The Saker, more or less accurately, in my opinion, reads the tea leaves behind recent strategic actions by the United States and its armed forces:
I think that there is very strong, even if only indirect, evidence which there is some very serious in-fighting taking place in the “Biden” administration and there is also strong, but also indirect, evidence that the military posture of the United States is undergoing what might end up being a major overhaul of the US armed forces.
If true, and that is a big “if”, this is neither good news nor bad news.
But this might be big news.
Why?
Because, objectively, the current US retreat on most fronts might be the “soft landing” (transition from Empire to “normal” country) many Trump voters were hoping for. Or it might not. If it is not, this might be a chaos-induced retreat, indicating that the US state is crumbling and has to urgently “simplify” things to try to survive, thereby generating a lot of factional infighting (at least one Russian observer specialized in “US studies”, Dmitrii Drobnitskii, believes to be the case: see the original article here, and its machine translation here). Finally, the state of decay of the US state might already be so advanced that we can consider it as profoundly dysfunctional and basically collapsing/collapsed. The first option (soft landing) is unlikely, yet highly desirable. The second option (chaos-induced retreat) is more likely, but much less desirable as it is only a single step back to then make several steps forward again. The last option (profoundly dysfunctional and basically collapsing/collapsed) is, alas, the most likely, and it is also, by far, the most perilous one.
For one thing, options #2 and #3 will make US actions very unpredictable and, therefore, potentially extremely dangerous. Unpredictable chaos can also quickly morph into a major war, or even several major ones, so the potential danger here is very real (even if totally unreported in Zone A). This, in turn, means that Russia, China, Iran, the DPRK, Venezuela or Cuba all have to keep their guard up and be ready for anything, even the unthinkable (which is often what total chaos generates).
Right now, the fact that the US has initiated a “great retreat” is undeniable. But the true reasons behind it, and its implications, remain quite obscure, at least to me.
I believe it is option 3 – profoundly dysfunctional and basically collapsing – that is the explanation and my reasoning is fairly straightforward. The US military is in far worse shape than even its biggest skeptics comprehend, and these retreats, from Afghanistan to Ukraine, are taking place in order to hide the US military’s lack of capability. With the prospect of a vaccine mandate being forced on an unwilling military by an unelected commander-in-chief, the US military will be fortunate if it doesn’t fall apart faster than Creepy Joe’s eyes light up after catching sight of a child in the crowd.
Any confrontation, with any enemy provided drones and missiles by either Russia or China, will reveal the US military to be not just a paper tiger, but a paper tiger who has been thoroughly immersed in water. At this point, I think it is more likely that we’ll wake up to find the USA being ruled by a USMC colonel and China in possession of Taiwan than for Creepy Joe’s anti-administration to engage in large-scale offensive operations outside the US borders.
It’s clear that the AIPACkers and ELOWs in the anti-administration desperately want war with Iran before they lose their influence over the US military. But it’s equally clear that the US military has no hope of winning any serious encounter with the China-Russia-Iran anti-imperial alliance. Hence the serious in-fighting presently taking place within Washington.
