Tag: war

The Old Guard Sees NATO’s Defeat

When the Special Military Operation began, both Messrs. Lind and van Creveld were inclined to viewing it as a Russian mistake. However, unlike NATO’s military strategists, both of the old lions are still capable of changing their minds on the basis of the facts on the ground, as William S. Lind’s recent commentary on the situation demonstrates:

Kiev’s defeat need not shatter world peace. But NATO’s response to defeat in Ukraine may do so. Panic is already showing its head in Paris, where French President Macron is suggesting NATO might send in troops to fight Russia directly. Berlin says no, but the traffic-light coalition government is weak and can be pushed around. London is in a belligerent mood and Warsaw is always eager to launch a cavalry charge against Russian tanks. The decisive voice will be Washington’s. That is not good news, because the Dead Inca has no idea what he’s doing and his advisors will be terrified of the charge of “losing Ukraine” in an election year. Can NATO just swallow hard and say, “We lost?” If not, the alternative is escalation in a war against nuclear power.

In Gaza, Israel has destroyed itself at the moral level of war, which is what states usually do against non-state opponents. Martin van Creveld’s “power of weakness” is triumphing again. Hamas will emerge from the war physically diminished but not destroyed, while most of the world sees it as “the good guys” because the massacres on October 7 have been overshadowed by Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Hamas will rebuild quickly, and not only in Gaza. Recruits and money will flow to it in a veritable Niagara.

The threat of a wider war lies to Israel’s north, not its south. While Hezbollah’s operations have been restrained, they have nonetheless driven 80,000 Israelis from their homes, along with tens of thousands of Lebanese who have fled Israeli airstrikes. The latter don’t matter strategically, but the former do because Netanyahu needs their votes. As always, he will put himself above his country’s interests. That suggests he is likely to launch a ground invasion of Lebanon, which Hezbollah apparently is anticipating and ready for. Hezbollah is much stronger than Hamas, and recent events suggest Iran will also be forced to get involved directly.

On a philosophical, but not-unrelated note, Martin van Creveld provides some important advice:

– Prepare to change your mind when new evidence arrives. As has been said, too often it is not old opinions that die; it is those who hold them, still clinging to their antiquated views, who do. This is not a fate you want for yourself and for your work.

It’s remarkable that both of these great military historians can still accomplish, in their eighties, what so few of their successors have been able to do.

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D-Day, 80 Years Later

It just lands a lot differently than it did even 20 years ago. What, exactly, are we supposed to be celebrating these days? Clown World didn’t even preserve democracy or the rule of law.

But at least our grandfathers paid the price to bring them freedom…

German police search 70 homes of people who posted hateful comments online.

Never mind.

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The War in the North

Despite having failed to finish off Hamas, Israel is seriously contemplating launching a war with Hezbollah, which Simplicius expects will have serious ramifications for Ukraine:

A biblical red glow torments the skies of northern Israel, which now burns with a Zionist’s zeal for Palestinian land, after a series of Hezbollah strikes. The gods of war are smiling favorably on the coming summer, as flashpoints all across the globe heat up. And the mother of all of them threatens to engulf the region in even more flame with the announcement that Israel could launch the long-awaited war against Hezbollah by mid-June, with rumor claiming the Knesset may vote to take action as early as tonight.

This happens to convolve with a host of other ponderous developments, which include Russia’s slow buildup for a large-scale escalation in the north. If Israel truly kicks off another massive war to its own north, it could be the final nail in Ukraine’s coffin.

Recall that in a short 4 months, we will have reached the 1 year anniversary of Israel’s invasion of Gaza and its meandering war against Hamas. If in almost a full year of fighting, Israel can make no real headway against the comparatively tiny Hamas, how long would it take for them to tame Hezbollah in what can only be expected to be a far more ‘high intensity’ conflict?

