### - so pull-up a cup of coffee and enjoy a read that kinda brings
everything up to date, although imho/observation there's still no sign of
mandela in the offing ;)

"Come writers and critics who prophesise with your pen
And keep your eyes wide, the chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who that it's namin'
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times, they are a-changin'"

confused? then read on + place yer bets :)

***

The United States finds itself wandering in a wilderness of indecision
when it comes to arms control policy.

The situation regarding the status of the last existing nuclear arms
control treaty with Russia — the New START treaty — is dire.
Implementation is currently frozen after Russia suspended its
participation in protest to a stated U.S. policy objective of seeking the
strategic defeat of Russia, something Russia finds incompatible with
opening its strategic nuclear deterrent (which exists precisely to prevent
Russia’s strategic defeat) to inspection by U.S. officials.

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/04/07/scott-ritter-the-future-of-us-nuclear-strategy/

The U.S. is not talking with Russia about the future of arms control once
New START expires in February 2026.

Moreover, fallout from the U.S. policy of seeking strategic defeat of
Russia has seen Moscow radically alter its position regarding future arms
control treaties. Any future agreement must, from the Russian perspective,
include missile defense; the French and British nuclear arsenals, as well
as the U.S.-supplied NATO nuclear deterrent.

Russia has further complicated any future negotiations by deploying
tactical nuclear weapons to its Baltic enclave in Kaliningrad, as well as
extending its Russian-controlled nuclear umbrella to Belarus where it has
mirrored the NATO nuclear umbrella.

The state of play today regarding strategic arms control between the U.S..
and Russia can best be likened to a patient on life support whom no one is
trying to revive.

Russia is in the process of finalizing a major modernization of its
strategic nuclear forces, built around the new Sarmat heavy
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and the Avangard hypersonic
reentry vehicle. The United States is on the cusp of initiating its own
multi-billion dollar upgrade to the U.S. nuclear Triad consisting of the
B-21 stealth bomber, the Columbia class missile submarine and the new
Sentinel ICBM.

If no treaty vehicle exists designed to verifiably limit the deployment of
these new weapons, once New START expires, the U.S. and Russia will find
themselves engaged in an unconstrained nuclear arms race that dramatically
increases the probability of unintended nuclear conflict.

When viewed in this light, the future of global security hinges on the
ability of Russia and the U.S. returning to the negotiating table and
resuscitating arms control from its present moribund state.

Key to this will be the willingness of Washington to incorporate Russian
concerns into U.S. nuclear posture. To achieve this, the U.S. nuclear
establishment will have to be shaken out of the calcified policy
assumptions that have guided U.S. arms control policy since the end of the
Cold War.

First and foremost amongst these assumptions is the need to promote and
sustain U.S. primacy in global nuclear weapons capability. Whether such an
assumption is jettisoned will be tied to the person occupying the White
House after the February 2026 expiration of New START.

This makes the 2024 U.S. presidential election one of the most critical in
recent history. Simply put, the future of humanity may ride on whomever
the American people vote for in November 2024.

The Establishment Standard

President Joe Biden has indicated that he will be seeking a second term in
office. While some have opined that, given Biden’s age, this goal might be
too optimistic, the reality is that if Biden, Vice President Kamala
Harris, or some other person designated by the Democratic Party is in
office to continue the Biden administration’s agenda for another four
years, decisions on the future of the U.S. nuclear posture and, by
extension, arms control policy, will remain in the hands of the same
establishment that has put us in the situation we are in today.

It’s proper to ask, therefore, whether or not the “establishment” is
capable of implementing the changes necessary to get U.S.-Russian arms
control back on track. History suggests not.

Biden ran in 2020 on a promise to change U.S. nuclear strategy away from
the George W. Bush-era policy, when preemptive U.S. nuclear strikes were a
possibility, to a doctrine holding that U.S. nuclear forces exist for the
sole purpose of deterring a nuclear attack against the U.S., or
retaliating if deterrence failed.

