vladimir Putin and his group for two decades. The story Americans are told by most of US media is that Putin is an evil dictator who can only be hated by moral people.
I have studied Vladimir Putin and his administrations for over two decades. Russian reality is that Vladimir Putin is a very popular elected leader — and this is verified by Western polling agencies [16]. Russian polls are sometimes higher, but even the 65% approval rating reported by NORC in January of 2024 would be unusual for a US president. 65% approval ties Dwight Eisenhower, and is only exceeded by John F. Kennedy [17]. JFK exceeded that approval rating for a short time. Vladimir Putin descended down to 65% from a higher rating. Of course there are dissenters in Russia. The fact that there are dissenters in Russia is a sign of democracy, not dictatorship. The USA has plenty of dissenters now too. And compare this with Joe Biden’s ratings as he leaves office, 33% approval, 58% disapproval.
It is not hard to figure out why Mr. Putin is more popular than any US president since John F. Kennedy. Vladimir Putin’s administration raised the GDP per capita by a factor of 12 times without accounting for purchasing power parity. (When PPP is taken into account Vladimir Putin has raised GDP per capita by 30 times.) For the period from 2010 to 2023, buffeted by sanctions and war, GDP per capita (without PPP adjustment) averaged 9.3 times 1999’s nadir, while Russia’s inequality (Gini) declined to 5 points below the US. This is great economic news for Russia’s people. Whatever else can be said about him, Vladimir Putin has been an excellent captain for his team. If an American president raised our GDP by those numbers, we would abolish the 2 term limit too.
I have studied dictators and warlords. I see no indications that Vladimir Putin is either. This idea is a false characterization, even if credence is given to several claims of assassination that cannot be treated fairly here. Putin’s Russia includes a great deal of outreach to the people to make sure that the problem of rulers in a bubble does not happen. My perception is that Vladimir Putin’s administration is far better connected to, and aware of the needs, opinions and interests of the Russian people, than any administration has ever been in the United States in my lifetime.
What needs to be understood is that Russia saw the fruits of what the USA gave them in the 1990’s, which was a time of trust towards the USA and appeal for direction. Shock treatment was a disaster, and Boris Yeltsin’s term in office from July 1991 to December 1999 included an estimated 4 million Russian deaths from homicide, suicide and starvation — approximately 3% of Russia’s 1990 population. After his 8 years in office, with political consultants supplied by the Clinton administration, through the agency of Dick Morris, Boris Yeltsin’s approval rating was 6%. Russia gave the US prescription a very good run. They really tried it, without holding back, and it didn’t work for them. We see in China the results of the Chinese government observing how not to reform their nation.
The trip-wire for nuclear holocaust
Nuclear weapons in Ukraine are as much a trip-wire for the Russian Federation as nuclear weapons in Cuba were for the United States. Consider how the USA would react to a Chinese or Russian armed and paid-for revolutionary government in Mexico calling for Mexico to enter The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) alliance. Membership in that alliance would put Chinese military bases in Mexico. It is hard to conceive how the threat that NATO represents to Russia is ignored by journalists and the current administrations in favor of focus on Ukrainian independence. Ukraine had independence before the revolution. It was a democracy then. Such rhetoric makes no sense.
Even if we avoid nuclear war with Russia at this juncture, the Biden gambit in Ukraine will not be forgotten.
Nuclear war scenario fundamentals
On the Russian side, an all-out war would target on the order of 1000 US cities using 750 kiloton warheads, with roughly 500 warheads in reserve for other targets [11]. US submarines are the first line of US response, just as they are for Russia and China. Nuclear attack submarines exist to be nuclear weapons platforms that can get close to shore. Nuclear submarines are also the first line of a first-strike scenario, because their missiles get to targets faster. The purpose of submarine launched missiles is to knock out missile silos before they launch, and take out capitols and large coastal port cities around the time an alarm is raised.
There was a speech in 2015 advocating for a first-strike on Russia from submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) that may have been a trigger for Russia’s 2016 civil defense exercise for 60 million people. These submarine forces also mean that the trip wire to all-out nuclear war is on a hair trigger. There is not much time at all to check or reflect when decisions need to be made. This grim reality is reflected in Russia’s June 2024 revision of launch decisions to field commanders. I cannot see any US administration deciding not to fire SLBMs at Russia’s nuclear war infrastructure if nuclear war in Europe happens. Not reacting would be the right move, because the United States cannot win. But the amazing idiocy demonstrated by beltway groupthink today would not allow sanity to prevail. This is foreign policy by the dunces in class. We have gotten away with it because the United States is still a premier military power.
The Russian Federation reinstated the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction deterrence in response to the Kosovo War (1998–1999). The Moscow chapter of Physicians Against Nuclear War sent a petition letter to Boris Yeltsin in 1999 asking him to reinstate it, because of the Kosovo War. Russia’s relationship to Serbia has some similarity to the USA’s relationship to England. The sentiment of Russia seeing Serbia bombed by the United States was similar. That sentiment was part of what elected Vladimir Putin’s group.
Russia is prepared for nuclear war as no other nation on earth is. Based on discussion with Professor Stephen Cohen, I am one of the few Americans who has been down inside of a working nuclear bomb shelter in Russia of the present era, and the only one he knew of. It was not a showpiece, and Russia has upgraded its nuclear bomb shelters since that visit. I have also been inside the huge fortress apartments built during the cold war that many people live in. These buildings are on the order of a kilometer to half a kilometer long, angled toward the most probable direction of enemy advance. The walls are fortress-thick, one to three meters, with steel outer doors. How those would stand up to a 300 kiloton air burst from a US nuclear warhead has not been tested, but it is quite probable that people inside can survive. Russia did the largest nuclear civil defense exercise in history in 2016 [21]. No other superpower nation is as prepared for all-out nuclear war as the Russian Federation.
Consequently, in the case of Russia, mutually assured destruction isn’t at parity with the United States. It’s not even close. Elbridge Colby expressed understanding of the USA’s lack of nuclear defense. To my knowledge, even experts like Colby may not understand the degree to which Russia is prepared compared to the United States. The true time on the Doomsday Clock is not 90 seconds to midnight. It is 1 second to midnight.
References
1. O’Rourke, L. A. (2019). The Strategic Logic of Covert Regime Change: US-Backed Regime Change Campaigns during the Cold War. Security Studies, 29(1), 92–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2020.1693620 Retrieved Nov 13, 2024.
2. Perkins, J. (2004). Confessions of an economic hit man. San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler Publishers. ISBN 9781576753019 https://archive.org/details/ConfessionsOfAnEconomicHitman_257/mode/2up
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7. Montanaro D. (2022) Biden says he was expressing moral outrage when saying Putin shouldn’t stay in power. NPR https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28/1089300515/biden-putin-remarks-regime-change Retrieved Nov 13, 2024
8. Goncharova O. (2024) Foreign Ministry responds to rumors of Kyiv’s plans to build nuclear bomb. https://kyivindependent.com/ukraines-foreign-ministry-responds-to-rumors-of-kyivs-potential-to-build-nuclear-bomb/ Retrieved Nov 13, 2024
9. Tucker M. (2024) Zelensky’s nuclear option: Ukraine ‘months away’ from bomb. https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/zelensky-nuclear-weapons-bomb-0ddjrs5hw Retrieved Nov 13, 2024
10. Belford A., Gibbs M., Harding L., Goodley S. (2021) Pandora Papers Reveal Offshore Holdings of Ukrainian President and his Inner Circle. https://www.occrp.org/en/project/the-pandora-papers/pandora-papers-reveal-offshore-holdings-of-ukrainian-president-and-his-inner-circle
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