Tillerson and the Doomsday Clock

Tillerson's ouster has been in the works for some time. The fact that on his plane ride back to Washington, D.C. he chose to lend his voice to Theresa May's bombastic theatrics with regards to the Skripal poisoning ("Ex-spy Skripal poisoning 'clearly came from Russia' & 'will trigger response' – Tillerson") is proof that he didn't follow orders from the White House (because the White House has danced around the Skripal episode).

Trump is on the verge of putting Russiagate and the Mueller probe behind him. The last thing he wants is another manufactured Russia crisis.

The #NeverTrumpers are on the verge of getting buried and need something big quickly -- any old Russia crisis will do -- because they are losing control of the narrative. The problem here for the rest of us is the Doomsday Clock is already only two minutes to midnight. Ginning up crises with Russia is going to usher in midnight.

Tillerson Signals Long Anticipated U.S. Betrayal of the Kurds

The news from Tillerson's meeting today in Turkey with foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu is not good. The oft-anticipated U.S. sellout of its Kurdish partners in northern Syria appears to be in the works.

Rudaw is reporting that

The United States and Turkey are “locking arms” in Syria, said Tillerson in a joint press conference with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu. “We’re not going to act alone any longer… We are going to act together from this point forward.”

They will begin in Manbij, the northern Syrian city under control of US-ally the Manbij Military Council and the Kurdish YPG, a force Ankara alleges is a terror group.

The US promised the YPG will leave the Manbij region, Cavusoglu stated. And once the Kurdish forces are gone, Turkey will be able to take steps forward with its NATO ally, he said.

Tillerson asserted that they “share the same objective in Syria” – to defeat ISIS, stabilize the country in order to allow refugees to return home, and support a political solution for a unified Syria, with no internal demarcations dividing the country.

They will closely coordinate on the final defeat of ISIS “and other terror groups” inside Syria, Tillerson added.

Bloomberg does not mention the "The U.S. promised that the YPG will vacate Manbij" statement by Cavusoglu:

The incursion has created an unprecedented military face-off between the two largest armies in NATO, with U.S. forces fighting alongside the YPG in northeastern Syria while Turkey attacks members of the group to the west. The two sides said the top priority of the working group established Friday will be addressing Manbij, a town in northern Syria held by the YPG with the backing of American forces. Erdogan has threatened to attack the town.

Manbij should stay under the control of the U.S. or its allied forces, Tillerson said.

“We have made clear our expectations from the U.S. in terms of its support for the YPG and the fight against terrorist groups,” Cavusoglu said. “We’d like to think that our vital security concerns are taken seriously.” He said previous promises made to Turkey by the U.S. were broken, but that the two sides had “reached an understanding to normalize our relationship again."

Previously, Tillerson has spoken of allowing the Turks to create a buffer zone in northern Syria in territory that is now Rojava.

Something is definitely happening here. There are contradictory reports that the Syrian government will join the Kurds in battling the invading Turks in Afrin. It seems Turkey's "Operation Olive Branch" is a slow, methodical grind. Turkey is peeling off villages. Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that Turkey now controls 7% of the canton.

For an excellent overview of what is going on with the Kurds and Turkey, as well as a fulsome defense of Rojava, read "Defending Afrin" by ROSA BURÇ  and KEREM SCHAMBERGER.

There is No Shock and Awe Preemption When It Comes to North Korea

Regarding the possibility of a preemptive U.S. attack on North Korea, my question to anyone advocating such a course of action is -- Why do you think China won't intervene, as it did in 1950, to prop up its ally?

That question is taken up by Oriana Skylar Mastro, a warfare-state academic at Georgetown U., in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. The title of the article, "Why China Won’t Rescue North Korea: What to Expect If Things Fall Apart," is misleading in that it conjures up images of the Chinese standing back and watching while the Kim regime is bombed into submission by U.S.-South Korean shock and awe.

