Tag: war

The loosening grip of empire

Fred Reed explains why the Empire needs a war:

The United States is not in danger. The Empire is. This is not good. Empires, the Soviet Union notwithstanding, seldom go quietly. Either Washington gambles on war of some sort against Russia, or Russia and China, in the desperate hope of reversing things, or the Empire gets slowly eaten. Or not so slowly. Once one country pries itself loose, many may rush for the door.

New York may go for calculated war against Russia–say, cyberwar expected not to turn into shooting war, shooting war in Syria not expected to turn into global shooting war, global shooting war not expected to turn into nuclear war. This will be a crapshoot. Note that America has badly misguessed the outcomes of every war since Korea.

This is why the American election actually matters, unusual in Presidential contests. It is Blowhard against Corruption, a swell choice, but Trump is firmly against war with Russia, and Hillary for. Her military understanding is that of a fried egg.

The woman is both a fool and a knave but, it seems, Trump has talked trash, and therefore she will likely be President. Weirdly, the future of the world depends on how an excited electorate of political middle-schoolers responds to one candidate’s dirty talk. From a curmudgeon’s point of view, it is pretty funny. It is funnier if one lives outside of the radiation footprint.

But back to business. The seaboard Axis of Evil needs a war because almost every tide runs against it. Proximately, the Axis has pushed China, Russia, and Iran together against the Empire. (First rule of empire: Do not let the dissidents unite.) Many signs suggest that the world, or much of it, is beginning to see China as its future. The BRICS, the SCO, the NDB, the AAIB–all exclude the US. China becomes the major trading partner of country after country. The twilight deepens.

I find it very difficult to believe that the Imperial USA is dumb enough to directly start a war with either Russia or China. But I don’t find it at all difficult to believe that they are foolish enough to expand the current wars-by-proxy and risk a disproportionate response by one or more of the enemies they have unnecessarily provoked.

A Hillary presidency doesn’t expressly guarantee war, but it does make it the obvious probability. This is something the NeverTrumpers clearly never considered before they struck their epically stupid poses. Hillary is a servant of Empire. Trump is an opponent, which, of course, is why he is so often lumped in with Vladimir Putin.

Missing: US air supremacy

With the addition of their small naval force, Russians are creating a you-can-fly-but-you-probably-shouldn’t zone over Syria.

The combined capabilities of the Russian naval task force and the S-300/S-400 missiles deployed in Syria give the Russians a world-class air-defense capability. If needed the Russians could even throw in A-50 AWACs from Russia protected by MiG-31BMs. What most observers do not realize that is that SA-N-6 “Grumble” which forms the core of the air defenses of the Peter the Great is a S-300FM, the modernized naval variant of the S-300. It is also capable of the amazing Mach 6 speed, has 150km range, an added infrared terminal capability, a track-via-missile guidance system which allows it to engage ballistic missiles and an altitude envelope of 27,000m. And, guess what – the Peter the Great has 48 such missiles (in 20 launchers), roughly the equivalent of 12 S-300 batteries (assuming 4 launchers per battery).

One of the major weaknesses of the Russian deployment in Syria has been the relative low number of missiles the Russians could fire at any one time. The US/NATO could simply saturate Russian defenses with large numbers of missiles. Frankly, they can still do it, but this has now become much, much harder.

Can the Russians now stop a US attack on Syria?

Probably not.

But they can make it much harder and dramatically less effective.

First, as soon as the Americans fire, the Russians will see it and they will warn the Syrian and Russian armed forces. Since the Russians will be able to track every US missile, they will be able to pass on the data to all the air defense crews who will be ready by the time the missiles arrive. Furthermore, once the missiles get close, the Russians will be able to shoot down a lot of them, making it necessary for the Americans to conduct battle damage assessment from space and then re-strike the same targets many times over.

Second, stealth or no stealth, I don’t believe that the USN or the USAF will risk flying into Russian controlled airspace or, if it does, this will be a short-lived experiment. I believe that the Russian presence in Syria will make any attack on Syria a “missile only” attack. Unless the Americans take down the Russian air defenses, which they could only if they want to start WWIII, US aircraft will have to stay outside the Syrian skies. And that means that the Russians have basically created their own no-fly zone over Syria and a US no-fly zone is now impossible to achieve.

This marks the first time that the USA has lost air supremacy in an active conflict in decades. It is yet another sign of a crumbling empire with declining military power. The danger of a Hillary presidency is that she is likely to make the mistake of past crumbling empires in military decline, which is to fail to recognize the significance of that decline, and, through overconfidence, order military action that will lead to defeat.

