Vladimir Putin on western sabotage of Nordstream pipelines

 

 

Asian woman elder hands me $5

 

Yesterday was another of our weekly 'No war with Russia' vigils we've been holding in Brunswick each Thursday for an hour. We held our first one on February 5.

We had Rosie, Dan and me there. Sometimes 2-3 more folks join us.

I do it for the waves and honks - especially from truckers. We get few negatives. Mostly blank stares at the car ahead. You can almost see the words 'stay in line' tagged on their foreheads.

I like to encourage those drivers who are thinking outside the box and not buying the non-ending corporate media Russia demonization.

Anyway, before anyone else arrived for the vigil, an elder Asian woman approached and wanted to read my sign. She said nothing to me, but then with her extended hands gave me a deep look and $5 bill. I didn't want to take it but that would have insulted her. I moaned and then said thank you. She walked away into a local fingernail shop where I realized she worked. Many of the workers in these shops are Vietnamese.

I wonder if she thought I was homeless. I really have no idea.

After the vigil I dodged traffic and went into the medium strip of the busy downtown street to pick four flowers (each a different color) from the city's beautification efforts. 

I walked toward her shop and entered the mini-mall outer door and realized that she was sitting inside the door with her shoes off. She was leaning against the wall and could see the street through the big windows from this spot. I handed her the small but radiant flowers and said thank you again.

She said to me 'I don't speak English' but her eyes and spirit told me all I needed to know.

That is why I love to hold signs on busy downtown streets. I try look the people in the eye - sometimes they look back.

For what ever reason.

Bruce

Updating the collapsing US-UK-NATO war on Russia

 

• At around 12 minutes into the video Col. Macgregor discusses the destruction of the Nordstream 1 & 2 pipelines. He says 'The Russians did not do this.'
• He also discusses the fact that Washington does not want any ceasefire or peaceful agreement to end the war in Ukraine.
• In addition the former Army officer reviews the original Russian military strategy along with the new emerging reservist mobilization decree. 
• He also claims that Germany was getting ready to make a shift and move away from supporting the war. The pipeline destruction now severely limits Berlin's options. He predicts that the current Germany government will collapse. He appears to also believe that NATO is in trouble.
  
• Poland, Macgregor says, is the most gung-ho for a bigger war. (Poland also hates Germany.)
  
• He concludes by saying the Kiev puppet government is rumored to be working on a nuclear dirty bomb.
  

Vladimir Putin on sabotage of pipelines

 

 

Putin: “Why would I blow up my own pipes? I could simply shut them off … I am not against the citizens of Europe, it's your leaders who are against the citizens of Europe.” 

 

Scott Ritter News

🇷🇺🇺🇸The sabotage on the "Northern Streams" occurred in the control zone of US intelligence. 

 

This was stated in the Russian Foreign Ministry.  

Czech citizens leading the way

 

 

Thousands of Czechs protested Wednesday in capital Prague again over soaring energy bills and demand to put an end to Czech supporting Ukraine. Hailing "The Czech Republic first," the demonstration came after a massive protest with some 70,000 people involved three weeks ago. 

Protesters criticized Fiala’s government on a number of issues, including supporting EU sanctions against Russia and insufficient help for households and businesses affected by the soaring energy prices.

My biggest fear....who is the real aggressor?

 

 

You can see the writing on the wall. Put your ear to the railroad tracks and hear the train coming.

The US has nuclear weapons stationed at bases in Germany, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey (and soon in the UK) and just might be getting ready to drop one on Ukraine.

The US-UK-NATO are losing the war - despite all the lies told in western corporate media. They've already shown themselves willing to use desperate measures by ordering/helping Kiev to repeatedly attack the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in eastern Ukraine.

And just this week we saw the terrorist raid on Nordstream 1 & 2 pipelines which clearly were done by the western allies. 

 "Didn't NATO bases conduct exercises there [in the area of the incidents], were not American soldiers accommodated on the territory of neighboring countries? (...) This July, in the same place, near the island of Bornholm — this is Denmark — NATO exercises were conducted, using deep-sea equipment," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing.

NATO member states are currently saying they will begin an investigation to learn who did this sabotage. Talk about the fox guarding the chicken house.

