Failed Proxy War With Russia Shows US Can’t ‘Pick on Someone Its Own Size’
12:33 GMT 16.07.2023 (Updated: 12:36 GMT 16.07.2023)
© Sputnik / Evgeny Biyatov
/ Subscribe
Washington took another step up the escalation ladder in the proxy war with Russia this month, sending cluster munitions to Ukraine after admitting that the US was running low on 155 mm howitzer shells. Commenting on this state of affairs, journalist Caleb Maupin said it exposes a few important things about the US military-industrial complex (MIC).
Discussing the US decision to deploy cluster munitions in Ukraine on Sunday, President Putin said it shows that an increasingly desperate Washington is “running low on ammunition” and is ready to facilitate the transfer of weapons whose use the US itself had previously characterized as “criminal.”
In a string of statements last week justifying cluster bombs’ deployment, White House, Pentagon and State Department officials characterized it as a stopgap measure that should allow US defense industry to ramp up its “depleted” stocks of 155 mm shells. Secretary of State Antony Blinken even suggested that Ukraine would be “defenseless” if Washington did not urgently send the weapons.
“The stockpiles around the world and in Ukraine of the unitary munitions, not the cluster munitions, were running out, about to be depleted. And so, the hard but necessary choice to give them the cluster munitions amounted to this: if we didn’t do it, we don’t do it, then they will run out of ammunition. If they run out of ammunition, then they will be defenseless,” Blinken said.
16 July 2023, 07:46 GMT
MIC is Emperor Who Has No Clothes
“I don’t understand how a cluster bomb is a ‘defensive’ weapon,” veteran US-based journalist and political analyst Caleb Maupin told Sputnik. “This is something you drop from a plane or you deploy and it goes across a widespread area and explodes, or it remains undetonated and then someone walks by and gets blown up. So the idea that they would be ‘defenseless’ without the cluster bombs, that doesn’t add up [if you] look at what a cluster bomb is.”
Maupin also questioned how it was that the US and its NATO allies, which outspend Russia militarily multiple times over, and have sent more weapons to Ukraine than Moscow spends on defense in a year, could be “running out” of ammunition.
“How much does the USA spend on military hardware? How much has the United States sent to Ukraine? How many billions and billions of dollars? How many other countries have thrown billions and billions of dollars into this? And they’re gonna run out of ammunition? What? What?! And you look at Russia, and you look at Belarus, the countries that are on the other side in Ukraine, they don’t seem to have this problem. They’re not running out of ammunition. They’re not running out of military hardware and weapons,” Maupin said.
“The United States has spent so much more money on this and so many billions of dollars have been piled into Ukraine. What’s going on here? What in the world is going on here? You almost wonder if this military-industrial complex thing where weaponry has been turned into a mechanism for stabilizing the economy, we dump lots of money into military expenditures – you wonder if a lot of these weapons are produced with the thought that they might never be used. They’re simply a moneymaking cash cow for certain Pentagon contractors. And with that being the situation, you have to wonder why we are going through them so quickly and what’s really going on here,” he added.
The journalist suggested that more than anything, the 17-month long NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine has demonstrated that the US, with its schoolyard bully-style record of military interventions from the 1980s into the mid-2000s, has finally run up against an adversary that can stand up to it.
“You know there’s that saying about saying to the bully ‘pick on somebody your own size’. I mean you look at recent US wars, the USA fought Libya, Iraq, Serbia, Grenada, Panama. The USA tends to be fighting wars against very, very small countries. Now we’re in a situation where the USA is waging a proxy war against Russia, and Russia is in a different league, a completely different league. And it looks like the method – the ‘Shock and Awe’ that was used in Iraq, the bombings, the kinds of swift victory methods that might have been used elsewhere are not as effective,” Maupin said.
On top of that, he noted, Russia’s nuclear arsenal means the US can’t enter the conflict with its own military, because if it did, “that would be World War Three. And at that point nukes would go off and that would be the end of human civilization as we know it.”
So instead, the US and its allies must make due with proxies, which are inherently less controllable, more unreliable and have their own agendas – as the US dirty war against Syria – where CIA-armed jihadist militants ultimately morphed into Daesh (ISIS),* showed.
The Ukrainian crisis is simply “not winnable” for the West and NATO, according to Maupin. “So the question is, how long are they going to keep pouring money and weapons and keep people dying in an unwinnable conflict? Or how long until Zelensky gets permission to make a deal and some new borders are drawn, some new territory is reached and this whole thing is over?...Well it appears that the Biden camp wants to prolong this as long as they possibly can for geostrategic reasons. But all this stuff about ammunition running out, the consequences on the global economy, allies not being on board as they expected makes you wonder how long Biden and his folks want to keep this going,” he said.
On the other hand, Maupin conceded, the big corporate monopolies may even appreciate the conflict continuing indefinitely, even if the rest of global economy “screams,” as it allows them to shore up their power and weaken competitors.
For more of Caleb Maupin’s incisive analysis, check out his interview with Radio Sputnik’s The Critical Hour.
* A terrorist group outlawed in Russia and many other countries.
