Tag: war

Time is Running Out on NATO

Tom Luongo explains why it’s time for the USA to extricate itself from NATO and let it collapse:

NATO cannot and should not survive these stresses if its intended victims, Russia/China/Iran, fight even remotely competently. And they are. They all understand that this is a race against a political and economic clock in the West that is quickly counting down to zero. All Russia has to do is keep grinding out territorial gains in Ukraine, Iran to not over-react to Israel’s provocations, and China to ignore the yapping over tariffs and Taiwan.

And all the Americans who are tired of this have to do is keep the money spigot to NATO and Ukraine closed off as much as is politically possible. The cost/benefit analysis for the US, especially in an election year, just doesn’t add up. And there is zero real leverage Europe can apply to the US other than through their bought and paid-for politicos in D.C. for more money.

The heart simply isn’t willing anymore. Why? For all the reasons I’ve been talking about for six years here, the memories of WWII are fading. The generations of Americans imprinted with the post-WWII Pax Americana lie are dying off (Boomers) or no longer care, if they ever did (Gen X).

The Millennials and ‘Zoomers’ aren’t invested in this mythology. They know their heads are on the chopping block. They can see that none of this is in their best interests.

As we’ve seen in the growing number and intensity of provocations, Clown World is desperate to escalate to direct conflict because it is being systematically defeated by the unrestricted warfare that its opponents are patiently waging against it. Just as Russia is not responding to the terrorist attacks on its civilian population and Iran is not responding to the Israeli attacks on its consulate, China is not going to take the bait on Taiwan.

They have no need to take the risk of engaging in military operations even though they have sound reason to assume that they could comprehensively defeat NATO and the remnants of SEATO; all war involves some degree of risk and there simply isn’t any need to accept any risk when time is quite clearly working in their favor.

Once Ukraine collapses, Clown World will be forced to stop its provocations and focus on retaining as many of its former satrapies and captive allies as it can. And it’s at that point that I expect the diplomatic efforts on the part of the BRICSIA nations to begin in earnest, and we’ll start seeing nations like Hungary, Serbia, Vietnam, and perhaps even Japan and Mexico turning against their current masters.

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Signs of Impending Demise

Neither the Chinese nor other Asians appear to be much impressed with NATO’s attempt to transform itself into the Global Atlantic-Pacific Treaty Organization in this interview of John Pang, a former Malaysian government official and a senior research fellow at Perak Academy, Malaysia, by Global Times.

GT: Western politicians like to say that NATO is “stronger than ever.” How would you describe the 75-year-old NATO?

Pang: I think NATO sounds more threatening and incoherent than ever. If that’s what they mean by “strong,” I guess they’re right in that respect. But it is also showing real signs of impending demise.

It is well past its shelf date. It was formed in the 1940s in response to the Soviet bloc, before the Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact was created as a defense treaty against NATO. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, NATO should have disbanded too. Instead it took on a new, expansionary role in securing US global supremacy. It is an aggressive, overextended organization adrift from its founding aims and attached now to the fantastical aim of “making the world safe for democracy,” that is to say, to attacking whoever the US deems the enemy of the day.

Devoid of its charter purpose, it’s been an organization in search of enemies and increased defense procurement. It’s made Russia, once again, the enemy. It has overextended itself on this venture in a way that has blighted Europe’s future and threatens its own survival. It now frames China, on the other side of the planet, as the security challenge. That’s where it is after 75 years.

GT: Reports say that the US government is making arrangements for trilateral talks with the leaders of Japan and South Korea in July at the NATO summit in Washington. What do you think that means? 

Pang: This will complete the consolidation of the worldwide set of US vassals, outposts and 800 military bases under NATO, Quad, AUKUS and this trilateral pact into a streamlined global threat posture also known as the West. There have even been moves to make Israel part of a Quad Plus, along with New Zealand. 

Meanwhile, we have Europe as an example of what “Natofied’ Japan and South Korea can look forward to: further loss vassalization not just in foreign policy but also in trade and industrial policy, technology, media and, crucially, culture, since post 1991 NATO is motivated by an expansionary liberalism that thrives on the destruction of cultural boundaries as much as national borders.

GT: What do you think of the prospect of “NATO’s Asia-Pacificization” or the establishment of an “Asian NATO”?

Pang: This is another one of those announcements that will go down in history like President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better World, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, and other grand ideas for bifurcating the world that lead nowhere.

