A not so gentle hint from the Kremlin on what comes next?
My latest essay, “How Far Can Diplomacy Go?” dated 7 January, has taken on a life of its own. Shortly after it was re-posted on http://www.antiwar.com in the early hours of 8 January it was immediately translated into Russian by politros.com, a St Petersburg based news portal. This was then picked up and re-posted by a half a dozen other Russian news websites including www.yandex.ru, the country’s equivalent of google.com, as well as fbm.ru, discover24.ru and rznonline.ru. It also was placed on the youtube channel 24NEWS plus : Российский беспилотный подводный аппарат «Посейдон» убедит НАТО принять условия России
I emphasize that my articles are very rarely spotted and translated by Russian media. Their website specializing in such translations, inosmi.ru has done this only a few times over the past five years. Other Russian sites have occasionally re-posted me in Russian, but these appeared to be machine translations, unlike what politros produced, and took several days to appear.
I also point out that the translation which the Russian portals have now disseminated is a partial translation, amounting to about two-thirds of my original text. They left out my comments on the “crackpot” whom I identified as a source of the “window of opportunity” argument which no doubt is driving the present Russian ultimatum to the West to revise the security architecture in Europe in its favor. They left out my remark on how revising this architecture must take place before Vladimir Putin’s current mandate in office expires in 2024 so that he may retire in peace and let the country move on to normal democracy.
More importantly, the Russian reposting of my article leaves out my mention of “surgical strikes” as the way for Russia to prove to our skeptical foreign and military policy establishment in the United States and Europe that their demands are not a bluff, but are backed up by superior strategic and tactical military force. Instead, they focus on placing Russian strategic arms just off the American shores, and in particular on stationing there submarines carrying the Poseidon, Russia’s new state of the art nuclear armed deep sea drone which is capable of setting off tsunamis that destroy coastal cities and installations.
The advantage of the offshore stationing of such weapons of mass destruction is that they pose an existential threat without need to actually destroy anything or kill anyone as would happen with another show of force I had mentioned, “surgical strikes” on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast naval bases now being outfitted and manned by US-UK teams. The threat of Poseidon by itself would be very unlikely to elicit a kinetic response from the United States and NATO. But will such a threat alone be sufficient to win for Russia the capitulation it is now demanding from NATO? Perhaps, but only perhaps. There are simply a great many stubborn and proud global hegemonists in Washington who will not be persuaded by a purely peaceful display of might.
Time will tell
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022