If--when--Ukraine falls, Vladimir Putin will have so many shoulder-fired missiles

learly, America is afraid of Vladimir Putin—specifically, afraid of what Vladimir Putin can force them to do against their better judgment—which is, to reply in kind to a nuclear provocation by Moscow.

The US knows that there is no such thing as a calibrated nuclear response. If Russia launches a nuclear ballistic missile against any target in the West, whether in NATO Europe or North America, the only response is overwhelming retaliation of a proportion that would no longer allow a second strike.

Hypothetically, that kind of scorched-earth strategy is not even achievable. The only enemy platforms that a US retaliatory strike can hit are fixed land-based silos. In all likelihood, the US may not even be able to pinpoint the location of Russian nuclear submarines also capable of launching ballistic missiles, or even intercept long-range strategic bombers already airborne by that time.

The highest paradox in thermonuclear war is that it’s a game of wits where the only winning move is not to play.

If the US and Russia even as much as allowed themselves to line up for a head-on collision--“chicken game style” to see who blinks and pulls his finger away from the nuclear button first—neither of them gains the upperhand. In fact, both of them lose control. It's like trying to bring your finger as close as possible to wet paint WITHOUT touching it.

The result would be the very apocalyptic final outcome that forty-six years of the Cold War (1946-1991) was trying to prevent: Mutually-Assured Destruction. Its appropriately macabre acronym “MAD” is supposed to be its highest deterrent, for truly only a mad man would taunt fate and risk nuclear winter.

Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin is acting like a mad man with a death wish. Such a man you DON’T want to play Russian roulette with. Not only does he NOT mind dying, he actually WANTS to. A mad man knows neither morass nor reason. That is what makes him fearsome to the US—which romantically hangs on to the notion that there is still some reason undergirding Armageddon.

So the US has decided not even to taunt Putin. They will not fly against or shoot down Russian warplanes themselves. They want Ukrainians to do it. The US would rather arm the Ukrainian Army to the teeth, than declare a NO-FLY ZONE over Kiyv. This has allowed Russian aircraft to carry out bombing sorties unchallenged in the unguarded Ukrainian airspace—for now.

However, the US acting through conduit allies, are rushing and have put 3,700 shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and 17,000 Javelin anti-tank rocket launchers in the hands of Ukrainian infantry within the last eight days. That is changing the dynamics of the land war in a direction I fear would actually draw the US into the very direct involvement it is trying to avoid, in the first place.

The Stingers got on the battlefield first and their impact was immediate: ten Russian MIG fighter jets downed in just the first six days, by Ukrainian claims. That ratcheted the challenge for Putin who reverted to the same proven formula he used in Chechnya and Syria to soften the enemy: bombarding civilian areas to split the defenders’ attention between fighting the war and rescuing their families.

But Putin cannot bomb his targets using aircrafts—these would be shot down by the Stingers. He has resorted to using long-range artillery and surface rocket launchers sitting all along that 40-mile column of armor deployed around Kyiv—which are now sitting ducks for the newly-arrived Javelins!

So, either way, Putin stands to lose both air superiority and the contest of hard armor—that will nudge him even closer to pushing the nuclear button, if nothing else, as a facesaving last-ditch option.

In short, so long as the nuclear option lurks in the background as the ultimate vindication, then there would be no such thing as a calibrated response by conventional arms, either.

So why tiptoe around Vladimir Putin at all? Why not fly in there decisively and turn back the Russian invasion yourself instead of outsourcing the job to the valiant but undertrained Ukrainians? They are so undertrained that when asking for aircrafts, the Ukrainians are even pushing Poland to be the one to ask for American fighter jets—F-16’s, F-15’s and F-35’s—to replace Poland’s Russian MIG’s which are what Ukraine is interested to get. Why? Because MIG’s are the only jets Ukrainian pilots know how to fly. They’ve never flown Lockheed or Boeing jets in their life.

Ironically, Poland AGREED with the suggestion even without the replacement American jets. They asked for US permission to fly their MIG’s to a US airbase in Germany—where the Ukrainian pilots can pick them up. The US declined the request. The US refused to allow the use of fighter jets that were not even theirs!