The biggest of them is, of course, the Rules-Based Order, whose moral, legal and political legitimacy is now absolutely collapsed. It will go down in history identified with its signature achievement, the genocidal destruction of Gaza.

Its purpose is to threaten, but it’s also empty. What is NATO anymore, as an aggressive pact, far from Europe? What is the military capability of this set of countries beyond the US? What is brought to the existing issues in East Asia, around the South China Sea, for example, by having this set of 32 nations participate, who are collectively outclassed by Russian military industrial capability in Ukraine? Having set Europe on fire with its aggressive enlargement, they propose to bring their formula to Asia, against a far more powerful opponent. It’s an imbecile proposition.

Wherever possible, Asian NATO should be ignored or bypassed by the countries in the region. Their presence in the region would be so incoherent that it’s not clear what there is to engage with. NATO is a treaty organization for the North Atlantic, a noticeable distance away. They are militarily irrelevant here. We get the spectacle of the German and Dutch navies sailing into the region to sabre-rattle, and have symbolic exercises with the Japanese, for example, and perhaps next with the Philippines.

This entertains the Western elite for a couple days with an appearance of a grand alliance of the “democracies” against China, at a time when, as their citizens will tell you, actual democracy has been hollowed out by oligarchic rule at home. They aim to encircle and divide but have nothing to encircle or divide with. They will add nothing but a layer of live action Euro role playing on top of the existing, and material, US threat posture.

Instead, NATO in Asia is really about what the US and its military industrial complex will do to its own members. In its expanded form, it will tighten the US’ extractive grip on Europe and Japan and South Korea more than it threatens China. It will mandate purchases of US military equipment and more money from member states, especially that standby piggy bank, Japan. It will de-industrialize Japan as it has Germany, in favor of the US. It will demand more political and cultural conformity, further militarize Japan and South Korea, and alienate them from the economic and cultural vitality of their home region.

Europe, Japan and South Korea can say goodbye to any notion of strategic, political, economic or cultural autonomy. Remember that this is happening while actual freedom is breaking out among sovereign nations in the multipolar world of an expanding BRICS.

It’s hard to believe that either the Europeans, the Japanese, or the Koreans genuinely want to be a part of a rapidly declining and increasingly impoverished Clown World, but it’s not as if they’re being offered a genuine choice by what has been transformed into the military arm of the imperial USA.

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The Inevitability of Catastrophic Defeat

Edward Luttwalk doesn’t seem to grasp that NATO will be defeated even faster, and more catastrophically, than its Ukrainian proxies were. Because it won’t be a restrained special military operation limited to the front, but rather full-blown war.

NATO nations can only forestall an inevitable loss to Russian forces in Ukraine by deploying their troops to the former Soviet republic, a former adviser to the US military has claimed.

“The arithmetic of this is inescapable: NATO countries will soon have to send soldiers to Ukraine, or else accept catastrophic defeat,” military strategist Edward Luttwak wrote in an oped published on Thursday by the British online media outlet UnHerd. “The British and French, along with the Nordic countries, are already quietly preparing to send troops – both small elite units and logistics and support personnel – who can remain far from the front.”

The conflict can’t be won without direct troop deployments because regardless of the quantity and quality of weapons sent to Kiev, Ukrainian forces are too outnumbered by the Russians, Luttwak argued.

These older military strategists simply don’t understand the ways in which technology has changed the operational and logistical elements. Any NATO troops entering Ukraine will be very nearly as vulnerable “far from the front” as they are on the front itself, especially since Russia will be free to fully utilize its air superiority, the first consequences of which have only recently begun to make themselves felt.

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Doubling Down Again

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that Ukraine will eventually join NATO as support for the country remains “rock solid” among member states. “Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership,” Blinken told reporters in Brussels.

If Ukraine will become a member of NATO, Russia has no reason to stop the war until Ukraine no longer exists as a sovereign state. Perhaps that’s the goal. Or perhaps this is simply what hubris looks like before nemesis appears.

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Looking for a Way Out

Both the USA and Ukraine are desperately trying to find a way to surrender to Russia in a manner that will be permitted by its Clown World puppeteers. One trial balloon was floated last month in The American Spectator:

How does the Ukraine-Russia war end? In an October surprise. Ukraine, which became independent on 24 August 1991, will be dissolved and a New Ukraine will come into being by virtue of a unilateral declaration by the present Government of Ukraine, with the support of the military high command. The de jure boundaries of New Ukraine will reflect and be co-terminus with the territory currently under the de facto administrative control of the present Government of Ukraine. New Ukraine will be compact; cohesive and well-integrated politically, economically, and socially (i.e., ethnically, linguistically, and culturally); and will have demonstrably defensible borders. Accordingly, New Ukraine will have the strategic autonomy to decouple from Russia’s sphere of influence without joining economic and military blocs such as the EU and NATO.

