Patrick Lawrence: Biden’s ‘Samson Option’
By Patrick Lawrence / Consortium News
It has been clear since the terror attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001 — the date I choose to mark a great turn in the global order — that America’s abdication of its postwar hegemony was to rank high among the 21st century’s defining events.
The questions from that day onward have been how the policy cliques in Washington would respond to such a change in America’s place in the community of nations and what they might do — how great the risks they would take — to avoid, or at least forestall, this world-historical shift.
How chaotically or otherwise, to put this question another way, would the arrival of a new, post–American world order prove?
We have just witnessed a week’s worth of shocking provocations as the U.S. and Britain escalate their proxy war against Russia under the pretense of defending Ukraine in a war that is already lost.
Washington and London — the latter with the former’s assent — have now authorized the grossly irresponsible regime in Kiev to fire American– and British-made missiles into Russian territory.
The Ukrainians wasted no time doing so. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) launched a volley of U.S.–made ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) missiles at Russian targets last Tuesday. A day later the AFU fired a similar barrage of British-made Storm Shadow missiles into Russian territory.
The degree of planning and coordination behind these attacks seems to me self-evident. Nobody in Washington, London, or Kiev is commenting on the targets hit, but these, too, were without question chosen after careful consultation.
Moscow has responded just as it said it would weeks ago. It now considers itself at war with the Western powers and, last Thursday, attacked a Ukrainian target with a new-generation hypersonic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
The message could scarcely be clearer — providing, I must add, one is capable of reading it accurately.
So we now have answers to the above-noted questions.
It was never difficult to foresee that those planning and executing U.S. foreign policy, lacking all imagination and anything remotely resembling courage, would prove incapable of an orderly transition to a multipolar world order.
After the Sept. 11 events, a continued commitment to American primacy was ineluctably going to prove a commitment to one or another degree of disorder.
The Biden regime’s latest escalation of its proxy war in Ukraine indicates the limits of this commitment: There are none.
We are now on notice that the world — bitter to write this — is condemned to unceasing chaos and violence so long as the American imperium’s ideologues are capable of mounting a resistance against the world as it struggles to be.
We know now the risks those devoted to prolonging the imperium’s final phase will take in defense of the no-longer-defensible: All risks are acceptable as they cling to power. They will risk another world war; they will risk nuclear annihilation.
We hear a lot these days about the Israeli doctrine known as the Samson Option, whereby the Israelis, if they thought themselves under an existential threat, would use their nuclear arsenal to bring the world down with them. Those freak-show terrorists running the Zionist state, you might say: Who or what could be more diabolic?
It is a reasonable question. But there is no longer any pretending as to the unique perversity of terrorist Israel and its Samson Option. America in its post–Sept. 11 phase — fearful, viewing itself as threatened by history itself — has just proved equally perverse, equally diabolic, equally given to contempt for the human cause.
There is a greater and lesser way to understand the U.S. decision to authorize the use of Western-supplied missiles against Russian targets. It is partly a matter of passing politics, this is to say, and partly a question of the dynamics of late-imperial ideology. Let us consider each.
It is certainly so, as Joe Lauria pointed out in Consortium News last week, that the immense recklessness of the U.S. decision to authorize the use of Western-supplied missiles against Russian targets reflects a failed president’s spiteful determination, on his way out of office, to undermine President-elect Trump’s announced intention to end the war in Ukraine.
I do not see how giving Kiev permission to use Western-made missiles (with Western military operating them) against Russia will do anything to alter Trump’s intentions. The only way such a gambit could work is by provoking Russia into a vastly expanded, vastly more dangerous war. This goes to my previously made point: No risk is too great if taking it will prolong the long U.S. assault on Russia in the name of American preeminence.
There is also Joe Biden’s pitiful desire to preserve his “legacy.” Biden was foolish beyond words when he settled on the subversion of the Russian Federation — is “subjugation” my word? — as the project that would engrave his name in the history books.
This is another lost war: Biden’s “legacy” lies in ruins even before he leaves one behind. The Man from Scranton will go down, as measured by the failures, dangers, and messes he leaves behind, as the worst-performing president in postwar American history.
We can fairly mark this down to Biden’s native ineptitude: Any careful review of his career reveals him to be — no apology for my word choice — very stupid. His declining mental state, which has received so much press in the months since he was forced to withdraw his bid for reelection, is a case of incapacity piled atop incompetence.
A little while back the Russians began referring to “the collective Biden” to take account of the reality that there is no way of knowing who makes the judgments and policy decisions commonly attributed to “the president,” or “Mr. Biden,” or “the White House.”
You might think it unbelievably irresponsible of the Democrats, and the whole of Capitol Hill along with them, to leave the United States without a capable president, but I propose a reconsideration:
While it is certainly irresponsible to leave the Oval Office vacant for many months, if not years, it is perfectly believable given the extent to which the Deep State (the national-security state if this makes you more comfortable) now runs U.S. policy — this not quite but nearly out in the open.
