My Reply to Professor Karaganov’s Proposal For Russia to Launch WW III

Eric Zuesse

On June 27th, an advisor to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, Professor Sergei A. Karaganov, of Russia’s National Research University Higher School of Economics, headlined at Russia’s RT News, “Here’s why Russia has to consider launching a nuclear strike on Western Europe” and argued that the time now has come for Russia to consider seriously the possibility that it would pre-emptively, and even nuclearly, invade at least the most-hostile European countries:

When discussing a hypothetical atomic attack on Western Europe, the question arises: how would the US answer? Virtually all experts agree that under no circumstances would the Americans respond to a nuclear attack on their allies with a nuclear attack on our territory. Incidentally, even Biden has said so openly. Russian military experts, however, believe that a massive conventional retaliatory strike could follow. It could be pointed out that this would be followed by even more massive nuclear strikes. And they would finish off Western Europe as a geopolitical entity.

However, I believe that if Russia so much as even considers doing that without first having offered to each and every European country (other than, of course the biggest one, which is Russia itself) a certain type of bilateral mutual non-aggression treaty which would also require of any participating country its withdrawal from America’s anti-Russian military alliance, NATO, that would be a catastrophic mistake. Even if only one NATO country breaks away, that could spark the end of NATO, and the end of the U.S. alliance.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has, thus far, responded to The West’s aggressive expansion of NATO right up to Russia’s borders, not by offering each NATO nation individually a bilateral treaty-proposal and guarantees for peace, including mutual weapons-inspections, but instead has responded only by targeting Russia’s missiles against new NATO nations, as-if a NATO nation cannot quit the anti-Russian military alliance and obtain peace with Russia, increased trade, and other mutual benefits with Russia, by abandoning its alliance with the world’s most aggressive and invasion-prone nation, the United States, and agreeing with Russia, on a bilateral basis, a future of peace and mutual economic benefit — a win-win future, instead of America’s now-habitual win-lose future. Putin ought to make this offer now. It might prevent WW III. The historical background explains why:

Russia ended in 1991 its Warsaw Pact military alliance on the basis of verbal assurances that NATO would not add to its membership any Soviet or Warsaw Pact members, but those verbal assurances turned out to have been lies, and Russia now is forced to decide how to deal with that ugly fact. Russia’s President Gorbachev was hoping that ultimately Russia itself would be accepted into NATO so that NATO would no longer be a military alliance against Russia, but U.S. President G.H.W. Bush and his agents were merely stringing him along on that hope, and had no real intention of even considering to do that. In other words: secretly, the U.S. side continued the Cold War regardless of what Russia would do. Clearly now, America’s aim is to conquer Russia.

I agree with Dr. Karaganov that a fundamental change is therefore needed in Russia’s relations with the other countries of Europe, but I propose that the first step in this regard MUST be Russia’s offer, to each one of them, the following:

The offer should be made only privately to each U.S.-allied country; and, then, if any such country privately says no, Russia should then offer the deal publicly to that country. Public opinion in that country might then force that Government — whose prior rejection of the deal would not yet be publicly known — publicly to say yes to it. Thus, there then would be two chances to obtain an agreement, instead of only one, and this would greatly increase the chances of success, with each country.

The substance of the agreement would be as follows:

Russia will announce that its nuclear missiles will be targeted ONLY against the U.S. and its allies, including all NATO member-nations, no neutral or not-U.S.-allied nations. In other words: any new NATO member-nation will thereby become a target added to Russia’s list for destruction in any WW III that might transpire between the United States and Russia. Any existing NATO nation that accepts the offered treaty would no longer threaten Russia and thus would no longer be targeted by Russia.

Furthermore, Russia will simultaneously be announcing that if any nation — participating or not — wishes to have an assurance that Russia will never, under any circumstance, invade it, then Russia will welcome from that nation a request for such an assurance from Russia; and Russia will include in that announcement explicit invitations to all nations which have, at some time, expressed an intention or a possible future intention to join either NATO or one of America’s other anti-Russia military alliances, such as AUKUS. In this regard, Russia will also state, in advance, that if ever Russia were to provide to a nation such an assurance and subsequently to violate it, then Russia would not only be violating its own tradition of rigidly adhering to international treaties that it has signed, but would also thereby be forfeiting to the country it had thereby broken its commitment to and violated, any and all of its rights under international law. Consequently, under the arrangement that is being proposed here, there would be no nation in the entire world that has, or ever did have, so strict an international treaty legal obligation as Russia would be having under this proposed arrangement. It would be much clearer than what the international law-breaking U.S. Government ever did or can offer in the NATO treaty or any other. Russia’s record of strictly abiding by its agreements speaks for itself. So does America’s record of violating agreements.

Finally: this proposed arrangement will be offering, to all existing member-nations of NATO and of America’s other anti-Russian military alliances, a promise that if and when any such existing member-nation will quit that anti-Russian military alliance, Russia will be happy to — at the moment that this is done — automatically provide to that nation the same legal commitment never to invade that nation, as has just been described here. In other words: the proposed arrangement will be offering, to the entire world, a stark and clear choice between two options: on the one hand, being allied with the most aggressive nation in all of the world’s history — the nation that sanctions, coups, and outright invades, any nation that fails to cooperate with its goal to replace the United Nations as being the ultimate arbiter of international laws, by the United States as being, instead, the ultimate arbiter of what it calls “the rules-based international order” (in which all of those ‘rules’ come ultimately from whomever rules the U.S. Government). Versus, on the other hand: building upon and remaking the U.N. into what had been the original intention for it by its creator and namer, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which was for the U.N. to replace the historically existing (until now) rule-of-force by-and-between contending international empires, by, instead, a peaceful and democratic international world order, in which there will be a “United Nations” which will be a worldwide federation of all nations, in which international laws will be produced by the global legislature of duly authorized (under each individual nation’s own internal laws) representatives; and adjudicated by the global Supreme Court, and enforced by the sole global possessor and user of strategic weaponry, the U.N. itself, so that penalties that are ruled by this global Court of international relations can be enforced against the Government of any nation that has been ruled by this Court to have violated the rights of any other nation’s Government. In this understanding of the U.N.’s proper scope of power and of authority, the U.N. will have no authority and no power regarding the Constitution or laws of any nation that apply only internally to a given nation, but ONLY to international laws, which pertain only to international relations, never to a nation’s internal matters. FDR’s objective was to make another World War — another war between empires — impossible, by eliminating all empires, and replacing all of them by an international democracy of (an international federation of) nations. Russia, in the proposed arrangement, would be striving to achieve, for the entire world, what FDR had planned for the post-WW-II world, but which tragically became promptly changed and abandoned by his immediate successor, Harry S. Truman — the founder (on 25 July 1945) of the present global U.S. empire (and of its hamstrung currently existing — Truman’s — U.N.).

If the proposal from Russia would be stated as being based upon what FDR had been intending to be the post-WW-II international world order (and it is so), then how could even the U.S. Government publicly complain about it? By Putin’s privately offering this proposal, he could start where FDR left off, and undo Truman’s Cold War.

And should this not precede anything such as what Dr. Karaganov has just proposed?

NOTE: This article was offered to Russia’s RT News as an exclusive, because they had published Dr. Karaganov’s article, to which this article is a response. However, RT rejected it. (No reason for doing so was provided.) Therefore, I now am submitting it to my entire distribution-list, of 300 English-language news media.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.