The conservative professor's article is actually down to earth and reasonable, but not sanguine when it comes to U.S. options. China might not be wedded to the survival of the Kims, but it has been planning for and is ready to secure the nation's nuclear arsenal. A better title of the article would have been: "China Will Not Rescue Kim Jong-un, But It Will Invade North Korea and Secure the Country's Nuclear Arsenal and Territorial Integrity If Things Fall Apart."

That's a sobering message for American Exceptionalists and neoconservatives. Basically it tells us case closed. There is no shock and awe preemption when it comes to North Korea.

Hence David Sanger's article published Sunday, "A Tillerson Slip Offers a Peek Into Secret Planning on North Korea," outlining the Trump administration's pitiful attempts to blunt the impact of professor Mastro's article by having Tillerson claim that the U.S. also has plans to secure North Korea's nuclear devices. Sanger notes that

But the reference to planning for North Korean collapse, while not drawing wide notice, caught the attention of those who have been drawing up military plans for a number of possible scenarios, including American pre-emptive strikes. Asked whether Mr. Tillerson had referred by mistake to entreaties to the Chinese that previous administrations kept secret, Steven Goldstein, the new under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, said it was quite deliberate.

“The secretary reiterated the position he has taken in meetings with Chinese counterparts,” he said. “He would like the U.S. and Chinese military leaders to develop a plan for the safe disposition of North Korea’s nuclear weapons were the regime to collapse.” He added: “While the secretary has never advocated for regime change, we all have an obligation to be prepared for any scenario.”

There is no indication that the Chinese have responded, or that military officials have met — though Beijing would almost certainly keep that secret if it occurred.

According to current and former American officials, the contingency plans to seize North Korea’s nuclear arsenal have grown in complexity in recent years, largely because the North Korean arsenal has grown.

There are competing estimates among American intelligence agencies over how many weapons the North possesses. Most estimates range from 15 to 30 nuclear devices, but the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is responsible for protecting American troops on the Korean Peninsula, projected this year that the number could be in excess of 50.

The North is presumed to have undertaken an elaborate effort to hide the weapons. The result, one senior military official said recently, is that even if dozens of weapons were seized and deactivated, there would be no way to determine whether many more were still hidden away, perhaps under the control of surviving members of Mr. Kim’s military.

In the secret American rehearsals of how to execute a seizure of the North’s weapons — more of which are planned for the first half of next year, officials say — speed is of the essence.

Finding those weapons, landing “render safe” teams to disarm them and airlifting them out of the country would be a difficult enough task in peacetime. But the American planning assumes a three-way scramble to seize both weapons and territory, involving Chinese troops who may find themselves facing off against the United States and its South Korean allies.

“Washington should assume that any Korean conflict involving large-scale U.S. military operations will trigger a significant Chinese military intervention,” Oriana Skylar Mastro, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, wrote this month in the journal Foreign Affairs, in a provocative article titled “Why China Won’t Rescue North Korea.”

China, she wrote, “will likely attempt to seize control of key terrain, including North Korea’s nuclear sites,” most of which are within 60 miles or so of the Chinese border. Because of geographic advantage, they would probably arrive long before American forces.

In the past, American planning was based on an assumption that China would come to the aid of North Korea, as it did during the Korean War nearly seven decades ago. But Ms. Mastro, who also advises the United States Pacific Command, wrote that today “the Chinese military assume that it would be opposing, not supporting, North Korean troops.”

Her analysis mirrors what is increasingly becoming the dominant thinking among American military planners. That has made the secret discussion that Mr. Tillerson alluded to all the more vital. Curiously, some Chinese academics have begun writing about the need for the United States and China to prepare a joint strategy. Such public airing of the issue would have been banned in Chinese publications even a few years ago.

In other words, the prevailing military-academic opinion is that regime change in North Korea will likely expand Chinese power, as regime change in Iraq has expanded Iranian power.