That’s how much the Americans are afraid of Putin. I can’t say I blame them. What the Americans are really afraid of is their inability to build national consensus to start ANOTHER war, just fresh from ending their longest one in Afghanistan. There is growing bipartisan support in Capitol Hill for direct US intervention, but there is no overwhelming public opinion in favor of putting “boots on the ground.”

President Joe Biden’s approval rating actually increased by 7 points on a mild “rally-around-the-flag” sentiment but it’s notable how, inspite of that, the Whitehouse still demurs from calling Biden a “wartime president.” They know sentiment like that will vanish into thin air the moment American soldiers start coming home in flag-draped coffins.

So I don’t expect America to “brave up” anytime soon, beyond piling up more economic sanctions that are hurting the WHOLE WORLD, including us here in the Philippines, more than Russia or Vladimir Putin.

Maybe one thought could change the American thinking about the vanity of its lukewarm military response to Putin and it is this: US fighter jets enforcing a NO-FLY ZONE will come home to their bases at the end of each day. But without them, if Ukraine falls eventually, all those thousands of Stinger and Javelin missiles fall into RUSSIAN hands. And since those Stingers can shoot down an F-16 or F-35 too, and those Javelins can knock out a US Abrams M1-A1 main battle tank too—that means the US will NEVER again enjoy air superiority or armor superiority in any more wars in the European arena in the future.

Then the US will regret letting the opportunity pass when they could have done the job themselves without risking any transfer of strategic arms technology--and a generous inventory--to Vladimir Putin.**

(Read more of my articles like this here: “theunheardside.blogspot.com” )

Are the Americans tacitly supporting BBM?

he biggest threat to VP Leni-Robredo’s campaign, right now, is Bongbong Marcos. In terms of actual voting support, I believe that Leni Robredo has more than enough votes to secure the presidency with a comfortably wide margin. But the fact that many pre-election surveys—including by two polling entities I normally trust—continue to show Marcos leading in double digit margins leaves me a little befuddled.

This performance seemed to be unaffected by his refusal to participate in all presidential debates. His problem is not lack of communicating ability, Ferdinand, Jr. is articulate enough. I think mainly the reason his campaign handlers have steered him away from these debates is because they anticipate a lot of questions might be asked about martial law. It’s topic avoidance, plain and simple.

Martial law is one of those subjects best revisited through the warming filter of sentimentalism. I have a theory that it’s all psychological--that the Marcos campaign had somehow figured out how to exploit.

To illustrate my point, consider that not all 1970s music was good but even if you heard the trashiest song of that decade today, it would still evoke some sort of sepia mood in you.

1970s music was the soundtrack of many peoples’ lives. Those lives are rich in fuzzy happy memories of a carefree, even psychedelic era, if you will. Of course, none of that has anything to do with martial law, or Marcos, but they dull any ugliness of the repressive regime of the day.

However, modern scholars have the advantage of a broader overview of history. This gives them a second chance to revisit history and to fact-check any effort at revisionism.

THAT is what Ferdinand, Jr.’s handlers do not want him to get emroiled in--a counter-productive program in martial law apologetics.

The father is dead—he’s a tyrrant of epic notoriety but death has sealed his lips from any need to explain himself. So why risk raising Marcos from the dead by having Ferdinand, Jr. stand in as a substitute dart board for every historian’s target practice?

No, if you’re going to have Ferdinand, Jr. run on the record of his father’s achievements, you have to project that record unblemished by post-modern criticism—and then refuse to take any questions. Meanwhile, Ferdinand, Jr.’s job in this campaign is just to REMIND people of the romantic Ilocano legend by just looking and sounding LIKE the father—that’s all.

So every occasion that Ferdinand, Jr. runs away from a debate challenge, his handlers want the voter to perceive it as an effort to protect and preserve a legacy. Don’t look now but if you argue the point, then you just conceded that such legacy even existed. See the trick there?

However, even all that cannot explain entirely the lopsided survey ratings—and I concede nothing concerning these surveys’ accuracy or “scientific-ness.” That will be a topic for a separate article later.

My suspicion is that these surveys are a subliminal feed, a carefully-designed tool working on the subconscious and influencing voters by the power of suggestion, bordering on mass hypnotism. Since they are aimed at achieving a specific result—a Marcos bandwagon atmosphere—that’s a dead giveaway that the numbers are doctored.

