NATO is only an assured market for US produced weapons. It is true that a War Economy was what really took the US out of the Great Depression with F.D. Roosevelt preparing for WWII. However, WWII ended in 1945, about 73 years ago, but the US War Economy is still alive in 2018. The US governments through the successive administrations has always found a pretext to keep on with a war economy. Actually whenever the US economy is in trouble, the US has engaged itself in a war somewhere. That sequence started with the Korean War and so on. Nevertheless, until the Vietnam War the military casualties did not have a political cost. The involvement in Vietnam caused many riots and protests across the entire US. The US lost the Vietnam War so it kept itself off the battlefields for a while. The Vietnam War cost over 50 thousand dead US soldiers and that had important political consequences such as public contempt concerning wars. lt was the reason conscription was abolished not only in the US but in the rest of the NATO countries. In a citizens army soldiers are there because of an imposed duty and every casualty always hurts some community, something that can be politically costly. While in a professional army, casualties become a self-chosen risk, which resembles the soldiers to mercenaries, that way casualties have a smaller impact in the public mind and a lighter political cost. The diminished political consequences of wars left a larger political margin for Washington to get involved in wars of choice with far away countries that did not ever pose any danger for the US nor had aggressed the mighty US of America. Since no government was crazy enough to attack the US, in order to have a pretext to keep supplying money to its weapons industry, Washington had to fake hostile actions or invent improbable threats which could justify an attack or an invasion, in which to use and test the weapons produced, such as the so called War on Terror. Those wars invariably happen in remote places, so far away that there is no risk of their expanding to the US borders. Even if the chosen enemy doesn’t have any means to attack the US, those wars serve as a pretext to increase over and over the Defence Budget that feeds on the earnings of the US Military industrial Complex. It is a policy that keeps alive the phantom of a Russian or a Chinese threat to some of the US allies so they can be compelled to buy more American weapons even when they have their own weapons industry.

There is a big problem for those US vassals that follow Washington’s orders; it is that the US weapons programme remains anchored in Second World War strategic criteria. Basically, it remains anchored in the use of strategic bombing against civilian population and civilian infrastructure, as in Serbia, in the vain hope that the exasperated population will overthrow their government. According to International Military Law, which forbids any attack against civilians, it constitutes a war crime. A crime that became a regular practice during the Second World War. It all started during the Battle of the Chanel when the British and the Germans got involved in a fight to bomb each other’s Civilian population. The confrontation ended very badly for the German side, because when the US entered the war the Anglo-Saxon Allies acquired air supremacy, which allowed for a bombing technic called Carpet Bombing, which completely destroyed Germany. Since then, aerial bombing of everything became the main weapon in the US military strategy. Since the war against Japan in the Pacific Ocean, the instrument to project US Aerial Supremacy everywhere became the so-called Carrier Groups, which consist of an Aircraft carrier and several other warships. Carrier Groups transport US aerial supremacy to any corner of the World and are used in US diplomacy as a veiled menace. When Chinese economic power started to make China very influential in the Pacific Basin, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a Pivot to Asia in US foreign policy. What that phrase meant in reality was sending 6 of the 11 US Navy carriers to the Pacific Ocean. The Carrier strategy is being followed right now in the recent American imposed decision to rearm Japan. Prime Minister Abe announced the construction of two Japanese Carriers to counterbalance the growing Chinese military presence in the Pacific. A Carrier is a very expensive weapon, each costing over $12 billion. Japan’s Government is very much in debt but seems to ignore the cost of such weapons. Meanwhile, the Russians and the Chinese have developed a specific antidote against carriers in the form of powerful hypersonic cruise missiles that, because they fly at 10 times the speed of sound (10 macht) are impossible to intercept. Those missiles do turn Carriers into expensive and very big targets, easy to hit.

Another deployment of US control of the sky is the proliferation of US bases in Europe that could have been justified perhaps during the cold War, but that keeps on going after the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the latest episodes was the dismemberment of Serbia to separate the Serb province of Kosovo. After 72 days of intense bombardment by NATO, Serbia had to give up. Serbia did not represent even a remote a menace to its European neighbours nor to the United States of America. The purpose of such naked aggression became clear when the US became the first one among the very few countries to recognize Kosovo’s independence, so it could negotiate with their puppet government, installed in Pristina, the concession of the space to build in Kosovo the biggest US Air Force base in Europe, at only a few minutes flight from Russian territory. Shortly afterwards the US started building missile batteries in Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania with the pretext of protecting Europe from non-existent Iranian Nuclear ballistic missiles. All these supposedly defensive anti-missile batteries have an offensive capacity and are close enough to the Russian border to diminish the time to react against a NATO attack against Russia. The Kremlin took good note of the NATO hostile attitude and started the technological modernization of its defensive capacity. The Russian military and scientists are very much aware of the US use of its aerial supremacy strategy and have concentrated in the further development of Soviet era mobile anti-aerial defensive batteries such as the Sam 400 (S-400) which can destroy several aerial targets at the same time with a very wide range of 400 kilometres. The S-400 have proven to be so accurate and consistent and so superior to the (Patriot) US equivalent that big countries like China and India have been buying them from Russia. The client list includes Turkey, a US ally. The Kremlin is about to deploy a newer version of the S-400 with improved range and precision, the S- 500. On the American side, the anti-missile defence is deployed in accordance with the means and presumed attack strategy of the defunct Soviet Union, so most of the American anti-missile defence is deployed in Canada and the North of the US ready to confront a missile attack through the Artic. In the meantime, Russia has developed very long range and manoeuvrable hypersonic cruise missiles that, launched from Russian territory, can reach US territory from the South

It may be because of this vulnerability of the US to a southern incoming attack that Moscow and Caracas are in talks about building a Russian Airbase in a small Venezuelan Caribbean island called Orchila, some 200 kilometres from the mainland. It is a move that reflects the rapprochement of US bases to the Russian border by putting offensive means closer to the exposed South of the US. This recent Russian move will without doubt will be a cause for deep worries in Washington. However, what Maduro and Putin should consider is that, even if Orchila is an island easy to defend from an aerial attack with a few S-400 batteries, Caracas is situated in the continental mainland and can be reached by land from Colombia, which may be the reason behind the very recent admission of Colombia into NATO. The US has a large experience on Regime change and there is no possibility of a strong resistance by Maduro’s Bolivarian Armed Forces, especially if they have to be on the watch at the Brazilian border in case of the military intervention Bolsonaro has been mulling about. There is another possible move from the South by the Kremlin: to renew with Habana the concession of the Soviet era naval base Russia had in Cuba until not so long ago. The Russian Navy has accurate low altitude, very long-range cruise missiles which were fired from small ships in the Caspian Sea to hit targets around Aleppo in Syria. Cuba has the advantage for Russia of being an island easy to defend from aerial attack with the deployment of several S-400 batteries and much more difficult to invade from the sea by US proxy forces in a classical US Regime change operation.

Almeria 20/12/2018

(Translated and revised by the author).