In Stanley Kubrick’s 1954 madcap dark comedy “Dr. Strangelove,” the clearly demented main character is a former scientist for Adolf Hitler who ends up as a military adviser to a fictional American president involved in a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union. The Strangelove character was not merely a figment of Kubrick’s otherwise brilliant imagination. Dr. Strangelove, who urges a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, is based on two immigrant Cold Warriors from Europe possessing doctoral degrees: Dr. Henry Kissinger, the Machiavellian national security adviser President Richard Nixon and Russian affairs adviser to President Barack Obama, and Dr. Edward Teller, the father of America’s hydrogen bomb. In real life, Kissinger, a German and an alleged Jew, and Teller, a Hungarian, brought their anti-Russian European political “baggage” to bear on America’s policy toward Moscow during the height of the Cold War. Kissinger and Teller, like the revenge-seeking Nazi, Strangelove, wanted Russia punished for personal political reasons.
Today, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe and chief of the U.S. European Command, four-star Air Force General Philip Breedlove, is attempting to reprise the movie role of Dr. Strangelove, his almost namesake. Just as Dr. Strangelove cited a “mine shaft” gap with the Soviets arising from a lack of underground facilities for the protection of American men and women who would repopulate the world through proper “breeding techniques,” Breedlove has stated that NATO must match Russian troop deployments in western Russia with a commensurate buildup of NATO troops in its east.
Breedlove has stated that NATO’s military presence in Eastern Europe will continue with air, land and sea deployments until at least December 31 and possibly beyond. Sounding a lot like Dr. Strangelove in his analysis of the perceived Russian “threat” to Ukraine and NATO, Breedlove pulled out the best talking points from the RAND Corporation. Breedlove in a news conference held this month with Canada’s top military commander, Chief of the Defense Staff Tom Lawson. Breedlove said, “Based on the new paradigm that we see Russia has presented . . . we are all going to have to re-evaluate some of the decisions that we have made for structure, for positioning, for readiness, and . . . even more important in the short term, our force responsiveness will need to be re-evaluated.”
In other words, Breedlove sees something akin to a “mine shaft” gap with the Russians and the deployment of U.S. and other NATO troops and planes to Romania, Estonia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Bulgaria. So far, Hungary and Slovakia have resisted calls by outgoing NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish neo-conservative puppet prime minister for President George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to station NATO troops in both countries.
Breedlove (like the fictional Strangelove vis-a-vis the USSR) is in the perfect position to hype up a situation brought on by wanton U.S. and European Union interference in the affairs of Ukraine. In April, Breedlove hearkened back to every Cold Warrior’s masturbatory visions of U.S.-Soviet battles in the Fulda Gap of Germany in having a vision of 40,000 Russian troops on the move into Ukraine and a NATO military response. After meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in April, Breedlove hyperventilated over a “potent mix of warplanes, helicopter units, artillery, infantry, and commandos with field hospitals and sufficient logistics” ready to move from Russia into Ukraine.
However, Russia began pulling its forces back from the Russian border with Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin offered the illegal government in Kiev negotiations. This was coupled with Putin’s call for secessionists in eastern Ukraine to postpone their self-determination referenda. These calls for talks and no violence were met with skepticism from the neo-conservatives in the State Department, including Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and her dirty talk phone partner, U.S. Ambassador to Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt.
For Breedlove, the return of Cold War politics and military strategy to Europe is pure “muttermilch.” Breedlove has called for a permanent NATO naval presence in the Black Sea and continued land and air deployments to eastern Europe. There are plans to expand the U.S. “Aegis Ashore” anti-missile naval base in Deveselu in southern Romania, a pet project of the neocon Deputy-Secretary General of NATO Alexander Vershbow, to include an expanded U.S. signals intelligence presence involving personnel from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Funding for unidentified additional “support facilities” were included for the missile base in the Pentagon’s 2014 budget.
NATO also has plans to establish a permanent naval base in Constanta, Romania, to counter the Russian Black Sea fleet headquarters in Sebastopol, Crimea.
There are also plans by NATO to increase its presence at a number of air bases across eastern Europe, including the Namest air base in the Czech Republic, the Mihail Kogalniceanu in Romania, and the Bezmer and the Graf Ignatievo air bases in Bulgaria. Breedlove and U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel have discussed with Polish officials, including Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak, the permanent basing of NATO troops in Poland. Russia has countered that the permanent deployment of large numbers of NATO troops to eastern Europe would violate the 1997 “Founding Act” between NATO and Russia.
Nevertheless, Breedlove has presided over a massive buildup of NATO forces in the area covered by NATO’s all-but-abrogated Founding Act with Russia. U.S. Air Force and Polish F-16s have flown missions near Ukrainian airspace and U.S. Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes, based in Poland and Romania, have reportedly been authorized by Kiev to fly missions in Ukrainian airspace to collect electronic intelligence, such as radar signatures and command and control signals, from Russian air force planes and ground stations.
Breedlove has also used NATO’s own propaganda organs, as well as friendly outlets like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, and George Soros’s Open Society Institute to push the notion of NATO’s further expansion. There are now serious proposals for NATO to accept not only Ukraine and Georgia as full members but also traditionally neutral Sweden, Finland, and Austria, as well as Moldova, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, Malta, Cyprus, and Azerbaijan . . . NATO membership for Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova would directly involve NATO in the self-determination struggles of Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Kharkov, Odessa, and Kherson in Ukraine; Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia; Transnistria and Gagauzia in Moldova; and Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan.
Breedlove and his colleagues would then be able to salute the American body bags returning to Dove Air Force base in Delaware from such battle grounds as Slaviansk, Mariapol, Tiraspol, Komrat, and Stepanakert. American mothers and fathers would have to consult detailed maps to discover where their sons and daughters perished in battles in previously unheard of regions and cities. American parents would also discover that their sons and daughters fought and died alongside some of the most vicious Nazi and fascist paramilitary brigades Ukraine and surrounding countries could muster for battle. Parents would be “comforted” by the notion that their military sons and daughters died for causes championed by the ideological sons of Adolf Hitler, Ukrainian Nazi Stepan Bandera, Romanian fascist Ion Antonescu, and Benito Mussolini.
Meanwhile, General Breedlove will be able to snap to attention, salute Barack Obama, and cry out, “Mein Fuhrer! President!”
This article originally appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