What makes me think the west might turn to nukes? How would they pull this off?

My fear is that the US could drop a battlefield nuke in the Donbass and then use their global CIA-run media arm to blame Russia for doing so. (Just like they are presently starting to do by blaming Russia for damaging their own undersea pipelines.) Then the US-UK-NATO could use that for an excuse to go full bore against Russia.

For evidence one might turn to this statement just released: 

On Sunday, Jake Sullivan warned that Washington and its allies would act “decisively” if Russia uses tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, adding that it had communicated “at very high levels to the Kremlin” that any use of nuclear weapons in neighboring country would be “met with catastrophic consequences.”

NATO may send troops into Ukraine if Russia deploys nuclear weapons in that country, Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau told local media on Thursday. The US-led military bloc has repeatedly maintained it’s not at war with Moscow and is not a party to the conflict.

 

I know this sounds insane. Totally irrational. Crazy. Evil, despicable. All of those words describe the neo-con pirates who run Washington and most of the EU governments. They are blinded by greed and desire for 'full spectrum dominance'. They are disconnected from reality. Are they capable of using nukes? You judge for yourself.

I'm just raising this because I feel I must. The neo-cons have been running their global economic and military empire for a long time. But their day in the sun is quickly fading. Russia, China, Iran and many other nations are now standing up to them. The neo-cons are desperate and highly dangerous.

Many of my long-time friends are adamantly opposed to nuclear war - as I am. But some of these folks still put much of the blame for this war on Russia. I don't see it that way.

If we hope to survive this current apocalyptic moment then I believe we must point our collective fingers at the real aggressor - the neo-con led west.

Remember that Russia's military budget this year is right around $65 billion. That is a defensive military. Compare that with the offensive Pentagon budget of around $1.2 trillion (when you add in all the hidden pots of gold like the Department of Energy nuclear weapons budget). Add NATO members military budgets to the US numbers and it is well over 60% of the global total in military spending. 

If Washington feels it can continue to neutralize the already weak peace movement across the west by its tactic of divide-and-conquer, then the neo-cons will feel confident in continuing their suicidal death-march to regain global dominance.

Bruce 

Truth slips out....

 

 

Former President George W. Bush accidentally slipped on his words stating Russia's brutal invasion of Iraq, instead of Ukraine. 

He quickly corrected himself and blamed his age. “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.”

Banderastan SITREP by Faina Savenkova

 

by Faina Savenkova for the Saker blog

For three years now I have been telling you about what is happening in Lugansk [Donbass region of eastern Ukraine]. About the war in which I live, about sorrows and joys. A year ago, the Peacemaker website [Myrotvorets Ukrainian kill list] published my personal data. I have written many letters to world leaders and artists in Western countries. I had only two requests: to delete the personal data of all the children from the “Peacemaker” and to help the children of Donbass to find a peaceful life so that we would not be killed. When the confrontation with the “Peacemaker” began, my friends – Ukrainian journalists asked me why I did not write a letter to Zelensky, but only mentioned him in an interview. At that time it was difficult for me to answer; I still naively believed that there could be peace between Ukraine and Donbass and that UN Secretary-General Guterres and UNICEF, as world-renowned organizations, would help me. But, unfortunately, I was wrong. Everything I asked for was ignored by these organizations, and Ukraine decided that we could be captured by force. My efforts and dreams have remained dreams. The only thing I’m glad about is that I didn’t write to Zelensky at that time. And now I understand why: you can’t write and ask not to kill children to someone who gives orders to shell Donetsk, Gorlovka, Alchevsk and other cities. You cannot write to a president who sends thousands of his soldiers to their deaths without sparing them, gives orders for terrorist acts and the murder of children. You can’t write to the president who started this massacre and lost half of his country. You can’t write to a loser. Every day children die in the Donbas, Kherson and Zaporozhye. And he has only himself to blame. A president who will lose everything…