Neither the US military nor the USA itself is what it was in the 1980s. It is no longer the nation nor the country that won the Cold War. Donald Trump recognizes this, hence his call to Make America Great Again, which is another way of saying Make the USA American Again.

What are they going to do, invade?

Perhaps Theresa May will succeed where Napoleon and Hitler failed:

Britain is sending hundreds of soldiers and hardware to Russia’s borders as part of a huge military deployment. A total of 800 troops, drones and tanks are moving to Estonia next spring, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said.

The move is part of the biggest military build up of NATO troops on Russia’s borders since the Cold War.

Mr Fallon said the deployment of the battalion, supported by French and Danish troops, will start from May 2017.

800 whole troops. It raises an obvious question: if Britain invaded Russia in 2017, would the Russians even notice?

After all, the British are being invaded by more migrants from the Calais jungle alone than that. Perhaps the British are thinking that if they tell the Russians their soldiers are refugees, Putin will surrender.

A vote for Hillary

Is a vote for World War III. Literally.

On Syria’s civil war, Trump said Clinton could drag the United States into a world war with a more aggressive posture toward resolving the conflict.

Clinton has called for the establishment of a no-fly zone and “safe zones” on the ground to protect non-combatants. Some analysts fear that protecting those zones could bring the United States into direct conflict with Russian fighter jets.

“What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria,” said Trump as he dined on fried eggs and sausage at his Trump National Doral golf resort. “You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton.

“You’re not fighting Syria any more, you’re fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right? Russia is a nuclear country, but a country where the nukes work as opposed to other countries that talk,” he said.

It’s good to see Donald Trump pointing out that Hillary will, indubitably, order the US armed forces into war with Russia. However, the real issue isn’t the proxy war in Syria, but rather, the provocative encroachments in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

The reason Hillary will start WWIII is because she will try to expand NATO to cover Ukraine, which Russia simply will not permit.

“He has opened the doors to the demons of Hell”

Why anyone would still pay any attention to an Obama-voting moron like Walter Russell Mead is well beyond me:

President Obama’s faltering foreign policy has taken another serious hit. It is hard to think of another American president whose foreign policy initiatives failed as badly or as widely as Obama’s. The reconciliation with the Sunni world? The reset with Russia? Stabilizing the Middle East by tilting toward Iran? The Libya invasion? The Syria abstention? The ‘pivot to Asia’ was supposed to be the centerpiece of Obama’s global strategy; instead the waning months of the Obama administration have seen an important U.S. ally pivot toward China in the most public and humiliating way possible.
Duterte clearly thinks that humiliating Obama in this way is a solid career move. He certainly believes that China will support him against the critics at home and abroad who will wring their hands over his shift. He presumably has had some assurances from his Chinese hosts that if he commits his cause to them, they will back him to the hilt.

This points to a broader problem: Obama’s tortuous efforts to balance a commitment to human rights and the niceties of American liberal ideology with a strong policy in defense of basic American security interests have made the world less safe for both human rights and for American security. As the revisionist powers (Russia, China, and Iran) gain ground, foreign leaders feel less and less need to pay attention to American sermons about human rights and the rule of law. Death squads and extra-judicial executions on a large scale: the Americans will lecture you but China will still be your friend. Barrel bombing hospitals in Aleppo? The Russians won’t just back you; they will help you to do it. Obama’s foreign policy is making the world safer for people who despise and trample on the very values that Obama hoped his presidency would advance. His lack of strategic insight and his inability to grasp the dynamics of world power politics have opened the door to a new generation of authoritarian figures in alliance with hostile great powers.

Unintentionally, and with the best of intentions, he has opened the doors to the demons of Hell, and the darkest forces in the human spirit have much greater scope and much more power today than they did when he took the oath of office back in 2009.

Unintentionally? With the best of intentions? Is Mead talking about Obama or himself? Remember, as Mead excoriates Obama’s foreign policy, that he not only voted for Obama, but voted to re-elect him. But it’s not as if Obama’s foreign policy was any better from 2008 to 2012 than it has been from 2012 to 2016.

Moreover, the man quite obviously has learned nothing from his past mistakes. Juxtapose these two phrases from the same article.

  • “Secretary Clinton is well aware of just how damaging the Filipino defection is in Asia; she helped develop the Obama administration’s Asia strategy.”
  • “Should Secretary Clinton make it to the White House, her first and biggest job will be to stop and then reverse the deterioration in America’s global position that her predecessor permitted.”

So, Mead not only voted – twice – for the man who permitted the deterioration in America’s global position, but now advocates voting for the woman who helped develop that failed strategy.

Either Mead is incredibly stupid, or, as with Obama, we need to question whether he serves those very demons to whom the doors of Hell have been opened.