You can be sure that every available Western munition—particularly of the artillery variety—will be routed to Israel and Ukraine will be historically screwed at the key moment of Russia’s largest scale maneuvers. It would be the ultimate irony should Ukraine fall as consequence of Israel’s actions—but alas, Zelensky and Netanyahu appear locked into parallel fates: both require the continuation of war to survive their political crises.

And the big question remains: when will China – or in its delusions of military supremacy, the USA – elect to open the Asian front.

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Magical Thinking and the Impotence of Mammon

The self-appointed gods of Clown World are having trouble understanding the difference between power and influence, and that no amount of influence – which is what money always and ultimately amounts to – is an effective substitute for actual material power:

We come back to the question of why anybody believed $60 billion could move the needle for Kiev’s cause in the first place. But this question is, alas, difficult to answer because policymaking in Washington is enshrouded under a thick fog that consists of two dominant components: magical thinking and political imperatives. For those who earnestly believed that $60 billion would turn the tide of the war, it is more of the former; for those aligning themselves with the political winds and pretending to support Ukraine much as a mime pretends to be trapped in a phone booth, it is the latter. In many cases it is both, and it is difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends.

Magical thinking is a recognizable symptom of that particular moment in time when an erstwhile great power is in decline but events have not quite yet forced it to come to grips with that decline. It is also a time of diminished scope for action. In times past, perhaps Washington would have solved a crisis such as Ukraine through crafty diplomacy or orchestrated a formidable proxy war with its industrial might and military expertise. But the US now seems incapable of sophisticated diplomacy and its industrial base has badly atrophied through decades of offshoring and financialization. After mostly fighting insurgencies in recent times, it now has no idea how to fight a peer war. About all that it can muster is aid bills with large dollar figures. If all you have is a hammer, the old saying goes, every problem looks like a nail. If all you have left is a printing press for dollars, then every problem must be solvable by an infusion of money – even if it’s not entirely clear what that money can buy.

But here we have stumbled onto something interesting: a belief in the omnipotence of money. Perhaps not a sincere belief; are there any sincere beliefs in Washington? Let’s think of it more as an ingrained pattern of thought for confronting a wide range of problems. In that sense, it is a framework suspiciously reminiscent of the approach used to combat financial crises. It doesn’t seem like so much of a stretch to imagine the entire Ukraine aid discussion framed as something that has become very familiar in recent years: a financial bailout.

A too-big-to-fail financial institution called Ukraine is teetering on the edge of failure and a bailout is needed. Although the bank is far away from the heart of Wall Street, there are fears of contagion – if this one fails, others will follow and soon no bank anywhere will be safe. The bank’s owners may be crooks, but that is not what is preoccupying policymakers. They are nervous about a spread that has suddenly moved against the bank: it is supposed to trade at 1:1 but has blown out to 1:10 (the ratio of artillery fire by Ukrainian and Russian forces). Shoving a $60-billion bailout into the bank should at least put out the fires and calm markets.

Zoltan Poszar, the legendary former Credit Suisse chief strategist who needs no introduction in finance circles, made a fascinating observation on the topic of the reflexive response of throwing money at a problem. Poszar was speaking narrowly about how a certain group of people approach a certain problem and was not talking about policymaking, much less Ukraine, but his conclusion traces the contours of something deeper.

When the specter of inflation reemerged in 2021, Poszar made the rounds of portfolio managers and, after talking with them, reached an interesting conclusion: nobody knew how to think about inflation. Nearly everyone on Wall Street is too young to remember the last serious bout of inflation, which occurred way back in the 1980s. So, according to Poszar, they all thought of the spike in the inflation charts as just another spread that blew out on their Bloomberg screens that could be solved by throwing balance sheet at it – a “crisis of basis” as he calls it. The formative experiences for today’s denizens of Wall Street, Poszar explains, are the Asian financial crisis of 1998, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, some spread blowouts since 2015, and the pandemic. In all of these cases, money was pumped in and eventually the dislocations disappeared.