So far as one can make out, to dolly in on this point, Secretary of State Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and a very few others form an inner circle that has been directing U.S. policy for much of Biden’s presidential term, either autonomously or by way of his nodding (literally) assent.
An outer circle, with input at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue but less operational authority, would include such figures as Samantha Power, who directs the Agency for International Development, Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
This is “the collective Biden” — so well coined, this phrase. Look at its members, and there are many more I have not named. These are the imperium’s praefecti, procurators and consuls. They have no interest in politics and want nothing to do with the citizenry. The empire is their ideology, and they are dedicated solely to extending its power.
And it is these more or less remote apparatchiks who form the collective Biden and who are yet more indifferent to the taking of unconscionable risks than the weak figure behind which they manage the empire’s affairs.
As many remarked after Russia began its intervention in Ukraine two years and nine months ago, Joe Biden started a war he cannot afford to lose. But Joe Biden will content himself with his Corvette and his sunglasses in a few weeks’ time.
The Deep State has a lot, lot more on the line at this point — not less, I would say, than the longevity of the American imperium. The people who form it are the true losers who cannot afford to lose.
It is impossible to know at this point what will come next now that the U.S., with Britain in tow, has authorized the long-range missile strikes.
We do not know, among much else, how the Deep State will field what efforts Trump may make to end the war. These people subverted his plans to improve relations with Moscow during his first term, we must remind ourselves.
But the extent of the desperation shared between the Deep State and Biden-the-outgoing-pol is very plain. The collective Biden reportedly did not inform the Pentagon before taking the missiles decision. It simultaneously announced plans to provide Kiev with anti-personnel land mines, the kind that blow combatants’ legs off and maim children who come upon them years or decades later.
This is not, to put the point mildly, the conduct of a policy clique confident it is in control of its destiny.
The Russian Response
Much has been made of the hypersonic missile, called the Oreshnik, the Russian military fired at a Ukrainian defense industry plant in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk last Thursday — a day after Kiev fired its volley of British-made Storm Shadow missiles into Russia. Out came the shrieks in Western media that “Putin’s Russia” has again threatened to resort to a nuclear attack.
There is no question of the Oreshnik’s unusual, if not unprecedented power. It triggered explosions that lasted three hours, according to the first press reports. And it can indeed carry a nuclear warhead.
But I do not share the prevailing read of the Oreshnik’s first deployment — just as I have not shared any of the previous talk of Russia’s suppose threats to go nuclear. I would summarize the message the Kremlin may as well have scribbled in chalk on the Oreshnik’s fuselage as,
Let us remind you that we, on both sides, are nuclear powers. Let us introduce some sanity to the impasse to which you have brought us.
The televised speech President Vladimir Putin delivered last Thursday evening supports this interpretation. While there are likely to be more Oreshniks fired into Ukraine, the targets, like last Thursday’s, will be chosen for their military merit and Russia will continue to refrain from deploying any short– or medium-range missiles anywhere beyond Ukraine —depending, he said, on what the U.S. does next.
Per usual, the Russian leader has taken the long view — as we all should — and places Russia’s response to the crisis the U.S. and Britain just created in the historical context of the West’s long list of post–Cold War betrayals.
“It was not Russia but the United States that destroyed the system of international security,” Putin said, the latest of his many references to Washington’s withdrawal from various arms-control treaties since the Bush II administration.
Glenn Diesen, an editor at Russia in Global Affairs and among the wisest heads in matters such as these, published a piece last week in which he asserted that the West has “crossed the line between proxy war and direct war.” In it Diesen posed the question on everyone’s mind right now:
“How will Russia respond? There are several more steps on the escalation ladder before pushing the nuclear button. Russia can intensify strikes on Ukrainian political targets and infrastructure, introduce North Korean troops that were likely intended as a deterrent for a situation like this, strike NATO assets in the Black Sea and logistic centres in Poland or Romania, destroy satellites used for the attacks on Russia, or attack US/NATO military assets in other parts of the world under the guise of enabling other countries to defend themselves.”
I do not know the likelihood or otherwise of any of these projections. But it seems to me the collective Biden and the national-security apparatus behind it may have got the Kremlin in a Catch–22 of sorts.
So long as Russia exercises the restraint it now exhibits — let’s say so long as Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, remain the statesmen in the room — the U.S. and clients such as Britain are likely to press their campaign of provocations to the next step, and the step after that, and so on. This is the long road to America’s version of the Samson Option.
And if the only way to stop these provocations is to respond to them as the West intends — that is, to escalate into a state of risk no sane statesman would find acceptable — the Russian Federation could find itself in the very war it has resisted, over many years, entering upon. The short road to the Samson Option.
We can thank Joe Biden for leading the world to this perilous moment. But I don’t think Biden is diabolically intelligent enough to get this done on his own. And this is what ought to worry us most.
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Patrick Lawrence
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.