If there is not a Trumpslide on November 8th, there is a very good chance that the USA will find itself at war with a Russo-Chinese alliance. And that is a war that a USA saddled with the incompetent and unwell Hillary Clinton as Commander-in-Chief will almost certainly lose.

White flight in Germany

As the migrants urge them on:

“We refugees… are fed up with the angry citizens (Wutbürger). They insult and agitate like crazy…. There are always these incitements by unemployed racists (Wutbürgern), who spend all their time on the Internet and wait until an article about refugees appears on the Internet. Then it starts with shameless comments….

“Hello, you unemployed angry citizens (Wutbürger) on the Internet. How educated are you? How long will you continue to distort the truth? Do you not know that you are spreading lies every day? What would you have done if you were in their shoes? Well, you would have run away!

“We refugees… do not want to live in the same country with you. You can, and I think you should, leave Germany. And please take Saxony and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) with you.

“Germany does not fit you, why do you live here? Why do you not go to another country? If this is your country, dear angry citizens (Wutbürger), then behave normal. Otherwise you can simply flee from Germany and look for a new home. Go to America to Donald Trump, he will love you very much. We are sick of you!”

Soon there will be nowhere for people of European descent to flee. Then the fighting will begin. One interesting thing about all this, from my perspective, is to note that my tribe historically put up considerably more of a fight than Americans or Germans have to date. And by “considerably”, I mean, wiped out all of the settlers. They ultimately lost, but at least they went down fighting.

Thus far, whites in both the USA and Europe have demonstrated that they would much rather flee their homes or die than fight for their own survival or fight for the survival of their nation. That is why they have lost the opening round of World War III, which is very different in nature than anyone was suspecting. In fairness, virtually none of them realized that a war had begun. Most still don’t realize it.

To quote Martin van Creveld, one of the planet’s greatest military minds, from his essay “War and Migration”, which appeared in There Will Be War Vol. X:

War and migration have always been closely related. The relationship was recorded as early as 1300 BC, when we are informed the Israelites followed Moses out of Egypt to embark upon the enterprise that ultimately led them to the Promised Land of Canaan. As you will no doubt recall, they promptly conquered it. And since that time, for over 3,315 years, the link between war and the large-scale movement of people from one place to another has never been broken….

At some times, war and migration were essentially the same, as in the great migration of peoples during the first few centuries after Christ, the Arab expansion after 632 AD, the Magyar invasion of Europe, the Mongol invasions of China, and the movements of many African tribes from one part of the continent to another. At other times, the relationships between the two phenomena were more complicated, such as ethnic cleansings that rendered war unnecessary or took place after war’s end, mass avoidance of conscription, or soldiers bringing home concubines and war brides. All these various forms have often intermingled, all appear regularly in the annals of human history, and all will doubtless continue to do so in the future. The only thing that changes is their relative importance at any given point in time.

The “proposition nation” devotees have much for which to answer. They served as the intellectual beachhead that permitted this mass invasion to proceed without resistance. It should be obvious, now that the lie that being a “German” or an “Englishman” is also a proposition has been broadly broadcast to the masses, that the claim of the “American” nation being intrinsically propositional was always entirely false.

But don’t despair. Things always look grim for the defenders in the early days. The Europeans, on both continents, have, quite literally, not yet begun to fight.

4GW in Syria

It’s not hard to see why the “Syrian rebels” are losing so badly to the Syrian government forces. Guess who has more support from the Syrian people. Applying the principles of 4GW, it should be obvious that Assad is going to win, because despite being an Alawite, he is still Syrian. The so-called rebels no more represent the Syrian people than the US military for whom they are a proxy do, which is why the usual rules about 4GW insurgencies don’t apply to them. They’re invaders, not insurgents.

USA contemplates WWIII

It may not sound that way. At least, not yet. But keep in mind the Pentagon’s doctrine concerning cyberwarfare announced in 2011.

The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

The Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country’s military.

In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” said a military official.

Now consider yesterday’s announcement concerning the Obama administration’s desire to launch a cyberattack on Russia:

The Obama administration is contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

Current and former officials with direct knowledge of the situation say the CIA has been asked to deliver options to the White House for a wide-ranging “clandestine” cyber operation designed to harass and “embarrass” the Kremlin leadership.

The sources did not elaborate on the exact measures the CIA was considering, but said the agency had already begun opening cyber doors, selecting targets and making other preparations for an operation.

