EDITORIAL

Fatal Utopian Insanity

Nov. 1—The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), long known as the voice of the “Eastern Liberal Establishment,” established as the younger sister of London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, surfaced what should be a wake-up call to those unwilling to understand how dangerous, and how far the nuclear Armageddonist push has reached.

An article, “Could America Win a New World War? What It Would Take To Defeat Both China and Russia,” was released on October 27 by the CFR’s magazine Foreign Affairs. Thomas Mahnken, the author, is a prolific writer on military and intelligence matters. He is a Senior Research Professor at The Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), has served in high-level U.S. Department of Defense positions, and is an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve. Mahnken has professionally straddled all sides of the political think-tank spectrum, and thus his authorship makes this article more chilling, and all the more required reading for all concerned about the danger of the ever-escalating march to nuclear confrontation.

Unbelievably, Mahnken’s Oct. 27 article goes through a rough plan of how the United States could go about winning this war, and no, he wasn’t joking. The U.S., Mahnken says, “needs to create deep munitions reserves, stockpile high-quality gear, and come up with creative battlefield techniques,” as well as “expand and deepen the United States’ defense industrial base.” In addition, he writes, we should “develop new joint operational concepts,” study the “strategic contours of a war in multiple theaters,” and coordinate more with allies.

Otherwise, the article is rife with fantastical statements such as, “Moscow, meanwhile, could decide that with the United States bogged down in the western Pacific [fighting China —ed.], it could get away with invading more of Europe.” The article’s conclusion includes an amazingly uninspiring chorale: “The United States and its allies must plan for how to simultaneously win wars in Asia and Europe, as unpalatable as the prospect may seem.”

Investigative journalist Caitlin Johnstone, writing about this article, makes note of how Western media is increasingly pushing the idea that the West must accept war as not only possible, but likely and something we should be prepared for. “These pundits frame the rise of a multipolar world as something that must inevitably be accompanied by an explosion of violence and human suffering,” she writes, but “[i]t doesn’t have to be this way.” Her article, “All at Once Mainstream Pundits Push for World War III,” was posted on Consortium News on Oct. 28.

Indeed, if Western nations would listen to the call of Schiller Institute leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the LaRouche movement to create a new development and security architecture, the seemingly inevitable march towards war would vanish overnight.