Having failed thus far to ignite Nuclear Armageddon, what’s up next for the U.S. military industrial complex? I’ll tell you: New bases in Europe, 47 of them, to be exact, in Scandinavia in coming years. That’s Joe Biden’s legacy, a blood transfusion to NATO’s moribund carcass by adding Finland and Sweden and thereby ballooning the Empire’s global military footprint, a footprint of over 800 imperial foreign military bases already bankrupting us.
Welp, we’re gonna get 47 more, per journalist Patrick Hennigsen, and they’re gonna be near Russia. If you’re a Finn or a Swede, you might want to consider emigrating, since the pusillanimous NATO to which you now belong has set you up as a tripwire for the Atomic Apocalypse. That’s Biden’s legacy.
Don’t think for a minute these bases make anyone safer. Quite the contrary. Besides being hugely provocative and thus endangering the local population, the bases’ U.S. soldiers are in harm’s way. Moscow eloquently demonstrated this on November 25. That was when Russia retaliated for recent ATACMS assaults, manned and operated by U.S. personnel. Most of that personnel are now dead. That’s because Russia shot its unstoppable Iskander missiles at the launchers, killing at least 30 U.S. operators.
Also “up to 40 fighters, mostly from the U.S. were eliminated in a missile strike on a command center…in the city of Kharkov on November 25,” RT reported November 28 [“Russian Defense Ministry reveals response to long-range Ukrainian strikes”].
This is the fate that may await U.S. soldiers on foreign military bases, because Russia’s extensive weapons menu is chock-a-block with all types of hypersonic missiles against which the west is defenseless….
Meanwhile, all-around nitwits in the Biden administration chatter blandly about “Ukraine taking the fight to Russia.” Ukraine? Hello? Is that the new shorthand for the United States?
In fact, much of our military production depends deeply on supply chains linked to China and, indeed, directly on Chinese manufacturing. And clouding the American defense picture, on December 1, Beijing’s sanctions on “the export of about 700 dual-use items took effect,” reported Asia Times that day, although what really grabbed headlines two days later was Beijing’s ban on sale of three rare earth minerals – gallium, germanium and antimony – to the U.S., a ban predicted in these CounterPunch pages, long ago. China has also sanctioned multiple American defense firms and senior executives…
China’s list of weapons-necessary products now prohibited from sale to the U.S. includes “computers, electronic devices, chemicals, sensors, lasers and aviation navigation systems. If China uses the list to fight a technology war, the U.S. won’t be able to find alternative products elsewhere.” So, um, about arming and equipping those 47 military bases in Scandinavia, I suppose Uncle Sam could always cannibalize dishwashers and washing machines to propel American weapons, the way the Biden team’s supposed geniuses like commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told us the Russians did in Ukraine (ho, ho!)…
We in the west have failed to assemble even one hypersonic missile, while a few Russian Oreshniks could likely wipe out an entire military base. I guess now they’ll all be pointed at Scandinavia.
-Eve Ottenberg, December 12, 2024
Read more in the following article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/13/biden-aims-to-go-out-with-a-bellicose-bang/
