Project Falsitas

It is apparent that James O’Keefe never read SJWAL, SJWADD, or Corporate Cancer. If he had, he would never have put himself in the position of being so easily ejected from the organization he founded by a Clown World agent who joined it only four months ago.

Since it’s already out there, here are my heartfelt remarks to my staff this morning.

I need to make clear I have not resigned from the company, Project Veritas, I founded 13 years ago. I was stripped of my position as CEO and Chairman.

I came to the PV office today to remove my personal belongings.

Every church, every corporation, and every organization needs to understand that it is under attack-by-infiltration at all times. Those smiling helpful new people who just love what you’re doing and are ever-so-dedicated to throwing themselves in and helping are not even remotely on your side at all.

The following is a selection from SJWS ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN, a book that is not half as read as its predecessor, but is arguably even more important for people like James O’Keefe.


The convergence of institutions tends to follow a recognizable pattern that operates in much the same way as the SJW attack sequence, but on a larger scale. This pattern can be usefully described as the SJW convergence sequence. We can see how it has played out for the last sixty years in fully converged institutions such as academia, the mainstream media, and the publishing industry, we can see how it plays out today in partially converged institutions such as corporate America and the various Christian churches, and we can see how rapidly the cancer can metastasize in institutions that are just being infiltrated today, such as the game industry and the open source software community.

Regardless of the nature of the institution, the same general pattern of behavior is reliably followed to such an extent that it is relatively easy to identify how badly an institution is converged, and its resultant ability or inability to perform its primary purpose, on the basis of what stage in the convergence sequence has been reached by the SJWs converging it.

For example, when I read the bizarre story of the sudden decline of a once-popular church near my childhood home in Minnesota being reduced to 800 people meeting in a hotel, I knew without even needing to ask anyone what had happened. The church, a Lutheran church called North Heights that my parents had attended in the 1990s, had been infiltrated by SJWs, converged, lost its ability to perform its primary function as a Christian church, and found itself on the brink of failure. What was astonishing to me was just how fast what looked like a rock-solid community institution had gone downhill and collapsed.

Founded in 1946, the church was a fixture in the northern suburbs of St. Paul, with two locations offering seven worship services to 7,000 parishioners. It was one of Minnesota’s first megachurches, which always struck me as a little ironic as the senior pastor since 1961, a quiet, humble Scandinavian man named Morris Vaagenes, could not have been further from the smooth, slick-haired Joel Osteen clones that one tends to picture when one thinks of a megachurch. While I seldom attended it, preferring Greg Boyd’s Woodland Hills instead, my mother sang in the Christmas choir there, my aunt and uncle and cousins were members, and if I recall correctly, several of my friends’ children attended North Heights Christian Academy, a private K-8 Christian school that was founded by the church. It was a church full of good, decent people, nice Minnesota Lutherans in whom even Garrison Keillor could find no fault, who loved Jesus, loved their fellow man, and liked nothing better than to send their children to Haiti or Trinidad for two weeks in the winter to build homes and churches for the less fortunate. It was a wealthy church, too, located as it was near the lake homes of Shoreview and North Oaks, and the parking lot was always filled with Audis, and BMWs, and Mercedes.

Pastor Vaagenes was a genuine man of God, who initially appeared a little weak and bumbling in person, but grew in stature in the pulpit, preaching straight from the Bible with a powerful evangelical fervor that belied his traditional white robes and otherwise unprepossessing demeanor. However, he retired in 1999, and as is so often the case when a strong leader retires, was succeeded by men who were considerably less capable of assuming the burden of leadership. In 2007, a woman by the name of Mindy Bak joined what had become a bloated 88-person staff, and with the help of other SJWs who had also infiltrated the church, managed to get herself appointed interim senior pastor in 2014 through a series of highly political machinations circumventing the traditionalists on the church’s Board of Elders. This was rather a remarkable accomplishment, considering that a considerable percentage of the church members were relatively traditional Christians who held to the conventional Biblical teachings on the proper roles of men and women in church ministry.

It was arguably even more remarkable that within just 18 months, attendance had fallen nearly 80 percent, over half the staff was laid off, both total and per-capita giving drastically declined, and the original location was shut down, in part due to “a lack of elevator access for the disabled.”