Simply put, from a realpolitik perspective, Russia has achieved its necessary and sufficient vital national security objectives with respect to its southwestern flank by virtue of the earlier takeover and annexation of Crimea and the strategically vital naval base of Sevastopol in March 2014, and the subsequent annexation (September 2022) and conquest (over the February 2022 – May 2023 period) of portions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk provinces to form a robust cordon sanitaire to protect Crimea. (READ MORE from Samir Tata: Coca-Cola Faces a Challenge in Its China Market)

Moreover, per the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Russian economy grew by 3 percent in 2023 and is expected to grow by 2.6 and 1.1 percent in 2024 and 2025 respectively, which is comparable to U.S. growth rates over the same period and far better than the economic performance of Germany. The challenge for Russia is to safeguard its hard-won national security gains and have the strategic patience to allow the Government of Ukraine to recognize that pursuing the military path is a dead end.

Clearly, what matters from Russia’s perspective is “which Ukraine” would fall outside the penumbra of the sphere of influence of the Russian Federation. As suggested by Vladimir Putin in his seminal speech in 2008 at NATO’s Summit in Bucharest, Ukraine as it was then constituted would break apart if there was a serious attempt to accept the invitation to join the military alliance. As Putin pointed out in the same speech, the core territories of western Ukraine were carved out of Poland and incorporated into an expanded Ukraine in 1939. Eastern Ukraine (Crimea and the strategically vital portions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk provinces) is now under de facto Russian control. A unilateral declaration of a downsized New Ukraine is unlikely to encounter a Russian objection.

An ‘October Surprise’ From ‘New’ Ukraine Is Possible, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, 3 March 2024

This is, of course, absurd. It’s literally the USA’s point of view, which is based on the US military’s need to concentrate on a single front; note that the USA is also attempting to negotiate a surrender to the Yemenese forces that have defeated the US Navy’s attempt to take control of the Red Sea.

The suggestion that the Russians will stop and accept nothing more than what they have already taken by force is obviously only an opening offer; Odessa and its port will obviously be a non-negotiable demand and NATO membership of a militarized “downsized New Ukraine” is an obvious non-starter.

As always, the fundamental flaw can be seen in the false assumptions revealed in the description of the situation. The current war is not just between Russia and Ukraine, or even Russia and NATO, it is between Russia and the masters of Clown World. And those satanic masters apparently believe that if Ukraine falls, they will fall with it. So, they are going to try to fight to the very last European and the very last American in order to save themselves, but neither the Europeans nor the Americans have shown any willingness to fight for Ukraine let alone them.

Furthermore, as Simplicius notes in his April 3rd Sitrep, Ukraine probably doesn’t have until October to make a serious offer of surrender before the Russians are in possession of more than the US trial balloon purports to give them.

Things continue to feel like a calm before the approaching storm. There is not too much overt activity in the battle space, but various rumblings of a large looming escalation continue to trickle through the grape vine. In a recent article I had mentioned how the Western press and elite commentariat for the first time began using the taboo ‘C’ word, i.e. “Collapse”, for Ukraine. Now this has opened up the floodgates, causing more and more worried publications to begin turning off their previous holding-the-line narrative filter and actually start describing the Ukrainian situation with truthful urgency. The U.S. has already emptied almost its entire store of usable surplus mainline weaponry for Ukraine, i.e. tanks, artillery, light armor—not counting things like ammo… even if the $60B were to pass, U.S. has little of actual value to send to Ukraine beyond small arms munitions and things of that nature. There are no more surplus Bradleys left, and none can be built as the factory closed down decades ago.

This highlights the essential danger for a nation accepting foreign rule. Once in control, a foreign elite will unhesitatingly destroy the entire nation over which it rules in order to save itself from the negative consequences of its own actions.

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A Warning to Taipei

It appears geoweaponry has been unleashed on Taiwan amidst rumors that the island province is working steadily toward a reunification agreement with the mainland.

A major earthquake struck Taiwan during the morning rush hour on Wednesday, collapsing buildings and triggering tsunami warnings in Japan and the Philippines. At least seven people were reported dead, officials said. More than 700 were missing, The Associated Press reported.