I can think of two objectives for doing that: one is to help Ferdinand, Jr. win the election or, in the event he loses, to lay the basis for claiming electoral fraud later by raising the question, how can anyone who led the race most of the way falter in the homestretch and eventually lose?

Ferdinand, Jr. can do to a Robredo presidency what Donald Trump is doing to the Biden administration, namely hanging a lingering cloud of doubt on its legitimacy. That ensures that the Marcos brand would stick around for a generation or two more, perhaps to capitalize on another redux of misty-eyed nostalgia and even fainter recollections of martial law atrocities. Whatever the reasons are, the forces behind this kind of manipulation have an uncannily long-term perspective.

Natural persons don’t have that kind of long view, or a propensity for reckoning events that would happen well beyond their lifetimes. This leaves only one possible causal agent: external institutional agenda—perhaps industrial, sectoral or even foreign state interests.

I’m not a particular fan of farfetched conspiracy theories. But I think it’s not a long stretch to cast a suspicious eye on the US.

I know—you’re thinking that’s ridiculous, how can the Americans throw their support behind the son of a dictator who is facing corruption and ill-gotten wealth recovery cases in several US courts, right?

Well, how can the Ameriçans have supported that dictator HIMSELF for several decades, in the first place?

You are naïve to assume that good old Uncle Sam is the paragon of virtue and universal political morality. Historically, US foreign policy is capsulized in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1939 take on Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, “He’s a sonofabitch, but he’s OUR sonofabitch!”—a quote that was famously copied by US Vice President (to Ronald Reagan) George H. W. Bush in describing Ferdinand Marcos in 1984.

In world politics, as it is in domestic, there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. Those interest could be existing or inchoate—they once existed and are now sorely missed.

The outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the looming dominance of China, the worsening belligerence of North Korea, the slow collapse of democratic governments in HongKong and Taiwan—all these are just a few of a growing number of reasons opening America’s eyes to one thing it has missed for almost 25 years now: its former military bases in the Philippines.

Clark and Subic once served as its forward jumping points in responding to flashpoints of international conflicts beyond the Atlantic horizon. But the US lost those bases after Ferdinand Marcos was toppled in 1986.

You’d think the US stood an excellent chance of keeping those bases under a president they unabashedly supported, Corazon Aquino. But she stood by and watched the bases close down in 1991, with only a year remaining in her term. She was not too helpful in the effort to extend the RP-US Military Bases Agreement, which narrowly lost a vote in the Senate controlled by nationalist Aquino allies.

The next president Fidel V. Ramos, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, was decidedly pro-American. But there was little he could do in the fewer than five months from the beginning of his term in June to the departure of the last US military serviceman from those lost US bases in November 1992.

His successor, the populist Joseph Estrada, was famously one of the senators who had voted against the extension of the bases agreement, and as many as those that believed the US had a role in his ouster in 2001, many also conclude that his hand-picked US puppet successor Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo could not “deliver” either.

Worse, another populist successor Rodrigo Duterte paradoxically proved to be the most anti-West and most pro-China postwar Asian leader to ever emerge.

If you were the Americans, you would think, look, rightwing presidents like Ramos, Arroyo and left-leaning populists like Estrada and Duterte cannot be relied on.

Centrists—or who claim to be “independent” just have a little bit too much of a nationalist streak in them, like the Aquinos and possibly Robredo—these people won’t play ball.

What you want is a president who is not too intelligent, asks few questions and just counts the money—like an intellectually-challenged Marcos.

You have him on a leash already, with outstanding warrants against him in US courts. Alright, you cannot actually serve those warrants on a head of state. But the fact that you have the goods on him and he is an oligarch with assets he’d like to protect on US soil, or stashed away in US banks, he’s the exact surrogate the doctor ordered that if asked to jump would ask back “how high?”

Besides that absurd theory, I have no other explanations for those dubious lopsided surveys.**

Vladimir Putin must be stopped militarily

ladimir Putin must be stopped militarily. Now.

Even though I’m convinced the United States and NATO are determined to sit out this Russian invasion of Ukraine, I don’t see any chance whatsoever that this conflict would not ultimately lead to World War III, unless the whole world intervenes.

