The McCollum Memo is a document of immense contemporary relevance for the Ukraine War. Although the document was written on the eve of the United States’ entrance into World War II, for which no constituency in the American population provided any public support, the document’s explanation of the successive steps a government, namely the United States, must take to provoke Japan to strike at America, proposes an immensely informative parallel for the increasingly reckless escalations the United States encourages Ukraine to unleash against Russia.

The McCollum memo, also known as the Eight Action Memo, was a memorandum, dated October 7, 1940 (more than a year before the Pearl Harbor attack), that Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum sent to his superiors. His superiors sent the memo to President Franklin Eleanor Rosevelt.

In the memorandum, McCollum, who ”provided the president with intelligence reports on [Japan]… [and oversaw] every intercepted and decoded Japanese military (though the military code had not been broken) and diplomatic report destined for the White House,” sought to provide the White House with a blue print according to which the President may find sufficient public support to ensure America’s direct involvement in World War II.

In the memo, McCollum, whose job description did not require him to subject the American population to analysis, nonetheless, stated: “It is not believed that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado […] If by [the elucidated eight-point plan] Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better.”

In his “eight point plan,” McCollum sought to advance a series of successive actions as a means to provoke the Japanese to attack the United States. The United States could thereafter advance the Japanese attack as a casus belli for direct involvement inWorld War II. These eight points were:

A. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies.
C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang-Kai-Shek.
D. Send a division of long range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.
E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
F. Keep the main strength of the U.S. fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.
G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
H. Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.

In “Chapter 2: FDR’s Back Door to War,” from Day of Deceit, Robert Stinnet, the author, whose history reveals the McCollum Memo, relays that “throughout 1941, it seems, provoking Japan into an overt act of war was the principal policy that guided FDR’s actions against Japan” and that “Roosevelt’s cabinet members, most notably Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, are on record favoring the policy, according to Stimson’s diary.”

This situation clearly aligns with the present situation, albeit in a slightly different format. It is widely acknowledge that President Biden, whose meandering, nonsensical, stuttering speeches or hand shakes with thin air indicate incapacity, is actively engaged in provoking Russia “into an overt act of war” as his principal policy, even if it is someone other than Biden, such as his wife, that is ultimately in charge of the man. Furthermore, the equivalent of a Secretary of War, the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, who dictates policy to Zelensky, is favors provocation, and is actively engaged in the achievement of that goal.

It is clear that the United States’ current foreign policy relations with Ukraine are designed to ensure that Ukraine is capable for provoking Russia into providing the United States with a casus belli, the Biden administration hopes it can sell to Americans to buy their way into a direct military confrontation with Russia.

The Pentagon leaks merely supplement what is already easy to ascertain about the Ukrainian armed forces from a careful, close, scrupulous reading of the New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal, together with sources in Arabic such as articles from Al-Arabiya, the Saudi press whose journalists were embedded on the Russian side of Bakhmut in an obvious display of favoritism, the German press, namely Der Spiegel, or the Russia news agencies.

The Ukrainian armed forces are logistically incapable of maintaining the Zelensky regime’s war effort under any circumstance. Either the tank debacle or the ammunition fiasco are enough to understand the shortcomings of its war machine. Despite more than 8 years of continuous training at military bases throughout Europe, if not primarily at Grafenwöhr (i.e., a former Nazi base), the Ukrainians are not only incapable of engaging in combined arms warfare, they are industrially incapable of engaging targets, let alone establishing an umbrella to provide overhead cover in a strike on Russian defenses.

Aware of the Ukrainian army’s status on the battlefield, the Biden administration requires an excuse to enter the war. Ideally, the Biden administration would like to receive a casus belli from Russia in response to a provocation. Should the Biden administration fail to receive a casus belli from Russia, there is nothing to prevent its invention. Any attempt to invest a casus belli would be McCollum moment in the history of the country.

Against the advent of a McCollum moment, the American working class must unite with the exploited Ukrainian and Russian soldiers to counterpose its own strategy of class consciousness, the likes of which is capable of discerning fiction from fact not merely for its own sake but for the sake of humanity. In the event that the United States strikes upon a McCollum moment, the working class must be capable of dispelling its lies to ensure opposition to the entanglement of armed nuclear powers in a direct military confrontation.