So, by the USA’s own logic:

  1. Cyberwarfare is an act of war.
  2. Acts of war can legitimately be responded to by traditional military force.
  3. The Obama administration is considering cyberattacks on Russia.
  4. If Russia responds to those cyberattacks with traditional military force, its response will be legitimate.
Translation: the neocons are trying to launch a war with Russia in revenge for Putin bringing the oligarchs to heel and threatening the increasing instability of the US Imperium. They won a Pyrrhic victory in Ukraine, they’re losing badly in Syria, and now they’re desperate to reverse a trend that has the potential to build into an avalanche.

Fortunately, as the article reveals, more sober and experienced CIA hands are dubious about the idea. Personally, I doubt the Obama administration will do anything at all before January, because Obama doesn’t want to do anything but play out the string before hitting the links and the lucrative speech circuit.

And in his position, isn’t that exactly what you would do?

Game Theory and Putin’s Gamble

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you are Vladimir Putin. Consider the following facts and assumptions:

  • Hillary Clinton appears increasingly likely to win the presidential election.
  • Hillary Clinton is a member of the globalist elite and is heavily influenced by Wall Street, the Saudis, and the neocons.
  • Hillary Clinton has a little girl’s conception of military action. “We came, we saw, he died.”
  • Hillary Clinton has always shown a tendency to overcompensate to prove how tough and ruthless she is.
  • Hillary Clinton doesn’t negotiate, she dictates.
  • Donald Trump is not a member of the globalist elite.
  • Donald Trump has openly expressed his desire to avoid war with Russia.
  • Donald Trump prides himself on negotiation, not confrontation.
  • The USA is already engaged in a war-by-proxy with Russia in Syria.
  • The globalist elite is already waging economic war on Russia.
  • Ukraine is not a member of NATO

You don’t want Ukraine. You don’t want war with the USA. You prefer to have an opponent like Donald Trump with whom you know you can negotiate to an enemy like Hillary Clinton with whom you cannot. Now consider the following possibilities:

  • The neocons are actively pushing for war with Russia in order to force Assad out of Syria
  • Ukraine will join NATO under a Hillary administration.
  • Wall Street needs some sort of major global event to pop the current asset bubble.

Also, Russia has made it very clear that they will never accept Ukraine in NATO, but the US has blatantly ignored every Russian warning and instead engaged in a series of provocative steps in Ukraine, in the Baltics, and in Poland.

If you were Vladimir Putin and you expect that a Hillary Clinton administration will make war with the USA inevitable, would it not logically make sense to start the conflict while there is still a chance to totally transform the shape of the US election? Right now, Trump is in trouble because the media is relentlessly away pounding on a few remarks about women from more than a decade ago and the public awareness of the war-by-proxy between Russia and the USA is totally nonexistent.

But if Russia invades Ukraine, takes Kiev, and scares the pants off the Baltics, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe alike, that will completely transform the election picture. For all her bellicosity, no one can take Hillary Clinton seriously as a war president, particularly anyone in the military after Benghazi.

So, are there any signs that Putin might be in a position to invade Ukraine on short notice?

  • “As many as 40,000 Russian troops are massing on the country’s border with Ukraine – prompting fears of a new military invasion. Among the units deployed to the area are armoured vehicles, tanks and fighter jets.” (August 2016)
  • “Russia has amassed some 100,000 soldiers in occupied Crimea and Donbas as well as along the eastern border with Ukraine.” (October 2016)
  • “Russian state officials and government workers were told to bring back their children studying abroad immediately, even if means cutting their education short and not waiting until the end of the school year.”
  • “Amid escalating U.S.-Russia tensions, the Russian military said Tuesday it will co-operate with China on efforts to fend off a threat posed by the U.S. missile defence program.”
  • “At the end of last week, Latvia identified several Russian planes near its borders: Su-24 tactical bombers, Su-27 multipurpose fighters and an An-26 military transport plane. Russia also conducts military drills near Latvian land border. Two airborne divisions – 76th and 98th – take part in joint exercises with elements of full-fledged combat activities.”

Now, I’m not predicting Russia is going to invade Ukraine. I’m not in any contact with anyone on the ground or in Russian circles.. I am merely observing that logic suggests Putin should invade Ukraine before the US election if it seems likely to him that Hillary is going to win it. The third debate is October 20th. Barring Donald Trump turning things between now and then, which looks increasingly unlikely given the 24-7 media assault, logic would dictate that a Russian invasion of Ukraine will begin the weekend after next, most likely on the morning of October 23rd.

I don’t know whether Putin will dare to roll the dice on such a potentially dangerous gamble, particularly because it is clear that Russia doesn’t want Ukraine. But with the neocons relentlessly pressing for war with Russia, the Russian president would be better off starting a regional war now in the hopes of avoiding a global one than holding off and having it forced upon him in one or two years time. And aside from Duerte, Vladimir Putin is the one world leader who might have the steel to think through the logic and grasp the adder.