theDrahos

Czech General Petr Pavel, who became the chairman of NATO’s Military Committee yesterday, told a security conference in Prague, last week, that he believes Russia is a threat to Europe on par with ISIS, and that Russia could take over Ukraine and the Baltics in two days without a response from NATO. NATO’s main problem, he said, is its cumbersome decision making process which involves bringing in all 28 members. The general said:

NATO would face the question of whether to start war, perhaps nuclear, against Russia over the occupied Baltics, Pavel said, according to the Prague Post.

Pavel apparently didn’t consider that, were NATO to employ its nuclear weapons in the way he suggests, life would be over for all of us, a reality noted by the Czech blog “Nova Republika,” reports Sputnik.

So long as Obama remains in office as an instrument of the whole Wall Street/London crowd that is desperate over the death of its oligarchical system, the danger of war is on a hair trigger, and that war will be a general war of annihilation of humanity.

The recognition that war is immanent and the picture of how close that is, is reflected in several recent statements:

• In the May 31st Financial Times, Thomas Graham, a U.S. National Security Council senior director for Russia (from 2004 to 2007 during George W. Bush), writes that

He says those who talk about a “Putin” problem, don’t understand that it is “Russia” that is acting in its strategic interest, and talk about “containing” Russia is just “geo-political malfeasance.”

• The Financial Times also ran an editorial warning that “the U.S. should stop grandstanding [against China] via the television cameras and should think hard before it sails warships past Chinese-built islands” [in the South China Sea]. The editorial made heavy reference to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s threats during the Shangri-La Dialogue international meeting of defense chiefs that the U.S. will “fly, sail and operate” over and around Chinese islands.

Brookings’ Michael O’Hanlon has a similar call for de-escalation, in an article called “How To Save Ukraine,” noting,

  Part of the deal he proposes is that there are permanent guarantees that Ukraine and all other Eastern European states not now in NATO never be allowed in, unless Russia approves, and perhaps Russia at some future point decides to join.  Russian cooperation is too important on too many big global issues, he says.