Written by Peter Rose   

Commenting on what James Taranto, at the Wall Street Journal, called the “staggeringly premature honour” of the Nobel Peace Prize for the newly elected Barak Obama, Walter Gibbs at the NYT opined that should his presidency descend into a military quagmire, as Lyndon B. Johnson’s did during the Vietnam War, this decision could prove an embarrassment. In the light of Obama’s ramping up the nuclear war stakes with Russia and China, “embarrassment” seems “staggeringly” understated.
With the recently announced rearmament of Japan and new US bases in the Phillipines, any idea that this is all just a spat to ‘punish Putin’ for Crimea and to ‘chastise China’ for signing the gas deal with Russia can now be effectively disposed. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the putsch in Ukraine was just the opening maneuver in a long-range radical repolarisation of geopolitical power in which 50 years of progress in nuclear disarmament and international co-operation are being recklessly swept aside.
What is really going on here and who’s next? Are the rest of us in the BRICS countries to be bullied now for the launching, later this year, of a new Development Bank as a Third World attempt to survive suffocation by the IMF? As an explanatory model, a desperate last grab for a waning global imperial/financial hegemony has been proposed. While this may seem unlikely given the fragile financial and demographic status of the US and its EU satellite, it may well be part of the picture. But using the manufactured ‘crisis’ to massively boost the Arms Industry may be much closer to the bone. John Kerry lets the cat out of the bag when he recently spoke to the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington DC, about putting NATO back on a permanent war footing. “After two decades of focusing primarily on our expeditionary missions, the crisis in Ukraine now calls us back to the work that this alliance was originally created to perform”. Accordingly, defense spending must now be raised to at least 2% of GDP among members.
But they’re all bankrupt! So must we conclude that they intend to fight their way out of the problem? And this brings us back to the fatal flaw of globalised Capitalism that has dogged Modernity over the past 200 years. Inherent economic imbalance in the system cannot survive without ‘Perpetual War’. Warfare paid for by its citizens in blood, misery and taxes.
While ‘Orwellian’ has become a commonplace, it’s impossible not to think now of Winston Smith’s disbelief as the allies of Oceania get switched in mid-speech in a propaganda radio broadcast on the progress of the ‘Perpetual War’. Its what’s happening right now and, as is the way of these things, once the new confrontation has been set up it will be handed on to the technicians, duly wound up and pointed in the right direction. And the situation then develops an inevitable momentum of its own.
Whether Obama is its author or the victim of a Neocon rewriting of the global power game is now a moot point. The real question is whether something can still be done about it? The hugely effective broad-based anti-war consensus in the US that effectively pulled the rug on Obama’s plan to compound the crimes in Syria is something that really worked. Can this sort of political rescue maneuver be repeated again by a determined war-weary US and EU public? Is Ralph Nader’s Left/Right alliance aim to hamstring the corporate state as ‘Unstoppable’ as he claims in his new book of that title? The opportunity to do so seems now to be only a brief moment in time and US citizenry will save an awful lot of lives and treasure if they get to and sort the problem before it gets irretrievably out of hand. But, with propaganda lockdown by the mainstream media, there seems little sign of this happening right now.
Obama’s goals outlined in his Nobel acceptance speech were certainly soaring and noble - eliminating nuclear weapons, nuclear non-proliferation, tolerance among different peoples, peace between Israelis and Palestinians and better social conditions for the world's poor. But a historical indictment of rank hypocrisy may be the least of his concerns.
US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson noted at Nuremberg that: We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us. Historically speaking, Angela Merkel may be even closer to that problem. A defense that we were just following orders, or we didn’t really know what they were doing, didn’t wash before and is unlikely to do so again.
On the general topic of Obama-war, Mark Anthony might well have agreed with Jackson as he hunted down the “Dogs of War’ who cried “Havoc” in the years of chaos that followed Julius Caesar’s murder.

Peter Rose is Professor Emeritus at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is a widely published environmental scientist who has worked intensively in the field of sustainable development and environmental restoration.