The quake hit near the eastern city of Hualien at 7:58am local time (2358 GMT) and had a magnitude of 7.4, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, making it the strongest quake to hit since 1999. The depth was about 35 kilometers (22 miles), which is considered shallow. Taiwan’s earthquake monitoring agency gave the magnitude as 7.2.

Strong shaking was felt in Taipei, the capital, some 100 miles away, with aftershocks continued for roughly two hours. And there were reports in China that people as far away as Shanghai, about 500 miles to the north, could feel the earthquake.

According to Taiwan media, the last earthquake of a magnitude 7 or greater to hit the island was the Sept. 21, 1999, “Jiji” earthquake that measured 7.3, which destroyed thousands of buildings and killed more than 2,400 people.

Sure, it could be a coincidence that this happened as US troops are being stationed on Taiwan, Japan and Vietnam are being pressed to join some new form of SEATO, and the US has largely prioritized its conflict with China over the current war in Ukraine.

But there are no coincidences and we know that geothermal weapons exist. This is no more an act of nature than the recent Maui and Texas fires were, or than a tidal wave that just happened to hit Manhattan would be one.

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This is not Self-Defense

The IDF murdered seven aid workers yesterday, three of whom were British special forces veterans, in three targeted drone strikes.

Late on Monday night three cars from the World Central Kitchen pulled out of the organisation’s warehouse in Gaza to distribute aid to Palestinians. Each vehicle was clearly marked as working for the humanitarian organisation, followed an IDF-approved route and had GPS trackers and SOS beacons broadcasting their positions.

But despite taking every precaution, the seven brave volunteers inside the cars were being watched – and were soon deemed hostile targets and eliminated.

Among the doomed passengers were former Royal Marine James Henderson, 33; former SBS soldier John Chapman, 57; as well as a British military veteran named last night by the BBC as James Kirby.

the IDF unit responsible for securing the area ordered UAV operators to attack one of the vehicles shortly before midnight.

It deployed a precision R9X Hellfire missile which smashed into one of the armoured cars. Passengers were seen scrambling from the wreckage and jumping into the other two vehicles.

They informed authorities monitoring their movements that they had been hit and sped off.

After travelling just 900 metres the Hermes 450 fired once more. The second armoured car was hit, leaving just the soft-skinned 4×4 remaining. Surviving passengers loaded the wounded into the final vehicle and pulled away.

But having made it 1.5km further along the coastal road the UAV fired for a third time – blasting the remaining vehicle to bits.

And then, as part of their diplomatic strategy to win friends and influence people, they bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria.

This isn’t self-defense. These attacks are not even taking place in Israel. No wonder Netanyahu is whining about how the whole world now hates Israel. Because it’s rapidly becoming impossible for any sane or impartial individual to not despise what the Israeli government and the Israeli military are doing.

Many wicked people were once victimized themselves. But having been a victim does not justify victimizing others.

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Spengler and the Clowns in the Bunker

David Goldman, the Asia Times columnist formerly known as Spengler, was invited to an elite conclave of Clown Worlders to discuss the current state of their war with Russia. And if he is to be believed, there is no Plan B for Clown World:

Somewhere last weekend a few dozen former Cabinet members, senior military officers, academics and think tank analysts met to evaluate the world military situation. I can say that I haven’t been so scared since the fall of 1983, when I was a junior contract researcher doing odd jobs for then Special Assistant to the President Norman A Bailey at the National Security Council…

Russia’s economic resilience in the face of supposedly devastating sanctions is only one reflection of a great transformation of world trade. China’s exports to the Global South doubled during the past three years and China now exports more to the South than to developed markets. China’s unprecedented exporting success, in turn, stems from the rapid automation of Chinese industry, which now installs more industrial robots per year than the rest of the world combined.

This is evident, I added, in China’s newfound dominance in the world automotive market but it also has critical military implications. China claims that it has automated plants that can make 1,000 cruise missiles a day—not impossible given that it can manufacture 1,000 EVs a day, or thousands of 5G base stations.

The implication is that China can produce the equivalent of America’s inventory of 4,000 cruise missiles in a week while American defense contractors take years to assemble them by hand.

No one disputed the data I presented. And no one believed that Russia is taking 25,000 casualties a month. Facts weren’t the issue: The assembled dignitaries, a representative sampling of the foreign policy establishment’s intellectual and executive leadership, simply couldn’t imagine a world in which America no longer gave the orders.

They are accustomed to running things and they will gamble the world away to keep their position.

