Tag: war

The Japanese Know

Japanese corporations are preparing for the Chinese takeover of Taiwan:

Over half of major Japanese firms said they are prepared or are making preparations for a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan amid Beijing’s growing military assertiveness, a Kyodo News survey showed Saturday. Of the 114 companies surveyed between late November and mid-December last year, 53 percent said they had concrete measures in place for a potential Taiwan contingency, including drafting manuals, planning evacuations, and stockpiling inventory. Another 12 percent said they did not have plans but saw the need for consideration, according to the survey, which covered a range of industries and included companies such as Toyota Motor Corp and ANA Holdings Inc.

There are also reports of China building large Mulberry docks of the sort that the US utilized in the invasion of Normandy. Which means I’d better provide my promised analysis of the latest US military simulations before the actual results are in.

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Denmark Turns to Russia

The fake Trump’s bizarre rantings about acquiring Greenland has sufficiently scared the Danes to the point that some of their politicians want to seek Russian assistance in defending their territory.

The Danish parliament is discussing the possibility of asking Russia for help in the event of aggressive actions by the United States towards Greenland. MP from the Socialist People’s Party Karsten Henge expressed confidence in the need for such measures. “In a situation of extreme escalation and tension, we need to take extreme measures and ask Russia for help to solve this problem. I am sure that our request will be heard, because Russia will not allow Greenland to become part of the United States. It is as disadvantageous for Russia as it is for us,” MK.RU reports him as saying. However, Henge did not specify how Russia could protect Greenland from American influence.

All of this talk of North American Union with Canada and Mexico, and acquiring Greenland by finance or by force, is nothing more than Clown World theater. First, I don’t think the short Trump at Mar-al-Lago is the real Donald Trump, he’s the body double being used by Clown World to try to negotiate a deal with the forces behind the real Trump. Second, all of the talk about merging with Canada and Mexico is part of the same NAU-NAFTA madness that was pushed hard by the Bush-Clinton regime before the neocons took control and shifted the US focus toward establishing Greater Israel. It’s a longstanding Clown World project, so either a) Donald Trump has completely betrayed both America and his base or b) the Trump who is advocating it is not the real Donald Trump.

The fact that the media keeps quoting the fake Trump’s absurdities and does so in mostly favorable terms is the best indication, other than the obvious height issue, that he isn’t the real Donald Trump. The whole point of noticing anomalies is that there should not be any anomalies. Nor is the fake Trump alone; in addition to the six Bidens, the “Hillary Clinton” who received a medal from one of the Bidens quite obviously wasn’t the real Hillary; she was too young, too healthy, and insufficiently overweight to be the real individual.

I understand that it’s very hard to accept that everything that is presented to you by the mainstream Narrative is false, but you have to learn to trust the evidence of your eyes. Don’t take my word for it, just take a close look for yourself and pay attention to the details. If every single detail is not correct, then you can be certain that things are not what they are publicly reported to be.

As for what’s actually going on with regards to Greenland, Occam’s Razor suggests that Clown World is trying to establish a bargaining chip that it can trade Putin in order to convince him to accept a deal where Russia establishes a new border that leaves Odessa with Ukraine. It’s not going to work, but it is an original and creative effort to substitute for the fact that Clown World has nothing else to trade because the Kursk invasion failed and Russia has already taken most of what it wanted in the first place.

And if Andrei Martynov is any guide, the Russians will not lift a finger to defend the Danes or anyone else in Europe.

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Big Serge’s 2024 Ukraine Summary

Big Serge is one of the Internet’s best military historians. Here, in one of his characteristically long and detailed analyses, he provides his 2024 summary of the Ukraine conflict and explains how Ukraine is effectively debellized.

2024 actually saw several very important developments which make the coming shape of the war relatively clear. To briefly recapitulate:

  • Russian forces caved in Ukrainian defenses at depth across an entire critical axis of front. After remaining static for years, Ukraine’s position in Southern Donetsk has been obliterated, with Russian forces advancing through an entire belt of fortified positions, pushing the front into Pokrovsk and Kostayantinivka.
  • The main Ukrainian gambit on the ground (the incursion into Kursk) failed spectacularly, with the salient being progressively caved in. An entire grouping of critical mechanized formations wasted much of the year fighting on this unproductive and secondary front, leaving Ukrainian positions in the Donbas increasingly threadbare and bereft of reserves.
  • An attempt by the Ukrainian government to reinvigorate its mobilization program failed, with enlistments quickly trailing off. Decisions to expand the force structure exacerbated the shortage of manpower, and as a result the decay of Ukraine’s frontline brigades has accelerated.
  • Long awaited western upgrades to Ukraine’s strike capabilities failed to defeat Russian momentum, and stocks of ATACMs and Storm Shadows are nearly exhausted. There are now few options remaining to prop up Ukrainian strike capacity, and no prospect of Ukraine gaining dominance in this dimension of the war.

