Even Clown World’s European satrapies are beginning to refuse to go along with the USA’s desperate attempts to shore up the edges of empire:
Australia is the latest country to reject a request from the United States to send warships to the Red Sea under the command of the Pentagon’s Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect commercial vessels along the critical maritime trade route from Iran-backed Houthi.
Defense Minister Richard Marles told Sky News that Australia’s military would not send a “ship or a plane” to the Red Sea but would triple the number of troops for the US-led maritime force. “We need to be really clear around our strategic focus and our strategic focus is our region,” Marles said.
The Pentagon’s formation of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a new task force to protect shipping from Houthi drone and missile attacks in the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait and the Red Sea, requires increased warship patrols by the US and allies. This will create a security umbrella over commercial vessels to defend from attacks.
Reuters said about twenty countries have signed up for the Pentagon’s new operation. However, several countries, including Australia, Spain, Italy, and France, have rejected the Pentagon’s request to participate in the operation.
These coalitions usually aren’t more than diplomatic cover for US troops, but in this case, the involvement of the lesser navies is actually necessary in the hopes of preventing the Houthis from sinking a US warship and thereby revealing the naked state of the US military. These hopes were always futile, however, since it’s pretty obvious that while Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, and China are all being cautious about directly attacking US military assets without the benefit of US camouflage – such as the Rangers and Patriot missile teams in Ukraine, for example – the Houthis appear to be very nearly ready to take on all comers as the Taliban.
None of this is happening by accident. The unrestricted and asymmetrical nature of the conflicts popping up one by one around the world, combined with China’s apparent quiescence, is very much in keeping with the geopolitical strategy laid out 24 years ago by the Chinese military. The fact that the neoclown strategists are keeping at least one very wary eye on China, despite its seeming lack of involvement in any of these conflicts and close calls from Gaza to Georgia, tends to suggest that the imperial advisers are well aware of this.
It may be another decade of this death-by-one-thousand-cuts warfare before China bestirs itself to openly challenge the Empire. Or it may only be a few more months before one or another of the various fronts that have been opened collapses. But regardless, it is eminently clear that we are witnessing the fall of an empire that has been in decline since 1973.