Well, what about UNICEF, the UN, Amnesty International? Did they say anything about the children killed by the Ukrainian army? No, of course not. They reacted the same way to the story of the Peacemaker. They know. But they remain silent or express “concern”. They are silent always and everywhere. When the children of Yugoslavia, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya were killed, they were silent. And if such respected organizations turn a blind eye to the brutal murder of children, do they have anything to say about the story of the “Peacemaker”? I think not. After all, according to UNICEF and Amnesty International, we are the wrong children, born and living in the wrong place. One of my essays says that children of war behave quietly because adults do not hear them. They are. Unfortunately, we children are not interested in these adults. We are not like them. They seem to think it’s okay to kill us, they just need to do it quietly so as not to disturb others with our cries for help. I’m sorry this is happening. I am sorry that the country in which I was born is shelling and trying to destroy everything that is dear to me and everything that I love, under the approving smile of those who can, but do not want to stop this war. Unfortunately, all those who help Ukraine do not realize that the war is coming to them.

Ordinary people in the United States and Europe are mostly unaware of the atrocities of the Ukrainian army, the brutal shelling and killing of civilians. People are told that we are shooting at ourselves or that the Russian army has been shooting at us for eight years. Apparently, that’s why we expected Russia to come here in 2022, right? This is a different reality.

But I’m sure it won’t always be like this. The truth will win anyway.

From Poland with love?

 

Latest News

• NATO held an exercise with unmanned submarines around the Danish island of Bornholm in June, exactly where the Nord Stream pipes were sabotaged yesterday. It makes the suspicion towards the US even stronger. See here
  

• No suspects behind the incident have officially been named, although in a tweet former Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski “thanked” Washington for destroying the pipeline. Moscow, which called the incident a “terrorist attack," also named the US as a potential suspect. The Russians have characterized Sikorski's statement as “borderline insane hysterical-euphoric reaction“.
• The military operation on Monday night which fired munitions to blow holes in the Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II pipelines on the Baltic Sea floor, near Bornholm Island, was executed by the Polish Navy and special forces. It was aided by the Danish and Swedish military; planned and coordinated with US intelligence and technical support; and approved by the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. See here
  

• Earlier on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said an attack on Nord Stream was “in no one’s interest,” but that it also represented a “significant opportunity” for Europe to abandon Russian natural gas in favor of alternative energy supplies, presumably such as US LNG, and “accelerate the transition to renewables” in order to fight climate change.  
• See SouthFront coverage here and America’s Grand Masters Checkmate the Baltic Sea here
  

Speech at Budapest peace event

 

 President of the Hungarian Community for Peace, Endre Simó’s speech at the Labor Party peace meeting on September 26, 2022 at Nyugati Square in Budapest

I wish you a good day, thank you for the invitation, I am glad that the Hungarian Community for Peace can work together with the Labor Party to protect the peace of our country! It is true that we joined together in the framework of the Forum for Peace movement, which was established on September 5th, to prevent Hungary from being plunged into war, together with organizations and individuals with diverse world views. We need to act because our government preaches too much about peace, but does little for it!

The government allows Western weapons destined for Ukraine to pass through Hungary, gives its name to Western sanctions policy with the exception of oil and gas sanctions, accepts NATO soldiers, allows Ukrainian soldiers treated in our hospitals to return to fight (neutral Switzerland does not allow them to continue go to war), our lady president of the republic, the commander-in-chief of our armed forces, apostrophizes Russia as an aggressor, because it could no longer tolerate the extermination of its sons from Donetsk and Luhansk and to drive a wedge between two brotherly peoples, the Russian and the Ukrainian. Anti-Russian statements are made, the peace-loving Hungarian is not allowed into the public service media.

We are at the point where the Hungarian political leadership stands by Zelensky even in minority matters. Not only does it not protect our compatriots living beyond our borders from being used as cannon fodder against the Russians, but they are already taking away from the Transcarpathians the freedom to live their identity. This happened a few days ago, when Foreign Minister Péter Szíjjártó signed a statement in New York together with his EU colleagues denying the right of the people of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia to a referendum. To be able to freely decide who he wants to live with in the future, Russia or Zelensky’s Ukraine. Would this government be so narrow-minded that it doesn’t even realize what it’s doing? On what basis can we claim the right to autonomy and self-determination for ourselves if we deny it to others? Or is this how we want to please Brussels in order to receive the frozen 7.5 billion euros? Are we turning the Transcarpathian Hungarians’ right to autonomy and self-determination into money? Shall we let principles declared sacred be reduced to fair trade? What do our bloods matter to us when there is money in the house? Would the government identify with the Kiev regime that classified its citizens into indigenous and secondary ethnicities, declaring Ukrainians superior and Russians, Hungarians, and Ruthenians inferior?