What could possibly motivate a pastor, even a female one, to destroy her own church in this manner? According to one former member quoted in the Star Tribune, the answer is pretty simple. “She hates men.”

And on March 13, 2016, less than two years after she had been appointed interim senior pastor, Mindy Bak presided over the final service at North Heights Lutheran in front of the last 900 members of the congregation. Her work was done, and what for sixty years was a thriving church community had been destroyed.

A long-running schism proves fatal to North Heights Lutheran… Prejudice, sexism and scapegoating all played a role in the church’s downfall, Bak said. Members of the breakaway group didn’t want a female leader, Bak said, particularly one that didn’t shy away from issues that predecessors had refused to address. They didn’t want to hear about the prejudices of North Heights or the truth about its finances, she said. Nor did they want to embrace her message that to love Christ you must love even those people who are challenging to love. A sign in the church hall read, in part, “Throughout our history, many grew to be the followers of Jesus we were called to be. But our willingness to love one another, in spite of division, never came. For decades upon decades, selfishness and pride have brought us to this place of self-destruction. We are a cautionary tale of a dying church.”

—–“Deep divide dooms onetime megachurch North Heights Lutheran,” Star Tribune, 13 March 2016

The convergence, decline, and fall of North Heights Lutheran is indeed a cautionary tale. But it is vital to remember that the SJW convergence of North Heights did not begin with the ascendance of Mindy Bak to the interim senior pastorship. Nor did it begin when she began working at the church in 2007; the fact that she was hired as a pastor indicates that the convergence actually began in the late 1990s, when the church failed to successfully vet its new employees, pastors, and elders. By the time the convergence is visible to the average member of the institution, it is usually too late to salvage the institution in the absence of a strong leader who understands what is at stake, does not fear conflict, and is willing to stand up to the vicious slander and underhanded tactics that will be unleashed against him.


In the same way, the convergence and destruction of Project Veritas did not begin with the hiring of Barry Hinckley as the organization’s Chief Strategy Officer in the autumn of 2022. His allies were already there and waiting for him to spearhead the insurrection; note that O’Keefe was successfully ejected after he realized Hinckley was a problem and fired him.

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Red Lines

The USA consistently refused to respect Russia’s red lines. Why on Earth would China pay any attention whatsoever to whatever the USA claims its red lines to be?

Any nation providing lethal support to Moscow in its ongoing conflict with Kiev would cross Washington’s “red line,” the US envoy to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told CNN on Sunday. Earlier the same day, US State Secretary Antony Blinken directly warned a top Chinese diplomat, Wang Yi, against considering such an option.

We … have to be clear that if there are any thoughts and efforts by the Chinese and others to provide lethal support to the Russians in their brutal attack against Ukraine, that that is unacceptable,” Thomas-Greenfield told CNN’s ‘State of the Union,’ adding that it “would be a red line.”

Her words came as Blinken was meeting Wang Yi on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany. There, the US diplomat told his Chinese counterpart that the US was “very concerned that China is considering providing lethal support to Russia,” Blinken told NBC’s Chuck Todd in the wake of the meeting.

This is what happens when you have a bunch of very special boys in charge of things. The neocons genuinely believe that they have the right to do whatever they see as in their own interest, but no one else has the same right.

Of course China is going to provide “lethal support to Russia”. It’s in their interest, because the same special boys who are threatening them if they do have already announced their intention to go to war with China just as soon as they’re done defeating Russia.

All I can conclude is that because the neocons hate literally everyone, including themselves, they’re playing a suicidal game of Samson burning down the temple using the US military as a match. I mean, it’s impossible to believe that they’re literally this stupid and totally unable to see the obvious consequences of their actions.

On the other hand, the possibility of stupidity should not be entirely dismissed. China is already allied with Russia, and World War III started with the Special Military Operation in February 2022.

“If China allies itself with Russia, there will be a world war.”

—Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 20 February 2023

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China Calls Out Surveillance

Wait, what’s that sound. It sounds like they’re playing… that’s AC’s music! This unusually direct accusation by the Chinese Foreign Ministry is ostensibly in response to the US Air Force shooting down the rogue Chinese weather balloon, and perhaps that is all it is, but the repeated references to “No. 1 spy empire” and “absolute No. 1 country in terms of spying and surveillance” make it appear to also be shot across the bow concerning the massive domestic Stalkerstasi spy program.