However, once elected Biden’s promise fell to the wayside as an
“interagency process” run by unelected bureaucrats and military officers
intervened to prevent campaign rhetoric from becoming official policy.

Biden, like every American president before him in the nuclear age, has
been unable and/or unwilling to expend the political capital necessary to
take on the American nuclear enterprise, and as a result the American
people and the rest of humanity are held hostage by this deadly nexus
between the U.S. military industrial complex and the U.S. Congress.

Congress allocates taxpayer money to underwrite a nuclear
weapons-oriented, defense industry, which in turn feeds this money back
into campaign contributions that empower a compromised Congress to keep
funding the nuclear enterprise – creating a vicious cycle impervious to
change of its own volition.

Biden or anyone Democratic candidate in 2024 is a byproduct of this very
establishment, and a willing participant in the corrupt circle of money
and power that is the nuclear, military industrial-congressional complex..
In short, if Biden or his proxy is sitting in the White House in 2025,
there will be no change in the U.S. nuclear posture on arms control policy.

This means any Democratic Party-controlled candidate voted into office in
November 2024 may very well be the last president to hold office, given
the probability of nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, which an
unchanged nuclear posture and arms control policy will foster.

The Trump Standard

Donald Trump, who preceded Biden as the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue, has thrown his hat into the 2024 presidential race.

Given the current state of the Republican Party, which has been cowed into
submission to Trump’s “make America great again” brand of populist
politics, it’s highly unlikely the GOP will put up a primary candidate
capable of defeating Trump, his ongoing legal dramas notwithstanding.

Whether Trump could pull off a second successful presidential run is not
the issue here. Instead, the question is whether Trump can promote an arms
control stance different from Biden and the Democratic and Republican
establishments that could break free of existing constraints — giving arms
control a chance.

Trump’s track record is decidedly mixed in this regard. On the one hand,
he has articulated some foundational beliefs which, if incorporated into
official U.S. policy, could radically alter the way the U.S. relates with
the rest of the world and, in doing so, create a new paradigm capable of
sustaining a revised arms control policy.

Trump’s willingness to break free of the ideological prison of rampant
Russophobia by considering the possibility of friendly relations between
the U.S. and Russia makes him unique among mainstream presidential
candidates of either party.

Likewise, Trump’s questioning of NATO’s viability and purpose means that a
future Trump administration could engage in the kinds of policy
restructuring that ends the perpetual state of tension between NATO and
Russia since NATO needs a Russian threat to justify its existence.

NATO’S diminishment as a policy driver would free both the U.S. and Europe
to more rationally explore the potential for a new European security
framework in a post-Ukraine conflict world. Such a posture would, in one
fell swoop, help resolve many of the add-on issues Russia now insists must
be part of any future U.S.-Russian arms control agreement, including
missile defense, French and U.K. nuclear weapons and the U.S.-provided
NATO nuclear deterrent.

More important, however, is Trump’s proven track record in breaking free
of past policy precedent in pursuit of meaningful nuclear disarmament.

The case of North Korea stands out. Trump met with North Korean leader Kim
Jung-un on three separate occasions to try to bring about the
denuclearization of North Korea. While ultimately this gambit failed, in
large part because of the resistance to change on the part of
establishment figures like Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and
National Security Advisor John Bolton, the fact that Trump even went down
that path shows that, unlike his predecessors and successor, he was
willing to go the extra mile in pursuit of ground-breaking change in U.S..
arms control policy.

But there is another side to Trump which bodes poorly for any meaningful
change in U.S.-Russian arms control. First and foremost is his abysmal
record on arms control.

He withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, he withdrew from the Intermediate
Nuclear Forces treaty and he published as policy the most aggressive
nuclear posture document in recent history, one which, according to Trump
officials, was designed to “keep the Russians guessing” as to whether the
U.S. would preemptively use nuclear weapons.