Who is the aggressor? The one who slaughters 13,000 Russians and shoots his own if he befriends them, or the one who protects them and wants to liquidate the resurgent Nazism? Who represents human rights? The one who divides his people into inferior and superior races, or the one who allows him to decide in a referendum who he wants to live with. Who represents democracy, Kyiv, which bans opposition parties, or Russia, which even back home offers the opportunity to vote to the 3.5 million Ukrainians who fled there?

According to the signs, the values of which the West was so proud can be found in the East! Should we seek Liberty where peoples’ right to self-determination is denied? Should we seek Equality where 60 percent of the wealth is owned by 1 percent of the population? Where is the Fraternity? Isn’t it where they preach peaceful coexistence? Why we cling to allies who will not let us live in peace with others and want to continue the war, not end it?

The policy of the Hungarian government is characterized by dishonesty, duplicity, and servility! We drink the juice of this on a daily basis, with skyrocketing prices, suppressed wages and pensions, impoverishment and declassification. Shouldn’t it finally be said, this is enough for our own allies to constantly cross us? So that we can not live in good relations with others? With those who are essential to our national economic development, our energy security, our social stability, and the prosperity of our people?

The Hungarian nation needs sovereign politics, not one that is subordinated to foreign interests! We must protect our brothers and sisters abroad as others do. Our national interest could be best served by creating a collective security and cooperation system, as proposed by Moscow, but rejected by NATO. If the West continues to refuse to compromise and reject peaceful cooperation with Russia, we will have no choice but to make a separate deal with Moscow. This is dictated by the Hungarian interest here at home and beyond our borders. The Hungarian Community for Peace is for the people, for our nation, together with its allies, including the Labor Party in the Forum for Peace movement! 

Who benefits from pipeline sabotage?

 

 

The two Russian pipelines Nord Stream-1 and Nord Stream-2 were hit in the last 24 hours.

NS-1 was shut down weeks ago by Russia due to Germany not repairing it as called for in their contract with Russia.

NS-2 had never been turned on after it was recently completed due to US pressure on Germany to stay in line on US-EU sanctions against Russia.

Both pipelines deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany and beyond.

During the entire time that NS-2 was under construction Washington tried to destroy the deal but failed. The US was able though to get Germany to rule out starting the pipeline. Washington instead wanted Europe to purchase fracked gas (LNG) from US drillers even though it would be much more expensive due to shipping costs.

I've read today that it could take quite a while to fix the two pipelines that have just been sabotaged. Who benefits from this? The US is already trying to pin it on Russia. Typical MO from the CIA.

Many in the German public have been calling on their government to turn on NS-2. That will now be impossible. The Germans are being locked into a cold box.

One can begin to imagine why Russia has so little trust for the US-UK-NATO.

Bruce

 

 

Update: 

This article here contends the following:

The military operation on Monday night which fired munitions to blow holes in the Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II pipelines on the Baltic Sea floor, near Bornholm Island,  was executed by the Polish Navy and special forces.

It was aided by the Danish and Swedish military; planned and coordinated with US intelligence and technical support; and approved by the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

Truss Brews Tempest While Spending on ‘Defense’

Paul Rogers says that the government of Liz Truss, for all its militarism, will stoke public backlash by ignoring the greatest single threat to global human security.

By Paul Rogers at openDemocracy

Liz Truss, the U.K.’s new prime minister, places a high premium on loyalty. This is why many former members of the cabinet, however experienced, have been relegated to the backbenches. There is, though, one survivor from the Cameron-Clegg coalition era — Truss herself.

In keeping with her own politics, the market fundamentalism of the Tufton Street brigade is very much in evidence in her choices of both ministers and advisers — and in her response to the energy crisis. This will be met by a price cap, but that will be achieved by loans of up to £130bn that will have to be repaid by the public, with the massive profits of the fossil carbon corporations scarcely affected.