As a matter of fact, it is the US who is the No.1 surveillance country and has the largest spy network in the world.

The US National Security Agency spied on calls and chat messages to and from the phones of leaders of Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and other European countries. The US has been operating a highly secretive signals intelligence collection program through almost a hundred US embassies and consulates worldwide. Anzer, a cybersecurity information platform, revealed last year that the NSA stole more than 97 billion pieces of global internet data and 124 billion phone records in 30 days, compromising the privacy of citizens across the world. Namibia recently found in its waters a US saildrone used to gather data underwater, and local media generally believe it to be an American spy drone. The US knows how many surveillance balloons it has sent into the skies in the world. It’s quite clear to the global community which country is the No.1 spy empire in the world…

Over the years, the US has been engaged in massive, non-discriminate wiretapping and secret theft operations globally, including against its allies, by abusing its tech advantage. These operations violate the sovereignty and interests of countries around the world, the international law and basic norms governing international relations, which makes the US the absolute No.1 country in terms of spying and surveillance.

Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin’s Regular Press Conference on February 13, 2023

Once WWIII goes hot, by which I mean it ceases to be presented as a proxy conflict between “Ukraine” and Vladimir Putin’s ego, but becomes a direct war between the USA and the Sino-Russian alliance, I expect we are going to learn an awful lot about the historical and ongoing misdeeds of the US government and its agencies, as well as of the Clown World individuals and organizations that control them.

Remember, the Russians know all about “the Holocaust”. It was their Red Army that liberated all of the so-called death camps. They know all about the surveillance and spy programs, both international and domestic. They know everything about NASA and the space programs. They know who killed JFK and why. They know why Watergate happened and they know at whose behest Nixon was removed.

And now it appears the Chinese do too. It’s somewhat amusing that while US figures such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Donald Trump, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Jordan Peterson, Ron DeSantis and pretty much every other figure of the neoconservative media and movement keep their mouths resolutely shut about something they definitely know about, the Chinese are openly throwing it out there to the entire world.

Jesus Christ said “the truth will set you free.” If you cannot speak the truth, then you obviously are not free.

Just in case anyone happened to miss the significance of this statement by the Foreign Ministry, the Global Times made sure to highlight it. Any revelatory information releases by China or Russia will obviously be dismissed as “wartime rhetoric.” Indeed, it will actually be wartime rhetoric, but dialectic is a form of rhetoric and I have no doubt that both the Russians and the Chinese will find it to be highly beneficial to inform Americans just how genuinely evil the rulers of Clown World are.

It may be worth noting that even as it calls out US surveillance, China is also very publicly embracing Iran, with a specific message to anyone who feels “targeted” by the new developmetns.

The development of China-Iran relations has a strong endogenous driving force. It can be said that President Raisi’s visit to China is very natural. However, as Iran is still under severe sanctions by the US, and China is the main target of US’ strategic suppression. With a narrow-minded mindset, some US and Western public opinion appeared rather odd in viewing the relationship between China and Iran, hyping that both China and Iran are “opposed” to the US and claiming that cooperation between the two sides will “weaken US efforts to isolate Iran.” Such zero-sum thinking is arrogant, unreasonable and overbearing. China and Iran do not need to act according to their attitude, and it is even less likely that the two sides will reduce exchanges because some people are unhappy.

In fact, many of the achievements of China-Iran cooperation in recent years have been realized by overcoming interference and sabotage by the US side. It may be difficult to improve this situation in a short period of time, but outside the US-West bloc and its influence circle, there is huge space and potential for win-win cooperation between countries, including China and Iran, which cannot be blocked by the political forces of the US and the West.

In this sense, China’s deepening cooperation with Iran also has anti-hegemony and anti-bullying feature. Both China and Iran uphold independent foreign policies, firmly defend the principle of non-interference in internal affairs on international occasions, and safeguard the common interests of developing countries. This is conducive to promoting the multi-polarization and diversified development of the world, and conforms to the general trend of the times. If anyone feels “targeted” in this process, then they should first reflect on whether they are too selfish.