Trump refused to meaningful engage with the Russians on any aspect of arms
control, and instead embraced the modernization of U.S. strategic nuclear
forces. In short, there was no light between Trump’s arms control policy
and that of the “establishment.” Indeed, one might make the case that
Trump’s policies represented an escalation over the norm.

Then there is Trump’s tendency toward pugilistic bluster driven,
apparently, by some inner insecurity that requires any U.S. negotiating
position to be taken from a posture of overwhelming strength and
dominance. He spoke of being “friends” with Russia, only to openly brag
about being the “toughest president ever” when it came to sanctioning
Russia.

He withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement, imposing new sanctions, all
the while promoting the idea of a new negotiation that would resolve the
Iran nuclear issue. And his North Korean initiative included some of the
most war-like rhetoric uttered by an American president in the nuclear
age, promising “fire and fury” if North Korea failed to toe the line.

The bottom line is that the “Trump Standard” for arms control is in many
ways even more dangerous than that of the “establishment,” promoting as it
does an aggressive posture founded in dominance.

In the end, Trump proved incapable of acting on his own belief, allowing
himself to be subordinated to a radical America-first national security
ideology which promoted the enhancement and expansion of the American
nuclear enterprise — the exact opposite trajectory the U.S. needs to be
taking come 2024.

There is no reasonable expectation that a second Trump term would deviate
meaningfully from that track record.

A New American Standard in Arms Control

The harsh reality today is that neither of the two potential sources of
viable presidential candidates for the 2024 election — Democratic National
Committee or MAGA Republicans — are positioned to effect meaningful,
positive change regarding either U.S. nuclear posture or underlying arms
control policy.

That leaves the American people, and the world as a whole, with the
inevitability of a massive nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia,
which will unfold unconstrained by meaningful arms control treaty-mandated
limitations.

This is nothing short of a recipe for disaster, a witch’s brew of
ignorance-based fear magnified by the lack of inspections designed to
mollify concerns over the respective nuclear threats posed by two nations
no longer willing to engage in meaningful dialogue and, as a result,
perched on the precipice of an apocalyptic abyss.

In short, a vote for either Biden/the Democratic establishment or
Trump/MAGA Republicans is a vote in favor of continuous nuclear-armed
Russian roulette, where there exists only one certainty — eventually the
pistol will go off. But in this case, it’s not a pistol, but a nuclear
weapon that leads to general nuclear war and the termination of life on
planet earth as we currently know and understand it.

The rally held in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 19 provided a platform for
some voices of sanity who have presidential potential, either as
independent candidates, or rogue outliers within their respective party
establishments. Tulsi Gabbard, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, and Jimmy Dore
all addressed the threat posed by nuclear weapons and the need to control
them through meaningful arms control.

But none who spoke have put anything in writing that would remotely
constitute an arms control “standard” that could compete with either Biden
or Trump — or their proxies — on the public stage. Moreover, other than
Dore, a comedian, none of these individuals has announced an intention to
run, making moot, for the moment at least, the notion of a third option on
arms control and American nuclear posture.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy,
has announced his intention to challenge Biden for the Democratic
nomination. While Kennedy, at this juncture, appears to be a long-shot,
the likely mental and physical deterioration and possible incapacitation
of Biden between now and November 2024, combined with the inadequacy of
Vice President Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate, means the
Democratic field could be thrown open.

Kennedy’s announcement puts him in position to be either the candidate
himself, or to challenge whatever establishment figure the Democratic
Party selects for the job.

The question is whether Kennedy is willing or able to articulate a new
American standard on arms control, one that embraces the best of the Trump
Standard without the pugilistic arrogance Trump brings with it.

Kennedy has not published a detailed position on arms control and the U.S.
nuclear posture. But in a recent conversation with me, he spoke about the
legacy of his uncle, Jack Kennedy, and how he took guidance from that
legacy.

Any man who draws upon the wisdom and patience displayed by President
Kennedy to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis would be on the right track
when it comes to arms control.