To put this in plain English, Poszar’s clients hadn’t encountered a problem that couldn’t be solved – or at least swept under the rug – by simply adding money, in whatever form, whether via an emergency loan or quantitative easing. This is of course a bit of an oversimplification, but it captures something of the essence of the prevailing pattern of thought.

The seeds of failure are sown by the blooming flowers of success. The current generation of clowns have literally never encountered a problem that could not be solved by throwing money at it. All of their theoretical and practical knowledge points to the same solution: more money.

This is why the rise of the BRICSIA alternative to the USD, the CRIPS alternative to SWIFT, and the Belt and Road alternative to the IMF loansharks are potential death blows to Clown World. They have, in three fell swoops, essentially disarmed Clown World by taking its only weapon out of the equation.

I strongly suspect the fine hand of Wang Hunin in this long-term strategic approach.

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Russia is Playing Black

But I’m not entirely sure that Clown World is even playing chess. It looks a lot more like checkers to me.

In the conversation between Russia and the United States, a certain readable language has emerged that can be read and understood. The sequence of steps and actions is this language: everything has a clear meaning. This makes it possible to understand what both sides are trying to achieve and to state that such a language of gestures is still readable and that the situation has not collapsed into chaos.

Thus, we see a clear desire on the part of the West to drive Russia into an escalation algorithm favorable to NATO. This is a protracted war of attrition against our country, waged exclusively with conventional weapons, for which NATO has the potential for quantitative and/or qualitative advantage. Even in those weapons where Russia has a predominance, NATO is trying to compensate for the situation with the combined use of other means of attack.

Russia is signaling that it sees this scenario and is conducting TNW deployment exercises, albeit without loading warheads. This is a warning that there is a counter-scenario and that the West will not be able to impose its war plan.

The West immediately responds with strikes on Russian missile warning system (MWS) radar stations near Armavir and Orenburg, with a simultaneous attack on an antenna in Crimea, also used for this purpose. So far, this is only a demonstration. But the West has outlined the trajectories of future strikes and made it clear that it is capable of attacking Russia’s SPRN in a combined and serial manner, if Russia develops the topic of TNWs, rather than continuing the war according to the NATO plan by conventional means, where the West expects to realize its resource advantage.

At the same time, Russia is being given to understand that the West sees the problem of manning the AFU and is preparing to introduce contingents of NATO countries into Ukraine. NATO intends to block Russian intentions to block this build-up with TNWs by denoting its ability to blind our Strategic Nuclear Forces. This, according to the West, should force Russia to give up its strong trump card and accept an ultimatum in the fall, the text of which will be approved in Switzerland in June.

At the same time, the West is conducting exercises to launch nuclear attacks near our borders. The pressure on the Russian leadership is exerted on all fronts, in combination. Preparedness for nuclear attacks, counting on internal instability, demonstrating readiness to expand escalation without restrictions – this is the language the West is now using with Russia. The goal is to convince the Russian leadership that it is impossible to inflict unacceptable damage on the West and surrender.

Before us is a chess game where Russia is playing Black. Her strategy is built in relation to White’s strategy. The opening is over, the exchange phase (middlegame) has begun. White shows that he is ready to throw pieces off the board and move to a fight. Black shows that it will cost White a lot.

The strategy of the West is a penned hunt, the strategy of Russia is a hunt for the hunter. These strategies are 200 years old, they are constant and are now being repeated. The West understands only real answers, it will not stop until it has tried everything. Russia will have to respond in kind. It’s about where Ukraine’s borders will be drawn and how the new balance of power in Europe will be formed.

What I find so astonishingly bizarre about the mainstream coverage of the Ukraine situation is the way in which it is always discussed in complete isolation from everything else going on in WWIII. Yes, it’s true that Russia might well struggle if forced to face the combined might of Clown World alone – which is the USA, the UK, the EU, and Japan – but Russia is not alone! Russia is very far from alone, being more closely allied to China than Japan or any of the European satrapies are to the USA.