Welcome President Raisi. China, Iran no need to watch attitude of US, West, Global Times, 14 February 2023

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Turks Suspect US Geoweapon

A Romanian senator publicly states that the lethal earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria were the result of an attack by a US geoweapon, and that the Turkish secret services are actively pursuing that line of investigation.

Turkey is the second great power from a military point of view within NATO. His position to block Sweden’s accession to NATO, his speech in Davos, as well as the gesture of leaving in the middle of the press conference, defying Schwab, did not remain without an echo in the cold world of leaders the world. But, no one thought that people would have to die, so many people, and in such a terrible way. And it’s just a warning, because it wasn’t the most populated area of Turkey.

150 aftershocks of a devastating earthquake, the second larger than the first, without the existence of an epicenter, the area being artificially stimulated, geological weapons having existed for a very long time, being used so far without causing too many casualties, probably for experiments. Now, it has been put into practice. If we look carefully at the map of Turkey, we will see that it is furrowed by gas and oil pipelines, this being actually one of the goals: their destruction. But, 10 seconds before the occurrence of the so-called earthquake, the Turks closed these pipelines. In addition, 24 hours before the earthquake, 10 countries withdrew their ambassadors from Turkey. 5 days before its occurrence, the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a travel warning for Romanian citizens in Turkey, although there was no danger, as did other countries. By killing people, they served their interests. The maps shown on all the television channels show that there was no epicenter, but a line with thousands of earthquakes.

The Turkish secret services are investigating a possible criminal intervention”, (read an involvement of another state in triggering the first earthquake), what followed later being a chain reaction after the destabilization of the tectonic plates in the region.

Considering that both Covid-19 and the Covid-19 vaxx were US-funded bioweapon attacks on the entire human population and the fact that it was the US military that is responsible for cutting off energy to Europe, the suggestion that Clown World is actively engaged in additional depopulationist attacks, including the earthquakes in Turkey, the toxic train derailments in the USA, is hardly unthinkable.

My expectation is that the next fatal earthquakes will be in Japan, which is resisting US demands that it change its constitution and transform its Self Defense Forces into a military capable of attacking China and/or Russia. Crimea is a possibility, as is western China, but I don’t think Clown World’s strategists are willing to take the risk of directly striking Russian or Chinese territory for fear of direct retaliation in kind.

I realize that most people are presently unable to recognize the obvious pattern that is taking shape here, but sooner or later, it is going to become undeniable, if not completely overt. It’s not China or Russia or aliens that are responsible for all of these things, or even any of these things, but the global depopulationists based in the USA.

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Silver Lining

I’m glad Gab exists. It serves a very useful purpose. But there are a LOT of literal retards on social media.

VD: “A man in Arizona admitted to possessing child pornography during the interview process for a position with the El Mirage Police Department.”

Following the disclosure, he was offered the position of police chief.

GAMMA: Total malarkey. The man was arrested, not offered a position of police chief. Here’s an article on the story from the New York Post.

This sort of thing is why I’m not quite entirely unsympathetic to the globalist notion of offering lethal poison to every moron gullible enough to trust the science and inject it into his body because credentials. Yes, it’s awful, horrific, evil, and satanic, no question, but I do think it’s important to remember that it will pretty much kill off the self-appointed reality police.

Silver linings, my friends. Silver linings.

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Japan Signs Up for Suicide

Or, quite possibly, not.

Now, I realize how this sounds to Western ears. And if a similar statement were released by the foreign minister of Sweden or Croatia or even Argentina, taking the words at face value would almost certainly be the correct interpretation. As we’ve witnessed time after time in the USA, when a corporation or a private organization makes a public statement about committing to diversity, it has already drunk the Kool-Aid and entered the death spiral.

But the Japanese are absolute masters about saying no in a non-confrontational manner. “It’s difficult” means “no”. “It’s complicated” means “absolutely not”. And “explaining a commitment to work to realize” means “never going to happen, roundeye”.

If Japan was truly interested in committing national suicide, it doesn’t need to sign up for diversity. It can achieve extinction a lot faster by simply declaring war against the Sino-Russian alliance, as neither nation has forgotten its defeat and humiliation at the hands of Imperial Japan in the 20th century.