Meanwhile, the obscene maldistribution of wealth in the U.K. continues. The country’s billionaires have now accumulated more than £600bn of wealth, with the top 10 on the Sunday Times Rich List amassing £176bn between them – but perish the thought that wealth redistribution or even windfall taxes should be mentioned in polite company.

This issue of who pays extends to a major element of Truss’s wider politics: defence policy. A key context, much in tune with grassroots Tories, is that the U.K. is one of the world’s great powers, to be demonstrated by increasing military spending to 3 percent of national income by 2030. This is the biggest hike since the 1950s, even though military spending went up under Boris Johnson, largely by diverting money from the international aid programme.

Truss’s plan goes very much further. According to a leading defence economist, professor Malcolm Chalmers from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), this substantially increased spending will run to an additional £157bn at current prices. Chalmers points out that unless there are even more cuts in public spending, this would require income tax to increase by 5p in the pound, or for the standard VAT rate to rise from 20 to 25 percent.

Even if this were to be achieved, it leaves unsolved the much bigger issue of whether Britain’s current defence posture is relevant to the security challenges ahead, not least in terms of recent performance, let alone monetary efficiency.

Military Failures & Inefficiency

On the issue of performance, the evidence is damning. During the past two decades, the U.K. has been a core player in three failed wars and one that is currently failing.

Of the failed wars, the longest has been the 20 years of the Afghanistan war, but the Iraq conflict has been similarly disastrous, with violence and instability continuing and a violent death toll currently standing at 288,000, the great majority of them civilians.

The 2011 Franco-British war in Libya left a deeply unstable and volatile country serving as a conduit for extreme paramilitaries and weapons spreading across the Sahel. Even the presumed defeat of ISIS in the 2014-18 air war has turned out to be anything but, as groups linked to ISIS and Al Qaeda grow elsewhere, especially in northern and eastern Africa.

As to efficiency in the U.K. military-industrial complex, this is little short of a joke. The lack of efficiency has shown itself repeatedly, with persistent cost overruns, long delays in programmes and embarrassing failures of highly expensive new items, the recent breakdown of HMS Prince of Wales being just the latest case.

The U.K.’s National Infrastructure Authority has done its best for years to keep tabs on dodgy programmes. Four years ago, these reached a peak when five systems under development and collectively costed at just short of £16bn were all red-flagged (at risk of collapse) at the same time.

Part of the problem is that Britain’s military-industrial complex is very much a closed system that requires enemies in order to thrive and, if need be, can always resort to appeals for patriotism. It is a thoroughly integrated system comprising the military, arms manufacturers, civil servants, think tanks, security and intelligence agencies and university departments, with trades unions necessarily looking out for their members. 

 

Truss’ defence stance, however unaffordable, will go down very well in these circles. It is, after all, nothing new. Five years ago, when Boris Johnson was foreign secretary, he gave that year’s Tory party conference his “let the British lion roar” speech, all about a renewed greatness rooted in the military.

Eighteen months later came the retro-fantasy of a new global Britain favoured by Gavin Williamson during his brief sojourn at the Ministry of Defence. This quasi-imperial, post-Brexit lurch, just like Johnson’s speech, is likely to be reeled out in the months ahead, with enemies such as Russia, China, Islamists and others all serving to remind the public of the need for strong defence.

Ignoring Climate Crisis

Ordinarily, this might be expected to work, but there is one very awkward element that suggests otherwise. It also stands to cause Truss really serious problems.

One aspect of her political make-up that was evident during the leadership campaign is an almost total ignoring of the challenge of climate change, reinforced last week by her decision to promote an arch-climate sceptic, Jacob Rees-Mogg, to the energy brief.

This should come as no surprise. After all, when the Tories won an overall victory in the 2015 election and were no longer encumbered with the Lib Dems, they immediately took an axe to many of the decarbonising initiatives advocated by Labour before 2010 and maintained by the Lib Dems during the five-year coalition.

These included reducing support for solar power and electric vehicles; stopping subsidies for onshore wind while increasing them for North Sea oil; privatising the Green Development Bank; and scrapping the “zero carbon homes” plan due to ensure all new homes would be carbon-neutral from 2016.

