Media and Communication Professor Emeritus Oliver Boyd-Barrett discusses his new article “Greenlighting the Escalation.” He writes:
We should expect with a fairly high degree of certainty that the US and UK will greenlight the use of Western long range missiles on targets in Russia…We can debate whether these attacks will be initiated before or after the US presidential election. Given the speed of Ukraine’s defeat in Donbass and stalling in Kursk I suspect sooner rather than later…Russian weapons will give much greater backbone to Islamic retaliation against Israel for the Gaza and West Bank genocides, and to the responses of Iran, Syria and Iraq to daily Israeli murder and other aggression, even as the US reduces its aircraft carrier presence in the region down to one (with the return home of the Theodore Roosevelt).
Is World War 3 probably only days or weeks away, as Gilbert Doctorow writes? Let’s ask Prof. Boyd-Barrett, whose new article “Long-Range Missiles on Russia; Hypersonic Missiles on Israel” begins:
Bottom Line
Mid-week of the week of September 8-14, many analysts, including myself, had expected with a high degree of certainty that the US would greenlight the use of Western precision-guided long-range missiles on targets in Russia.
At the time of writing on September 15 this had not yet occurred. The main reason for this reluctance to proceed can only be a reaction to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statement on Thursday in which he declared, in effect, that any such greenlighting of long-range missiles on Russian targets would be considered by Russia to be a direct participation by NATO in NATO’s otherwise proxy war against Russia over Ukraine, because only NATO is capable of using these weapons, only NATO has the satellite reconnaissance capability necessary to navigate them, and the engineering skills to maintain, launch and fire these systems.
In short, NATO would have embarked on World War Three, and Russia would respond accordingly.
The use by Houthis in the Yemen of a hypersonic missile for an attack on Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport may be a signal from Russia of how its supply of weapons to the West’s enemies, in retaliation for any Western move towards the use of long-range missiles against Russia, will quickly reconfigure global geopolitics to the West’s disadvantage.
Oliver Boyd-Barrett on Greenlighting Escalation Towards WW3