Defense Minister Minoru Kihara conveyed Tokyo’s “serious concern” about Beijing’s increased military activity near Japan during talks with his Chinese counterpart Dong Jun on Saturday, while both agreed to maintain bilateral dialogue, according to the Japanese Defense Ministry. In their first meeting held on the sidelines of the annual Asia Security Summit in Singapore, known as the Shangri-La Dialogue, Kihara said there are “many security concerns” for the two Asian nations, such as a territorial row in the East China Sea and increased joint military activities by Beijing and Russia around Japan.

Only the UK is tied to the USA by more than threats and political corruption, and both the combined demographics and industrial capacity of the BRICSIA alliance far surpasses that of Clown World. Indeed, I think that the event the Chinese are waiting for prior to their next major move, whatever that may be, is either a) a NATO attack on Russia or b) a massive Russian offensive aimed at knocking Kiev out of the war.

Remember, for all its careful harboring of its resources in the current Special Military Operation, the 20th Century Russians specialized in the Zhukovian art of unexpectedly delivering overwhelming force on a scale larger than anything the West has ever known.

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Taiwan in Three Weeks

I am VERY dubious for a number of reasons, beginning with the interpretation. But then, I was also wrong about the Russian SMO kicking off in February 2022; I didn’t realize Putin was going to actually follow through.

Chinese State TV declaring today that China will reclaim Taiwan, likely in early June. It has begun preparing the Chinese public for coming war and possible political sanctions and isolation!! According to Chinese defense ministry sources, the Chinese army will launch an attack on Taiwan in early June.

Time will tell. I don’t think the threats about the Three Gorges Dam matter very much, though. In fact, if Taiwan is actually threatening the dam, that makes a forced reunification more likely rather than less. And the Chinese military has clearly stepped up the pressure since the recent election of the new pro-independence President.

The just-concluded large-scale joint exercise conducted by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has shocked “Taiwan independence” secessionist forces, with a pilot of the island’s air force reportedly admitting that “the air force will eventually collapse.”

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Will NATO Go All In?

Ukraine has been defeated. And NATO has been defeated in Ukraine. The proxy war is essentially over. The question now is if Clown World will accept defeat and all the consequences it entails, or whether it will provoke a direct war with Russia:

Ukraine is at a crossroads and a potential breaking point. The political situation has hit rock bottom, with Zelensky’s authority and legitimacy quickly unspooling; the manpower issue is reportedly very bad and is not being addressed by the newly announced mobilization; and on top of all that, Russia appears on the brink of opening up another in a series of new fronts that could bring the AFU to the brink by stretching the lines like never before.

Here’s where the ominous signs begin.

There are increasing signals that the covert plan from the globalist controllers is to get Ukraine to leave Russia with no choice but to escalate drastically and bring NATO in some form, whether limited or not, into the fight. Ex-British MP Andrew Bridgen stated that this is the real reason why Rishi Sunak has called an early election—he refuses to be a ‘war time president’.

My perception is that cooler heads will ultimately prevail, simply because both the Middle East front and the Asian front are more important to Clown World if it prioritizes its survival rather than its continued global rule. But there is no guarantee that the longer-sighted parties will make the decisions, and indeed, there is a case to be made by the nationalist side that a conclusive global war might be preferable to putting things off until World War IV.

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Did Clown World Go 1 for 2

The President of Iran is confirmed to have been killed in a helicopter crash:

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was killed after a helicopter carrying him and other officials crashed in the mountainous northwest reaches of Iran on Sunday.

Raisi, 63, was confirmed dead by Iranian media today along with Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian, Governor of Eastern Azerbaijan province Malek Rahmati and Tabriz’s Friday prayer Imam Mohammad Ali Alehashem.

Two pilots and three other Iranian officials and security guards also perished in the crash.

Now, we don’t know that the crash wasn’t simply an accident. Helicopters are the second-most-dangerous form of air travel after those weird Ospreys that the U.S. Marines insist on trying to use. But the death of a high-ranking national leader coming so soon after the failed assassination of the Slovak Prime Minister looks more than a little suspicious.