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Russia’s New Red Lines

Russia is sending a very clear warning to the neoclowns. Not because they expect the evil morons to heed them, but to give the people of the West one last chance to stop following the wicked satanists down the pathway to Hell.

As usual, Yevgeny Popov, State Duma member and host of “Sixty Minutes,” put a lot of video segments from Western television up on the screen, including a lengthy statement by Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, former commander of all U.S. forces in Europe from 2014 to 2017, on how the Ukrainians must be given long range precision missiles for them to attack Russian Crimea and also further into the Russian heartland. The interview from which this declaration was made does not yet appear in Google search, but from interviews posted in 2022 it is clear that Hodges is no madman, and his statements must, as Popov said, be taken with utmost seriousness.

The context, of course, for the radical escalation now being discussed in the United States is the expectation of a massive Russian offensive to begin shortly as the anniversary of the Special Military Operation approaches. The imminent defeat of Ukrainian forces has focused minds in Washington.

One of the regular panelists on “Sixty Minutes” then faced the cameras directly and said that Russia’s nuclear doctrine is under revision in light of these aggressive plans being aired in the United States, so that Russia is headed towards a policy of ‘preventive’ tactical nuclear strikes, similar to what the United States has. Moreover, if Ukraine targets Crimea and heartland Russia, then Russia will respond according to plans now being laid down. These plans foresee counter strikes against U.S military installations in Europe and in the Continental United States using hypersonic missiles. The panelist calls for this threat of counter strikes in Europe and the US to be made public and explicit, so that no one is in doubt about what to expect from the Kremlin.

So here we are. The Russians are stripping away the fiction of a proxy war and revealing the co-belligerent status of the US and its NATO allies in preparation for a kinetic war with NATO.

Meanwhile, the slaves of Clown World are still playing their magic word games and pretending that they are relevant in a military context. Colonel Markus Reisner, the military strategist of the Austrian Ministry of Defence, takes on the difficult task of explaining why NATO soldiers fighting in Ukraine under NATO command-and-control with NATO weapons against Russian forces do not mean that NATO is at war with Russia.

If the military from Austria or NATO countries retired from service and became mercenaries, then they could no longer be considered representatives of the armies of their states. He explained that the serviceman takes off his uniform, signs a contract and goes to Ukraine – now he is not a soldier, for example, of the Austrian armed forces, but a contract mercenary. In his opinion, there are a large number of mercenaries on the territory of Ukraine and not soldiers of the alliance.

Wanna bet? I’m pretty sure the Russians are perfectly capable of considering these newly-minted “mercenaries” to be not only representatives of the armies of their states, but representatives of Clown World as well. The idea that the various European states, led by the USA, are merely providing weapons and money for Ukraine to pay for and supply these retired US and European soldiers, who are now “mercenaries”, is the application of talmudism to military grand strategy.

I expect it is going to be demonstrated, very soon, what a fundamental category error that will turn out to be.

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Surrender Means Success

The neocons are still practicing their insane word magic as they try to convince Russia to let them surrender Ukraine without openly admitting that they lost their proxy war on Russia.

David Ignatius has been a career-long mouthpiece for the US State Department. He has just been called in by the current Secretary of State Antony Blinken to convey an urgent new message to President Vladimir Putin, the Security Council, and the General Staff in Moscow.

For the first time since the special military operation began last year, the war party in Washington is offering terms of concession to Russia’s security objectives explicitly and directly, without the Ukrainians in the way.

The terms Blinken has told Ignatius to print appeared in the January 25 edition of the Washington Post.

The territorial concessions Blinken is tabling include Crimea, the Donbass, and the Zaporozhye, Kherson “land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia”. West of the Dnieper River, north around Kharkov, and south around Odessa and Nikolaev, Blinken has tabled for the first time US acceptance of “a demilitarized status” for the Ukraine. Also, US agreement to restrict the deployment of HIMARS, US and NATO infantry fighting vehicles, and the Abrams and Leopard tanks to a point in western Ukraine from which they can “manoeuvre…as a deterrent against future Russian attacks.”

