A mass murder timetable and a geopolitical race against possible global hostilities. A change of regime anticipated in November in Washington, DC, could make the difference in the mounting bombardment deaths, the constant mass displacements and racist settler violence in Palestine, all sustained and enabled by the US. A different presidential election outcome could see a rapid end to the Ukraine war and a new stability in eastern Europe.
Will American Vice President Kamala Harris halt the ongoing genocide in Palestine if she attains the United States’ presidency? Will such an imminent geopolitical change provoke the Israeli regime in Occupied Jerusalem to further draw in the US’s military support by a rash nuclear strike on Iran – thereby sustaining the Likud regime’s political survival?
Alternatively, a Donald Trump return to power could see a scaling down of the Ukraine war, a more reassured North Korea and, also, a calming of the Beijing-Taipei tensions caused by Washington’s fanning of naval rivalry in China’s maritime sphere.
Such is the global significance of the domestic politics of the pre-eminent superpower and its allied Western power bloc. It is that very pre-eminence that wields such planetary impact affecting humanity overall.
True, to the outside world, the American presidency choices may seem of low or questionable calibre. On recent occasion, American voters seem to be happy to choose between a seemingly infantile, vulgar and obviously criminally minded persona on one side and, a somewhat doddering, ideologically fanatical (‘Zionist’) but intellectually arrogant persona, on the other.
Before that, we saw Americans choose a self-pronounced genital ‘grabber’ and vacuous TV star over an elitist (“basket of deplorables”) career politician who had, as her country’s chief diplomat, publicly threatened to “obliterate” a whole nation (Iran).
At the helm of the most powerful geopolitical bloc, the US President has the power to, at least partially, lead the whole world community down paths of devastation. But being a profoundly socially accomplished nation at the same time, the US of A also inspires and exhilarates in some of its political and governmental finesse. It is still, in some ways, a gentle giant.
Both in West Asia and in Eastern Europe, the tensions are high today as the conflicting power blocs strike hard, manoeuvre, gamble and, ultimately, risk worsened war, on a wider geographical scale and/or with more intense destruction.
‘Soft options’
In both theatres of hot war there has been gossip as well as serious strategic speculation about ‘soft options’ or ‘hard options’. There are also worries about ‘wild card’ actions by single actors in desperate predicaments or, at least, with perceptions of desperate predicaments.
The ‘what if?’ question applies to both these theatres of major geopolitical confrontation. In both cases, there are various types of proxy warfare being waged by great powers. Some great powers are being reluctantly drawn into the fray. Other great powers are already heavily committed to grand, imperial, geopolitical projects of dominance and economic gain.
That ‘what if?’ speculation necessarily includes that horrific nuclear option, given the capabilities of confronting great powers backing the proxies.
In Palestine, the death toll now tops 40,000 after ten months of West-backed Israeli offensives. Unless there is a change of policy in Washington with a new US presidency – especially with a possibly different policy under a Kamala Harris presidency – the casualties will keep rising. Within a few more months of West-backed, ‘plausibly’ genocidal, warfare, the numbers killed in Gaza will equal the numbers killed instantaneously by the Hiroshima nuclear bombing executed by this very same alliance of Western powers eighty years ago.
The world’s first nuclear bomb, dropped by an US Air Force plane on the large Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima on 6th August, 1945 (in fulfilment of the Western Allies’ war plans), instantly killed an estimate 78,000 people. Up to 100,000 or more are counted as dying over the ensuing decades from injuries, trauma suicides, and radiation sickness. A few days later in that fateful August, a second Japanese city, Nagasaki, suffered a similar fate in accordance with that same Western war timetable.
How many of the Earth’s citizenry know today that, eighty years ago, the US Air Force would have dropped a third atom bomb on a third Japanese city within days (it was already in stock) if Japan had not surrendered? The third bombing was scheduled for August 19 but Tokyo surrendered on August 15.
In addition to the third bomb (nicknamed ‘Third Shot’ – such a sick understatement!), the US nuclear bombing program was busy assembling three more, to be ready for scheduled further nuclear strikes in September and October that year. All this is clear evidence of America’s and its Western allies’, deliberate intention to wage nuclear war back in 1945, at the very dawn of the nuclear age.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no “one-off” or “experimental” operations. They were meant to be the start of the Western Allies’ nuclear phase of the War, a meticulous schedule for an atomic bombing campaign.
Nuclear deterrent
Apparently, however, there is some evidence that the US Government of the time was beginning to have misgivings of pursuing the nuclear campaign for too long, given the huge casualty rates and severity and extent of physical destruction observed in the first two strikes.
What happened in 1945, then, was a suspension of the planned nuclear offensive by the West due to the ending of hostilities. Since then, the West has been ready and waiting to use its enormous nuclear armament at any time. Indeed, Western politicians have hinted, on occasion, at their readiness to use the nuclear option.
The principal reason why such a nuclear option has not been exercised since then, is the quick emergence of a countervailing nuclear capability in the Warsaw Pact group of Socialist powers. Only the assurance of a mutual destruction has prevented any nuclear war to date. Even if the Warsaw Pact itself collapsed decades ago, Russia’s has sustained its nuclear arsenal and, new nuclear military powers have emerged outside the Western alliance, namely, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.
The diversification of nuclear armouries has continued to ensure that condition of ‘nuclear deterrent’, that is, of terrifying, instant, strike capacities being kept in suspense. After all, that is the meaning of “deterrence” – the deterring of a potential action, something that is planned and intended to implement.
The world has lived and suffered under this threat of a suspended nuclear belligerence for the past eighty years. The nuclear deterrent remains the scary subtext underlying, especially, the geopolitics of the great powers with their nuclear arsenal, the richest, most powerful of them paradoxically claiming to be the “civilised” world.
In West Asia, however, the ‘wild card’ possibility is very high, given that in the actual war theatre, there is only a single nuclear-armed actor – Israel. The West ensures that Israel, its sole proxy in the region, remains the militarily dominant actor in the theatre.
It has ensured this dominance – despite Israel being the smallest country of the region – by ensuring that the Zionist colonial State became a nuclear-armed power within two decades of its forcible founding in 1948. Today, protected by frequent vetoes by Western powers in the UN system, Israel has been the sole privileged State to rapidly develop its nuclear arms without any spotlight on it and any criticism.
All the other nuclear arming states – including Pakistan and India – have been subjected to various forms of monitoring often with Western pressure.
Other states that are outside the West’s sphere of influence have been blocked from building up nuclear capability – Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq – by means of hard politico-economic sanctions and, also, by outright military strikes and catastrophic invasions, directly or through proxy armed groups. The sole exception being North Korea because Pyongyang enjoys the deterrent umbrella of both Beijing and Moscow.
It is Israel’s nuclear dominance in West Asia and, more importantly, the waywardness and corruption of the current Government, that renders West Asia as the region most likely to suffer a sudden, cataclysmic regional war. There is a general consensus among analysts that such a region wide full scale war could be sparked by Occupied Jerusalem’s use of intensive military strikes, including possible nuclear bombings of either Iran or Syria or, both.
Only the West is to blame for allowing a besieged colonial proxy outpost to possess nuclear arms. That is a gross violation of the premise that one’s proxy must not possess your own capacities.
For eighty years, Israel has functioned precariously as a State surrounded by hostile states and forced to expand territorially as a means of ‘security’ while, at the same time, enforcing disruptive ethnic exclusivism.
Is it surprising, therefore, that that hapless Western proxy colony ends up with a hysterically paranoid population that elects opportunistically manipulative, criminally corrupt governments – desperadoes ready to play all cards simply to cling to power?