In short, Ukraine is on the path to debellation – defeat through the total exhaustion of its capacity to resist. They are not exactly out of men and vehicles and missiles, but these lines are all pointing downward. A strategic Ukrainian defeat – once unthinkable to the western foreign policy apparatus and commentariat – is now on the table. Quite interestingly, now that Donald Trump is about to return to the White House, it is suddenly acceptable to speak of Ukrainian defeat. Robert Kagan – a stalwart champion of Ukraine if there ever was one – now says the quiet part out loud:

Ukraine will likely lose the war within the next 12 to 18 months. Ukraine will not lose in a nice, negotiated way, with vital territories sacrificed but an independent Ukraine kept alive, sovereign, and protected by Western security guarantees. It faces instead a complete defeat, a loss of sovereignty, and full Russian control.

Indeed.

None of this should be particularly surprising. If anything, it is shocking that my position – that Russia is essentially a very powerful country that was very unlikely to lose a war (which it perceives as existential) right in its own belly – somehow became controversial or fringe. But here we are.

I couldn’t agree more. The position of Clown World, led by the architects of its strategery like Robert Kagan, was always insane, incoherent, and ill-informed. It’s worth noting that the very champions of the ill-advised proxy war, including Kagan, are now offering their advice to Trump on how to best handle what they call “negotiations with Putin” but are actually a very thin veil for the inevitable surrender.

Russia has not only defeated the Ukrainian forces, it has comprehensively defeated the EU and the USA in military, diplomatic, strategic, and economic terms. This isn’t the “pro-Russian” position, it is the objective position, and with the exception of the economic context, it was always and completely obvious from the start. The problem is that even now, the would-be negotiators completely fail to understand Russia, its leadership, it’s people, and its objectives.

They would do well to stop posturing and pontificating, and instead, read War and Peace.

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The Limited Lessons of the Ukraine War

A lot of important lessons are being learned, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “relearned” from the current war in Ukraine. But, as Anarchonomicon observes, a number of the various elements of this war are unique and unlikely to be repeated:

You have the resources of dozens of nations representing over half the world’s economy being poured into a country that can neither win nor negotiate, to fight its similar neighbor that also has to fight it out despite the cost due to the international strategic implications, both of whom are Slavic-white countries who both had strong reserves of nationalism and patriotism and avoided the kind of multi-culti mass-immigration that has zapped the willingness to fight for their country right out of every white man in the west, and because of a series of geostrategic accidents they spontaneously agreed to limit the fighting to stretch of land as narrow as that between the Swiss Border and the English Channel.

That’s a whole lot of conditions that will probably never hold again. Or at least certainly not for the next hundred years given the demographic crises everywhere and the pending death of the nation state.

  • If the smaller state doesn’t have allies who can fund it to the tune 50+% its annual GDP it can’t happen.
  • If either country has endured mass immigration/multiculturalism and doesn’t have an eastern european level paradoxical ultra-nationalism for their decaying shithole country…it can’t happen.
  • If either country isn’t being bribed/backed into a corner to refuse all negotiation, it can’t happen.
  • And if either country would rather just expand the war geographically and not fight an attritional trench war, it can’t happen.

The most important thing to note is that Ukraine is Clown World’s proxy. The entire Empire That Never Ended is fighting Russia, and is in the process of losing the war militarily, economically, and diplomatically. And once Clown World either contracts or collapses entirely, there isn’t a similar force on Earth capable of recreating it.

Which means any lessons about late-stage imperial proxy wars will probably not be relevant for another 200 years.

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“A Legitimate Act”

The Times view on assassination of a general: The targeted killing is a legitimate act of defence by a threatened nation.

How very peculiar! I don’t recall the British newspapers endorsing the IRA assassination of Lord Mountbatten as a legitimate act of defense. But if we’re to take Clown World media seriously, any nation that is threatened is now justified in engaging in state-sponsored targeted killings.

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Regional Power != Global Invincibility

A surprising number of would-be war analysts are putting far too much stock in Russia’s inability to prop up the Syrian regime against the combined assault of US, Israeli, Turkish, and jihadist forces. But Russia and China are both REGIONAL powers; their inability to dictate events in the Middle East, or in Africa, is no different than the inability of the USA to dictate events in Eastern Europe or the Red Sea. The further away from their industrial core where force is generated, the harder it is to deliver a sufficient amount.