This is an offer for a tradeoff – partition through a demilitarized zone (DMZ) in the east of the Ukraine in exchange for a halt to the planned Russian offensive destroying the fortifications, rail hubs, troop cantonments, and airfields in the west, between the Polish and Romanian borders, Kiev and Lvov, and an outcome Blinken proposes for both sides to call “a just and durable peace that upholds Ukraine’s territorial integrity”.

Also in the proposed Blinken deal there is the offer of a direct US-Russian agreement on “an eventual postwar military balance”; “no World War III”; and no Ukrainian membership of NATO with “security guarantees similar to NATO’s Article 5.”

Blinken has also told the Washington Post to announce the US will respect “Putin’s tripwire for nuclear escalation”, and accept the Russian “reserve force includ[ing] strategic bombers, certain precision-guided weapons and, of course, tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.”

Russia isn’t going to accept this offer or even use it as a point to begin negotiations, because they already tried negotiating with the West with the Minsk Accords of 2014 and 2015. But, as Angela Merkel and other Western leaders have publicly admitted, the agreements were a sham from the start, and were only intended to buy Ukraine more time to prepare its defenses.

Various Russian leaders have stated that both the USA and Ukraine are “non-agreement capable” and they are absolutely correct to have reached that conclusion, as Clown World’s leading neocons are still making plans to win a war that was not only unwinnable from the start, but has already been lost.

Because what they really need to prepare for is success, you see!

Success. That’s the potential outcome that the United States, Ukraine, allied and partner governments, and private-sector actors must now prepare to confront. Ukraine’s counteroffensives, backed by expanded and accelerated US and allied support, continue to push Russian forces out of Ukrainian territory, although at a reduced rate. These hard-won successes, however, bring with them possible challenges that also must be addressed.

In the short term, there are fresh threats from Moscow—attacks on electricity, water, and heat as winter approaches, sham annexations of occupied territories, mobilizations of new troops, reduced but persistent nuclear risk, and Russian prisoners to manage. Areas that Ukraine has liberated from Russian forces need immediate governance, cleanup, humanitarian assistance, and economic revival. Over the longer term, Ukraine will have to rebuild destroyed infrastructure; institute the economic and political reforms required for European Union (EU) membership; and be capable of ensuring its security.

How exactly to meet these looming challenges while exploiting present and future opportunities?

It is, of course, up to the Ukrainians to determine their priorities and their supporters to assist as much as possible, which is also consistent with US interests. But what’s urgently needed is a four-front, long-haul strategy for helping Ukraine win the war against Russia and the peace that follows—one built to withstand the dramatic developments that are sure to play out over the coming years, not just over the next weeks and months of this rapidly evolving conflict.

Preparing for victory: A long-haul strategy to help Ukraine win the war against Russia—and secure the peace, Atlantic Council, November 30, 2022

This isn’t quite Hitler in the bunker giving orders to nonexistent divisions levels of delusion, but they’re observably on their way. And, of course, the word magic failed. No deals. I find it particularly interesting that they went out of the way to mention Nuland’s name. I think they’re making it clear they know perfectly well who is calling the shots in Washington.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has dismissed proposals issued this week in Washington by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Under Secretary, Victoria Nuland. Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova has confirmed that Russia’s military plan for the Ukraine will not be interrupted or delayed.

Clown World’s desperation is observably increasing, as both China and Russia have gone largely silent. This leads me to suspect that both nations will make their next major moves in concert with each other. Exactly what those will be, we can only offer our best surmises, but it would not be surprising if both Ukraine and Taiwan are entirely lost to Clown World by the end of this year.

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When the Plan Fails

A Rand report published in April 2019 laid out US strategy vis-a-vis Russia, which as you can see in hindsight, was followed fairly closely to the letter. Note that “extending” Russia is shorthand for “causing the Russians to overextend and unbalance themselves”.

