"Gentlemen, this may turn into a Seven Years, or even a Thirty Years War—and woe to him who would be the first to throw his spark into the powderkeg!" So warned the 90-year-old Chief of Staff General Count von Moltke the Elder in his last speech before the German Parliament, on May 14, 1890, shortly after the expulsion of Otto von Bismarck from the Chancellorship. And von Moltke was vindicated: A new World War broke out, like the Seven Years War: the so-called First World War. Were Von Moltke alive today, he would, in view of the build-up in Southwest Asia, probably issue a variant upon his earlier warning: "Woe to us all, if this powderkeg blows!"
The preparations for a military intervention against Syria and a preventive strike against Iran are at this point so far advanced, that they may already have happened before these words reach the reader. The U.S. Administration has called upon all U.S. citizens to leave Syria, has recalled its ambassador, and has re-positioned the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) from the Hormuz Strait, close to Syria in the Eastern Mediterranean. Officially, the U.S. Navy has said the carrier is merely "stopping for a break on its way back to the USA."
The United States and Great Britain have officially declared that they will no longer adhere to the confidence-building measures that were part of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), arguing that Russia hasn't kept its part. This means that the U.S.A. and the U.K. will no longer inform Russia on their plans for troop deployments in Europe. After first signing the CFE in 1990, and renewing it in 1999, Russia had suspended the Treaty in 2007, when the U.S. announced that it was setting up a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, along the Russian border.
The director of the Center for Military Prognoses, Anatoly Zyganok, told Pravda.ru that this means that from now on, the U.S. could station troops wherever it wished, without ever notifiying Russia—i.e., in the Baltic States, Poland, the Czech Republic, or Hungary. Already, a treaty dating back to the era of German reunification, stating that NATO forces would not cross the Oder River, has been totally ignored. According to Zyganok, the recent decision on the violation of the CFE Treaty is connected to the developments in the Mediterranean, as well as NATO's intention to build up a military capability south of the Russian border, with which to execute a military strike against Syria.