But the logistical difficulties in a remote location should never be confused with an inability to generate the force in the first place, as Andrei Martynov illustrates:

Russia is outpacing the arms production of the entire EU after significantly ramping up its defense industry and despite Western sanctions, the bloc’s commissioner for defense and space, Andrius Kubilius, has said. Kubilius, a noted Russia hawk and two-time prime minister of Lithuania, was approved by the European Parliament last month as the EU’s first ever defense commissioner. In an interview on Friday with the RND media group, he called on the EU to significantly expand the production of conventional weapons such as artillery and infantry vehicles, as well as long-range and precision weapons amid what he called a Russian attack threat. “The Russians have expanded their arms industry to an unimaginable extent despite our sanctions,” Kubilius stated. Russia now produces “more weapons in three months than the entire European arms industry can produce, and in six months more weapons than the entire German army has,” he added. Kubilius also cited experts who, according to him, say that Russia now produces more tanks than it uses on the front lines in the Ukraine conflict.

I want to stress, that in the last few years, a very good man, who I will not name, because I respect him, no, he is not my acquaintance–was repeating ad nauseam that Russia “with the economy the size of Spain”. Sadly, there is no such profession as a “good man”, but for most people in the US “intel” community it is worth learning that Russia’s economy is the 4th economy in the world and, possibly, the third. I want to stress that GDP numbers circulating in the “intel” circles are crap invented in the combined West to hide its deindustrialization and financialization of own economies. US industrial base was in steady decline for decades now and realistically, with the exception of automotive industry (granted with huge pure assembly from import parts sector) and aerospace with naval construction… well, that’s about the most important US machine building sectors.

What changed the equation in Syria was the involvement of the Turks and their willingness to help Clown World depose the Assad regime. The Russians quite rightly assessed the situation as hopeless and extricated their forces as well as the Assad family without taking any losses; contrast that with the expense incurred by the futile Us and European attempts to preserve Ukraine and its Clown World regime. But Erdogan has long been open about his dream of rebuilding the Ottoman empire, and Syria is part of that former Ottoman territory.

A deluge of new evidence shows Turkey slowly fortifying its position as future hegemon of the region. As soon as Damascus fell, the director of the MIT—Turkey’s CIA equivalent—Ibrahim Kalin was spotted visiting Jolani, touring Damascus, as well as paying homage to the ancient Umayyad mosque. Several videos showed Jolani acting as personal chauffeur to Kalin, driving him around Damascus with an armed escort. Think about that: Jolani as personal driver to the head of Turkey’s top intelligence agency—that’s not to mention that Kalin was senior personal advisor to Erdogan and is member of his AK Party. So, Erdogan’s personal henchman is already shadowing Jolani, whispering in his ear—what can that mean? And what does that say about rumors that HTS had long ago cut ties with Turkey, with the same going for SNA/FSA/TFSA?

This is why Israel has already invaded southern Syria. In my estimation, Turkey poses a much more significant long-term military threat than Iran ever has, although I wouldn’t assume that Turkey won’t eventually ally with Iran against Israel when the Israeli-Turkish war eventually begins.

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Clown World Declares a Winner

Foreign Affairs declares Türkiye and Erdogan to be the winners of the sudden Syrian collapse:

In most capitals across the Middle East, the news of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s fall sparked immense anxiety. Ankara is not one of them. Rather than worrying about Syria’s prospects after more than a decade of conflict, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees opportunity in a post-Assad future. His optimism is well founded: out of all the region’s major players, Ankara has the strongest channels of communication and history of working with the Islamist group now in charge in Damascus, positioning it to reap the benefits of the Assad regime’s demise.

Chief among the rebel forces that ended Assad’s rule on Sunday is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Muslim group that was previously affiliated with al Qaeda and is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the United Nations. Despite those designations, Turkey has provided indirect assistance to HTS. The Turkish military presence in the northwestern Syrian town of Idlib largely shielded the group from attacks by Syrian government forces, allowing it to run the province undisturbed for years. Turkey managed the flow of international aid into HTS-run areas, which increased the group’s legitimacy among locals. Trade across the Turkish border has provided HTS economic support, too.