This report examines a range of possible means to extend Russia. As the 2018 National Defense Strategy recognized, the United States is currently locked in a great-power competition with Russia. This report seeks to define areas where the United States can compete to its own advantage. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from Western and Russian sources, this report examines Russia’s economic, political, and military vulnerabilities and anxieties. It then analyzes potential policy options to exploit them — ideologically, economically, geopolitically, and militarily (including air and space, maritime, land, and multidomain options). After describing each measure, this report assesses the associated benefits, costs, and risks, as well as the likelihood that measure could be successfully implemented and actually extend Russia. Most of the steps covered in this report are in some sense escalatory, and most would likely prompt some Russian counter-escalation. Some of these policies, however, also might prompt adverse reactions from other U.S. adversaries — most notably, China — that could, in turn, stress the United States. Ultimately, this report concludes that the most attractive U.S. policy options to extend Russia — with the greatest benefits, highest likelihood of success, and least risk — are in the economic domain, featuring a combination of boosting U.S. energy production and sanctions, providing the latter are multilateral. In contrast, geopolitical measures to bait Russia into overextending itself and ideological measures to undermine the regime’s stability carry significant risks. Finally, many military options — including force posture changes and development of new capabilities — could enhance U.S. deterrence and reassure U.S. allies, but only a few are likely to extend Russia, as Moscow is not seeking parity with the United States in most domains.

Key Findings

Russia’s weaknesses lie in the economic domains

  • Russia’s greatest vulnerability, in any competition with the United States, is its economy, which is comparatively small and highly dependent on energy exports.
  • The Russian leadership’s greatest anxiety stems from the stability and durability of the regime.

The most promising measures to stress Russia are in the realms of energy production and international pressure

  • Continuing to expand U.S. energy production in all forms, including renewables, and encouraging other countries to do the same would maximize pressure on Russia’s export receipts and thus on its national and defense budgets. Alone among the many measures looked at in this report, this one comes with the least cost or risk.
  • Sanctions can also limit Russia’s economic potential. To be effective, however, these need to be multilateral, involving (at a minimum) the European Union, which is Russia’s largest customer and greatest source of technology and capital, larger in all these respects than the United States.

Geopolitical measures to bait Russia into overextending itself are likely impractical, or they risk second-order consequences

  • Many geopolitical measures would force the United States to operate in areas that are closer to Russia and where it is thus cheaper and easier for Russia than the United States to exert influence.

Ideological measures to undermine the regime’s stability carry significant risks of counter escalation

  • Many military options — including force posture changes and development of new capabilities — could enhance U.S. deterrence and reassure U.S. allies, but only a few are likely to extend Russia, as Moscow is not seeking parity with the United States in most domains.
Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground, RAND, 24 April 2019

This was followed up by a report five months later, which provided specific actions intended to achieve the objectives identified in the initial report, entitled Overextending and Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options.

Insert deep movie trailer voice: They did not correctly assess the impact of the cost-imposed options.

What’s fascinating is that now RAND is rapidly backtracking on the idea of extending Russia, because the US attempts to extend Russia have turned out to extend the USA, its NATO proxies, the other European states, and Clown World itself. Remember what I said in the previous post about NATO needing to win fast? That’s why Rand wants to pull a Vietnam/Afghanistan, call it a win, and get the US military out of Eastern Europe as quickly as possible.

The Andrew Anglin committee has correctly assessed the situation.

Here’s the deal: everyone understands that Russia is only a power capable of competing with the US because it is backed by a much larger and much wealthier country called “China.” Russia needs their economy to survive. India wouldn’t be standing up to the US, nor would Saudi or any of the other former allies pushing back, if they weren’t getting cover from China.

The think tanks were all pushing for China to be the target of the next US war.

However, Pentagon people said Russia is much weaker, so they went with that. Now it’s a boondoggle. The West is destroying its economy, they are alienating the whole world, and they’re accomplishing what exactly? Russia can keep fighting indefinitely. It’s not costing them anything…

The US can’t possibly open up the China front while the Ukraine is ongoing, and time is on China’s side over there.

This is why RAND is mad.

However, wars do not take place in a vacuum and they have a way of creating a new reality that is unforeseen even by the architects of the best-laid warplans. There is no reason for Russia to let NATO and the US military off the hook just because it suits RAND, and there is absolutely zero chance that Xi Xinping and the extremely astute Chinese warplanners are going to be blind to the advantages of making sure that the first front stays active until the second one is opened by one of the two parties concerned.

Remember, the failure of a plan doesn’t mean it never existed, it simply means it didn’t work.

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