Nonetheless the Trump administration continues to goad North Korea into some sort of reaction that can be used to justify a U.S. attack. (See Sanger's latest, "U.S. Accuses North Korea of Mounting WannaCry Cyberattack.) Warfare appears to be the only foreign policy of the United States.

Tillerson's Threat of a Preemptive Attack on North Korea Completely Hollow

To understand why Tillerson's much-reported statement that the United States is considering the use of preemptive military force against North Korea is nothing more than boilerplate you can read deep-state-denying Max Fisher's "The Risks of Pre-emptive Strikes Against North Korea":

Jeffrey Lewis, a North Korea expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, recalled a 1969 episode in which North Korea shot down a United States Navy plane, killing 31.

The Nixon administration, he said, never retaliated because it could find no options that were “tough enough to punish the North Koreans, but not so tough that the North Koreans will think it’s a general attack,” setting off an all-out war.

That has been the problem ever since, Mr. Lewis said: “News flash, these Venn diagrams do not overlap.”

As North Korea’s nuclear capability has grown, the distance between a single attack and all-out war has shortened. Paradoxically, the heightened fear of escalation also makes it likelier.

“If there were ever a conflict, Pyongyang would have nowhere else to go but up the escalation ladder after artillery except to its nuclear weapons,” Victor Cha, who served as the Asian affairs director on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, wrote in a September column in a South Korean newspaper.

That threat goes both ways, Mr. Cha wrote, because it “compels the United States to pre-emptively attack the nuclear forces at the first sign of conflict.”

A full war, entered deliberately or accidentally, would risk terrible costs.

Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti told a congressional committee in 2016, when he was commander of United States forces in South Korea, that war with North Korea “would be more akin to the Korean War and World War II — very complex, probably high casualty.”

Analysts doubt that the United States could reproduce the rapid military victory it achieved against Iraq in 2003. In the event of war, North Korean plans are thought to call for nuclear attacks against major ports and air bases in South Korea and Japan, halting any American invasion before it could fully begin.

In the meantime, nuclear and chemical strikes against major population centers would be intended to shock the world into capitulating. Missile defense would be of limited use against short-range rockets and of no use against North Korea’s hundreds of artillery pieces, many of which target Seoul, the South Korean capital.

Seoul has a population density twice that of New York City. Seoul is home to 10 million people. Even an impetuous blowhard like Trump would think twice before sacrificing 10 million people.

Neoconned Again

Lately it seems as if the newspapers have returned to 2014: Stories about fighting in Eastern Ukraine; an incendiary report by Amnesty International alleging Syrian government crimes against humanity; a tendentious article in the Gray Lady which creates the impression that there is smoldering support for ISIS in Sunni Iraq.

Then there is this little gem by Gardiner Harris, "As Ties With U.S. Cool, Europeans Look to Forge Other Alliances," about the EU foreign minister Federica Mogherini's Foggy Bottom sit-down with the Secretary of State from ExxonMobil Rex Tillerson: "On Russian sanctions, she said President Trump’s policy was essentially identical to former President Barack Obama’s and to Europe’s."

It was foolish to expect that a Trump administration would be substantially different from prior ones. Sure, it is welcome news to see that Trump blocked Tillerson's choice of neocon archduke Elliot Abrams for his deputy, but the overall trajectory is still neocon. Robert Parry has lately been calling this out. What we're going to get, and no doubt what the Saudis have been promised (in order to let go of Islamic State), is increasing conflict with Iran; that, and increasing conflict with China. According to this morning's Situation Report:

The Pentagon wants to increase the number of freedom of navigation operations it conducts near man-made Chinese islands in the disputed territory of the South China Sea. Anonymous military officials told Navy Times that the carrier strike group attached to the USS Carl Vinson would carry out the operations if approved by the Trump administration. The operations began under the Obama administration and involve sailing within 12 nautical mile of the islands in order to content Beijing's claims of exclusive territorial sovereignty surrounding them.

The next four years are going to be a real neocon roller coaster.