All this has given Turkey influence over HTS. In October, Erdogan quashed plans for a rebel offensive in Aleppo; when rebel forces launched their campaign late last month, they likely did so with Erdogan’s approval. For years, Assad had been dragging his feet as Erdogan sought to mend ties with Damascus and repatriate the millions of Syrian refugees whose presence in Turkey undermined support for his ruling party. With Assad’s regional allies weakened by the Israeli campaign in Gaza and Lebanon, and Russia distracted in Ukraine, Erdogan saw an opportunity to force the Syrian leader to the table.

The rebels’ whirlwind success came as a surprise. Now, Assad is out of the picture altogether, and Erdogan is getting ready to cash in on his years-long investment in the Syrian opposition. Iran and Russia—Turkey’s main rivals in Syria—are chastened; a friendly government could soon be set up in Damascus, ready to welcome back refugees; and Assad’s departure could even open a window for remaining U.S. troops to leave, fulfilling a long-sought goal of Ankara’s. If it can avoid the potential dangers ahead, Turkey could end up a clear winner in Syria’s civil war.

Obviously Israel is one of the immediate winners; the Lebensraum advocates are already grabbing Syrian territory in the name of “self-defense”. But I’m not certain that convincing the rest of the world that any accommodation with the USA is impossible is likely to benefit the Netanhayu regime in the intermediate term.

Also, at some point, the Turkish desire for an Ottoman revival and Israeli dreams of a Greater Israeli Empire are bound to collide. And the numbers would appear to favor the Turks.

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Five Lessons for Russia

Simplicius contemplates the lessons to be learned from the collapse of Syria and cites five lessons that the Russians should take from it.

FIVE LESSONS FOR RUSSIA

Doom and gloom are somewhat appropriate, but it is more important to think about the future now. What does the fall of Syria tell us?

  1. False Peace is Death. A bad faith ceasefire is a recipe for disaster and after Minsk and Astana should never be repeated. False peace is worse than war, because false peace means you still have to fight the war later, but at a disadvantage. No green busses or green corridors for the enemy, no deescalation zones, no freezing of any lines. The enemy has to be defeated completely: victory is a prerequisite for mercy. Until that is achieved, no ceasefires, only death under FABs.
  2. Collapse is always sudden. The Assad regime resisted NATO-Israeli aggression for 13 years. And then it fell in a week. Mistakes, systemic errors and structural attrition accumulate until a critical mass is reached, and at that point the smallest impact will bring down the entire house of cards. Likewise, our current enemy in the main theater will resist stubbornly, until he will not be able to anymore, and then we will see Big Arrows. All our efforts should be focused on damaging the enemy’s war-waging capabilities to reach that critical point.
  3. Infantry is King. A single full-sized, dependable Russian infantry brigade (or a Ukrainian one, for that matter) would have been able to defeat the Jihadi advance for good. They were completely overstretched and to a large degree their offensive was a bluff that only worked because the SAA didn’t even try to resist, they just ran. We had our own experience with a lack of infantry in the SMO — it led to the Kharkov oblast debacle in fall ’22. No matter what anyone says, no matter what technological advances there are, the infantry unit was and remains the central actor of history, upon which all else depends.
  4. Empire is secondary to the Nation. There was a loud public debate among patriotic circles in Russia when the intervention in Syria began in 2015. Personally, I was opposed to the intervention because it seemed absurd to me to send Russian men to die in a foreign desert while Russian people are suffering under the yoke of Banderite occupation just across the border. We were told by Kremlin propagandists that “Palmyra is a symbol for all mankind” and the Donbass is just, eh, the Donbass. Whatever. Now, Jihadi dogs will get to loot and destroy all that archaeological treasure of all mankind, and we have to fight for the Donbass, anyway. Was it worth it? I have always been staunchly pro-Assad, but a single square mile of Russian land in Novorossiya means more to me than the entire Middle East. A nation should have its priorities in order.
  5. You can’t change nature. Some peoples and countries are just unreliable. They will never have stable polities unless compelled by overwhelming force or foreign occupation. They will never build working institutions on their own. You can’t just offer them a comprehensive reform package and then shrug when they refuse to implement it. They will always be shitty client states if you work with them within a civilized framework. We know how to work around local particularities in other parts of the world, so we should let Middle East policy also be guided by this knowledge. They are not Warsaw Era-pact allies you can let do things on their own.

The most important lesson, of course, is to stop trusting to agreements with the agreement-incapable. The second-most important lesson is to recognize that every state and entity controlled by Clown World is agreement-incapable.