As it is, we are already on that slippery slope towards transglobal conflict. Russian President Vladimir Putin has began bombing nuclear power plants in Ukraine, including the biggest nuclear reactor in Europe, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which supplies one-fifth of all electricity in Ukraine.

The danger is mitigated for now, radiation levels remaining normal. But remember Russian planes are using bunker buster bombs capable of destroying hardened structures. You don’t even have to destroy a nuclear reactor’s radiation containment done. Even a hairline crack leads to the same result: a catastrophic radiation leak that cannot be put out like an ordinary fire.

Nightmarishly, such a leak literally transforms every molecule in the air into a bomb that doesn’t stop exploding—it just keeps emitting lethal radioactive waves that turn everything it hits just as radioactive.

A conventional bomb only explodes once, destroying itself as well. But an uncontained nuclear incident sparks an atomic reaction that lasts for thousands of years.

When the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which is also in Ukraine, was damaged in a peacetime accident in April 1986, the cloud of radioactive particles drifted across vast areas of Eastern Europe. Since countries around that portion of Europe are mainly dairy-producing and wine-producing countries, it took the rest of the world, including the Philippines, months to take out every suspected radioactive gallon of milk, bottle of wine, cheese, beef and cold cuts from grocery shelves all over the world.

US President Joe Biden emphasized during his State of the Union address that no American troops will be deployed in Ukraine. The US will, however, expedite the delivery to the Ukraine military of shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Javelin anti-armor missiles to stop a full-on advance of Russian troops into Ukraininan soil.

Ordinarily edgier NATO allies have even supplied Ukraine with advanced aircraft and weaponized drones to actually participate in repulsing a ground invasion, short of actually sending airborne divisions to drop boots on the ground.

The strategy, it seems, is to arm the Ukrainian army to the teeth so that they can repel any invasion by themselves, while their international armorers watch the fighting on CNN, FoxNews and BBC. That is a naïve mindset uncharacteristic of the West that loves to rhapsodize about “dying for democracy” etc.

First of all, Putin is obviously not using ground troops so much in these early days of his invasion. He’s using long-range artillery and intermediate-range surface-to-surface missiles, firing unlimited volleys right from Russian territory.

Since US and NATO will not send troops into Ukraine, Putin knows they are even more unlikely to engage him on Russian territory. So as long as his military foot print is entirely on Russian soil, he can keep lobbing shells across European borders all he wants.

He also doesn’t need to occupy Ukraine. Just aim a few missiles at some residential buildings and it’s enough to trigger an exodus of refugees spilling across the border into Europe, leaving Ukraine empty and “ready for occupancy” for Russian settlers, the better with which Putin can pacify unrest back home. He can offer the Russian proletarium free fully-furnished housing in Kyiv and other upscale Ukraininan cities, ultimately consolidating support for his war efforts among his restive constituents.

Meanwhile, the US and European nations are still enamored by their own elitist thinking that if you seize luxury yachts and freeze bank accounts holding ill-gotten wealth of Russian oligarchs, you would bring this thieving fraternity down on their knees and, several layers of consequential analyses later, stop the war.

Listen, if there’s anything you don’t mind losing, it’s money that isn’t yours in the first place, especially since you know how easy it was to amass that wealth.

All Americans have to do to realize this is to read childrens’ bedside stories, like that one about cutting the goose that lays the golden egg. Made to choose between losing their stash of golden eggs and propping up their golden egg-laying goose Vladimir Putin, it’s a no-brainer to guess which option they’ll choose.

So I’ll say it again, economic sanctions against a country that is a sizeable chunk of the global economy will NOT work. By land area, Russia is as big as China and USA combined—even bigger if you hypothetically add back all those newly-independent Eastern European countries and Baltic states that were once part of the Soviet Union. The rest of the world trades with Russia not for Russia’s sake but for their own. So talking tough to Russia is like telling the ocean you’re imposing sanction on it by refusing to catch fish from it. Right. And where, pray tell, are you going to get your fish from, the aquarium?

The moment Ukraine falls, next would be Moldovia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuainia—who knows, maybe even Poland or Bulgaria. It would be the West’s most feared scenario—the 50’s era “Domino Principle” happening in Europe instead of Asia.

Those who refuse to learn the lessons of the mistakes in history are doomed to repeat them.**

(read more articles like this here: “theunheardside.blogspot.com” )