A lot of people are assuming that Israel was responsible, but it’s premature to try assigning any responsibility at this point. I, personally, tend to doubt it, especially since Iran has demonstrated its ability to hit precision targets in Israel, so I find it hard to imagine Netanyahu giving any orders that would make him look like a legitimate target for reprisal in the world’s eyes.

If it was an assassination and not an accident, I think it’s much more likely the act of neoclowns not only have long sought an active war between Iran and the USA and also need an excuse to extricate themselves from a losing situation in Ukraine.

That being said, the correct answer may be 1 for 3:

Military leaders of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DR Congo) said they have put down an attempted coup in a dramatic Sunday incident which included a large shootout erupting in the capital of Kinshasa. At least three men have been reported killed, with two being police officers which engaged a team of armed attackers. The third deceased is said to be one of the gunman. A government spokesman has stated “The armed men attacked the Kinshasa residence of Vital Kamerhe, a federal legislator and a candidate for speaker of the National Assembly of DR Congo, but were stopped by his guards.”

“The Honorable Vital Kamerhe and his family are safe and sound,” the spokesman announced on X. The attempted assassination failed, with the “situation under control” – according to the military, but the whole murky incident is raising eyebrows in the West as the army says it has detained some suspects who hold US and Canadian passports.

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Unlocking Antarctica

Somehow, I doubt the coming conflict over Antarctica is actually about the oil that was supposedly just discovered there.

Deep beneath the harsh wasteland of the Antarctic shelf lies a prize hundreds of millions of years in the making. For more than 150 years, wars have been fought for access to oil, the thick, black ooze that the world has come to rely on. Despite the growth of renewable energy in recent years, almost all of the world’s energy, 84% as of 2020, runs on fossil fuels, including oil and gas.

And with the Russian discovery of an estimated 511billion barrels of oil and gas in the Antarctic, the race for Black Gold is on once again, as nations across the world claiming they alone own the land above the fossil fuel reserve, even though a historic treaty prevents anyone from accessing it.

But experts have warned that Russia and China should not be trusted and that the West ought to make preparations to prevent them from getting their hands on it. Russia’s discovery underneath the Antarctic is already starting to spook the West, with the issue being brought up at a Select Committee this week.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that there is something important being concealed from the world down in Antarctica, though whether it is aliens, secret Nazi space bases, or the ice wall around the edge of the Flat Earth, I wouldn’t even begin to hazard an opinion. But whatever it is, it’s big enough that the Narrative needed to suddenly announce the existence of a massive oil discovery in order to explain the incipient conflict over it.

World War III is certainly turning out to be considerably more intriguing than I’d ever imagined.

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The Chinese Know

The recent article in Global Times makes it pretty clear that both the Chinese and the Russians are very well aware of who was responsible for the assassination attempt on the Slovak Prime Minister:

The prime minister is known for his ability to reinvent his political career in the face of major setbacks. Last October, Fico and his Smer-SD party won Slovakia’s parliamentary election after campaigning on a pro-Russian and anti-American message, marking the start of his fourth term as Slovakia’s prime minister. He has consistently advocated for peace between Russia and Ukraine, and promised to stop sending weapons to Ukraine, to block Kiev’s potential NATO membership and to oppose sanctions on Russia. When discussing the situation in Ukraine, he emphasized, “We share the same opinion with China on the impossibility of solving the conflict in Ukraine by military means and we support all meaningful peace plans that will not be phantasmagories but will be based on reality.” This stance positioned him outside the European mainstream. He has become the target of criticism by the opposition party and liberal media.

The assassination attempt against Fico sounds the alarm for increasing political violence in Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin stated, “There can be no justification for this monstrous crime.” The chaos in European politics and society is worthy of serious consideration.

Whereas Ukraine was a proxy battleground between NATO and Russia, it increasingly appears that there will be multiple fronts in the increasingly open war between Clown World and the sovereign nations.

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