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Why Russia Quit on Syria

Andrei Martyanov’s citation of a Russian journalist helps explain why the Russians finally stopped protecting the Assad regime in Syria:

I do not feel sorry for the Syrian authorities. I remember too well how, back in 2012, we, Russian journalists, were “squeezed” at border control, with all our luggage turned inside out, and our cameras and photo cameras confiscated. Then they hounded us around the offices of various ministries, putting us through an unsolvable puzzle of obtaining various papers and permits. And Western reporters were practically carried around in their arms, trying to demonstrate their liberal views against the backdrop of the uprising in Daraa. These are not my personal grievances. This, among other things, was an expression of their attitude towards my country. Condescending, with rolled eyes and a disdainfully raised upper lip. Then we saved Syria in 2013, if anyone doesn’t remember. Obama was going to cover it with carpet bombing after the chemical provocation in Eastern Ghouta. And thanks to the efforts of Russian diplomacy, the catastrophe was averted. Postponed, as it turns out now. In 2015, we came to Assad’s aid again when the terrorists were five kilometers from the center of Damascus. And as best we could, we patched up this patchwork quilt, consisting of various religious, social, forbidden and not so forbidden pieces, between which contradictions grew.

Now Israel and Turkey will divide up whatever parts of the country ISIS-HTS are not allowed to keep. It appears the US military is already bombing their jihadist proxy army; one wonders how it is going to respond to the Turkish invasion of Kurdistan.

I would also keep an eye out for similarly sudden events in Ukraine; Martyanov and others believe Russia dropping its support for the Assad regime was traded for US dropping its support for the Kiev regime and that this was not necessarily the win for Clown World that it appears to be.

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Clown World Takes Syria

In an effective demonstration of its global influence, Clown World’s jihadist proxies managed to take Syria in less than two weeks.

Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS) jihadists and other anti-government militias entered Damascus on Saturday, taking control over the Syrian capital. Flight data websites show that President Bashar Assad’s plane has left the city. Syrian Prime Minister Mohammad al-Jalali has already offered cooperation “with any leadership chosen by the people,” also claiming that he remains in his home.

HTS, a group led by a former Al-Qaeda commander and previously known as Jabhat al-Nusra, launched a surprise offensive from the opposition-held province of Idlib in northern Syria just last week. Jihadists have already driven the Syrian Army from the cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Al-Qusayr at the border with Lebanon.

Other opposition and militant groups operating in Syria also seized several parts of the country. The US-sponsored Free Syrian Army (FSA) has taken control of the ancient site of Palmyra, while the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) also backed by the US have seized Deir ez-Zor.

This is a reminder of Moshe Dayan’s explanation of Israel’s military success: they fight Arabs. Russia didn’t offer much assistance; as Andrei Martyanov pointed out, there is no point in assisting those who will not fight for themselves, a lesson that Americans and Europeans should keep in mind as they meekly submit to the invasion of their various countries.

This is obviously an attempt to secure a bargaining chip in the aftermath of the failure of the Kursk invasion, and Russia’s inaction makes sense in light of its attempt to avoid the full-blown hot war with the West that Clown World is seeking to ignite prior to January 20th. Even so, it is a moderately astonishing shuffle of the deck that no one was expecting.

It also shows the unpredictability of the Turks, who were seemingly cozying up to BRICS and moving away from NATO, but apparently whatever price they were demanding for their cooperation was finally deemed worth paying. Presumably they will be rewarded with the Syrian territory they have been craving in order to completely control Kurdistan, as part of what is described as “a devil’s bargain”.

A truly seismic change in the Middle East appears to be happening very fast. At its heart is a devil’s bargain – Turkey and the Gulf States accept the annihilation of the Palestinian nation and creation of a Greater Israel, in return for the annihilation of the Shia minorities of Syria and Lebanon and the imposition of Salafism across the Eastern Arab world.

This sort of thing is why it is totally pointless to attempt to predict geopolitics. There are always additional factors and variables that one does not know to enter into the equation.

UPDATE: The Russians have confirmed a) Assad has been deposed and b) Russia is maintaining its military bases in Syria.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has confirmed that Bashar Assad has stepped down as Syrian president and left the country following negotiations with armed opposition groups after the fall of Damascus to Islamist forces. In a statement issued on Telegram on Sunday afternoon, officials clarified that Moscow was not involved in the talks but acknowledged Assad’s decision to transfer power “peacefully.” “Russian military bases in Syria are on high alert. At present, there is no serious threat to their security,” the statement read.

In the unlikely event that you haven’t understood that WWIII began in February 2022, the conquest of Syria should make it clear that this is, indeed, the case.

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