Zero Hedge, normally a reliable site, reports that the US Department of Defense and the NATO Secretary General claim that 10,000 to 12,000 North Korean soldiers have joined Russian forces in Kursk to help drive out the Ukrainian incursion.
The Pentagon spokeswoman, Sabrina Singh, says that if these North Koreans do for Russia what French troops and NATO personnel are doing for Ukraine, the US will remove its ban on NATO firing missiles into Russia from Ukraine.
As Putin has said, this would mean the US/NATO are at war with Russia, which, Putin has implied, means a nuclear response from Russia. Why Putin is OK with drones fired deep into Russia but not missiles is unclear.
What do we make of this report? It strikes me as nonsensical and contrary to Putin’s abhorrence of expanding the conflict. It also strikes me as nonsensical that Russia cannot expel Ukrainians from Kursk without North Korean reinforcements.
There are two possible real explanations. One is that Washington’s military/security complex wants to carry the war further into Russia, confident from Putin’s past non-response that Putin will do nothing about it, and the alleged Korean troops are an excuse. The neoconservatives believe that Putin is nothing but hot air and that they can destabilize his regime by sending in missiles to kill Russians and destroy infrastructure all over Russia. That Putin has been unwilling to use the available force that he has to end a conflict with a third world military with zero military technology of its own after three years suggests to the neoconservatives that Putin is so averse to war that he simply will not fight anything other than a limited military operation.
The other explanation is that Putin is demonstrating to Washington that Russia, also, can bring in foreign resources to the conflict. The French send troops. NATO sends “mercenaries.” Washington provides weapons and people to operate them along with intelligence and targeting information. If this is the explanation, assuming there actually are North Korean troops there, it shows that Putin has a defective understanding of the situation.
President Putin, you are at war. You, Russia, China, and Iran are in the way of American hegemony. American foreign policy has not repudiated the neoconservative doctrine that hegemony is the principal goal of US foreign policy. Therefore your support for peace negotiations is nonsensical. Negotiations make no sense. They show you to be humanitarian but unrealistic.
Russia is in the way of Washington. There can be no peace until Washington redefines its foreign policy goal, or Russia is broken up into its constituent parts. While Putin speaks of peace negotiations with Ukraine, Washington is attempting to open a second front against Russia with a color revolution in Georgia.
Whatever peace deal Putin makes would have no more reality than the Minsk Agreement, Washington’s pledge not to move NATO one inch to the east, or any of the broken 20th century agreements. Washington only respects force, and Russia has not demonstrated force. Neither has China. Neither has Iran. The absence of countervailing power is building toward a major war.
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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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