These lost the U.K. years in decarbonisation, making the current energy crisis even worse.

What is perhaps forgotten is that the environment minister at the time was a rising young Tory politician by the name of Liz Truss.

Now, we have an entire government minimising the climate crisis just when it is becoming blindingly obvious that it is the greatest single threat to global human security.

The government may ignore this but the people won’t – and we can be certain that it will emerge rapidly, before the next general election, to be a focus of mounting public anger and action that will far transcend the activities to date of Extinction Rebellion and other activist and campaigning groups.

Even as we face a recession and a winter of crisis for so many people, this may yet come to be the defining crisis of Truss’s time in Downing Street.

~ Paul Rogers is emeritus professor of peace studies in the Department of Peace Studies and International Relations at Bradford University and an honorary fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College. He is openDemocracy’s international security correspondent. He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers. 

Edward Snowden gets Russian citizenship

 

RT

The whistleblower fled the US after leaking top-secret documents, almost a decade ago

President Vladimir Putin has granted Russian citizenship to US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, Russia’s TASS news agency confirmed on Monday. The American’s name was included without fanfare on a list of 72 foreigners who became citizens.  

Snowden, who applied for citizenship in 2020 upon receiving permanent residency rights, has not commented on the decision as of Monday evening Moscow time. His wife will also apply for citizenship, according to his lawyer.

The former Booz-Allen contractor is not eligible for mobilization to the Ukrainian front as he did not serve in the Russian army, the attorney said in a statement to media, pouring cold water on feverish social media speculation that Snowden might be drafted now that he was officially a Russian citizen of military age.

While the fact that Snowden has lived in Russia since fleeing the US in 2013 has been held up as “proof” he was undermining the US government on behalf of Moscow, he was marooned in Sheremetyevo Airport upon arriving from Hong Kong to catch a connecting flight to Cuba after the US canceled his passport mid-flight. He was reportedly en route to Ecuador, where he had lodged an asylum request with what was then a government friendly toward American dissidents.

The US still wants Snowden returned home to face espionage charges related to his 2013 leak of a mammoth cache of files revealing the NSA’s sprawling surveillance operations, which targeted American civilians to a far greater degree than previously known to the public. Rather than release the documents himself, however, the whistleblower reached out to a small group of journalists and filmmakers including Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, instructing them to curate and publish them as needed.

After the publication of a handful of disturbing revelations alongside their source documents in the Washington Post, The Guardian, and other establishment outlets led to Washington calling for Snowden’s head, billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar quickly purchased the entire archive, using it as the foundation for his company First Look Media, which launched The Intercept with the Snowden docs as its headliner. However, the site never released more than 10% of the leaked files during the 15 years it hosted them. Despite Omidyar’s billions, The Intercept cried poverty when it shut down access to that small fraction of the archive in 2019.

That decision that was made without consulting Snowden, who had rendered himself a de facto stateless individual for the sake of making their contents public. Since then, the surveillance program he exposed was declared unlawful by a US appeals court.

Updating referendums to rejoin Russia

 

 

This video is done by SouthFront which is banned on YouTube. They make very good update videos daily at their web site about the Ukraine and Syrian wars.

In this case someone else copied and pasted this video onto YouTube. Don't know how long it will remain available.

The verdict: White House NSC spokesman lies

 

fyi - NSC is the White House National Security Council 

 

By Ray McGovern

Thanks to Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden – I refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jacob Sullivan, and China specialist Kurt Campbell – will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China. And, shockingly, under false pretenses.

Most Americans are oblivious to the reality that Western media are owned and operated by the same corporations that make massive profits by helping to stoke small wars and then peddling the necessary weapons. Corporate leaders, and Ivy-mantled elites, educated to believe in U.S. "exceptionalism," find the lucre and the luster too lucrative to be able to think straight. They deceive themselves into thinking that (a) the US cannot lose a war; (b) escalation can be calibrated and wider war can be limited to Europe; and (c) China can be expected to just sit on the sidelines. The attitude, consciously or unconsciously, "Not to worry. And, in any case, the lucre and luster are worth the risk