By Finian Cunningham

August 26, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  It surely is the greatest Orwellian paradox that the United States is a permanent member of the UN Security Council. For the US is a behemoth that craves insecurity and war for its very existence.

This week Washington took the reprehensible step towards inciting a new global arms race when it test-fired a new ground-based cruise missile off its west coast. The range of the nuclear-capable weapon was over 500 kilometers. It would have been banned under the recently discarded Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.

Conveniently for the US, it had pulled out of the INF less than three weeks before the latest missile test. That nails the lie espoused by the Americans that they were collapsing the 1987 treaty “because” of alleged Russian violations. The brutal truth is that the US simply wanted to trash the arms control treaty in order to expand its arsenal of short and medium-range ballistic weapons.

Disturbingly, Pentagon chief Mark Esper has also announced in recent weeks that the US intends to install INF-busting-type missiles on Asian land bases. He says the US needs to confront the “bad behavior of China”.

There is no reason to believe that the US will not move ahead to install short and medium-range missiles in Asia and also in Europe. In both scenarios, the balance of nuclear power is dangerously shifted to threaten China and Russia.

Beijing and Moscow said this week that they do not want to be drawn into an arms race with the US. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his defense chiefs to formulate a reciprocal response to the new US threats without dragging the country into an economically sapping arms race, as was the case in past years of the Cold War.

It is deplorable how the US is incorrigible in its pursuit of confrontation. No other nation in modern history has such a nefarious record of relentless war-making and destruction.