Success always plants the seeds of failure. The current set of Clown Worlders are the third generation in the West, and like every third-generation heir, they are well along the generational pattern of build-crusie-lose that so often produces the rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story so witnessed in once-successful families over time. The current elite no longer understands the differences between the situation they face and the historical challenges surmounted by their predecessors, and they are trying to use the same tactics and techniques that worked for their predecessors in a different time and on a very different set of people.

What we’re witnessing on a grand scale across the West is no different than watching the founder’s grandson resolutely steering the family company onto the rocks even as his siblings, wives, and children blithely spend away the family’s resources in imitation of the second-generation’s unproductive champagne lifestyles. Not only do they have no idea how to go about succeeding, but they can’t imagine failure, not even when it is simultaneously staring them in the face and biting them in the behind.

No wonder Spengler is terrified. The comeuppance for the corrupt clowns who destroyed the wealthiest and most successful societies in human history is almost certainly going to be one for the history books.

UPDATE: The Europeans are finally beginning to figure out that the clowns have abandoned them and they are on their own. But they obviously aren’t smart enough to accept defeat, give up their pretensions, and negotiate a settlement with Russia while they can still get very reasonable terms.

Washington has sent a clear message to European NATO members that they can no longer rely on its military protection, the head of German defense giant Rheinmetall has claimed. For decades, the EU has taken it for granted that the US would come to its rescue in case of war, but “that will no longer happen,” CEO Armin Papperger told The Financial Times. He cited the failure of the US Congress to approve continued military assistance to Ukraine as a signal to Europe that the Americans are not willing to pay for its security.

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They Know They Will Lose

Although many of their pet politicians, corporate executives, and talking heads in the media don’t realize it yet, the top globalists already know that they have already lost WWIII, as Col Douglas Macgregor points out:

This war has become financial as well as military. And the globalists understand that they’re going to lose this war. And what will come of this is that the BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, are going to be increased by 81 additional members. And all of these people are going to go to a currency that is backed by gold.

And once they go to that currency backed by gold, whether it is one currency or a basket of currencies, it doesn’t make any difference. Yes, we are in a lot of trouble. The globalists know that, and it is why they are so desperate right now. And the greatest fear that I have is that when the Russians do attack and it becomes abundantly clear that Ukraine is finished, I mean, it’s already obvious to anybody who visits the place for any length of time. It’s in ruins.

But once that occurs, I fear that there will be pressure to commit US forces in Poland and Romania, along with Polish forces and potentially Romanian ones, to western Ukraine. And if that occurs, the gloves will come off, because truthfully, thus far, Putin has exercised tremendous restraint, tremendous patience. He does not want a war with the West. If he wanted that, we’d already have it. But if we intervene in western Ukraine, it’s over. We’ll be in a full-fledged war.

You know, I think we grossly miscalculated. Putin had made several speeches over the last 20 years, repeatedly saying, please do not advance the border to Russia. Do not try to transform Ukraine into a hostile actor, an actor with hostile intentions towards Russia. What happens in Ukraine is of existential strategic interest to us, just as theoretically, what happens in Mexico is of existential strategic interest to us. Although this administration has decided to ignore it. He expected that we would negotiate, that he would demonstrate that this was serious, and that Russia wanted its population in eastern Ukraine, which is really Russian, to have equal rights before the law. He wanted to end the oppression of the Russians that lived there, and he wasn’t going to surrender Crimea.

The reason he went into Crimea is he was afraid it was going to be turned into a US naval base. Biden said. “Our goal is regime change. Our goal is to get rid of Putin, and our goal is ultimately to divide Russia into constituent parts, then exploit it.” All of his supporters, his staffers, everyone in the globalist camp knows this is the truth. The so-called oligarchs Kolomoisky, Soros and others were all part of this. None of this is news.

Finally, he said, enough’s enough. He stopped. They set up a strategic defense. They ran an economy-of-force mission, and now they have a force in place that can go as far as it needs to go, which includes to the Polish border. They have a plan for 31-month war against us if we insist on fighting it and we are in no shape to fight a war.

We can’t even recruit for the United States Army or the Marines. The Marines are running around trying to recruit illegals and are being encouraged to do so by the administration. Is that what you want in the ground force, to fight for this country? Forget it. It’s not going to work.

The difference between the coming war that concerns Col Macgregor and the special military operation of the last two years is that Russia has been keeping most of its primary military forces in reserve from the start. The reason we haven’t been seeing any of the vast and sweeping combined-arms offensives that were utilized in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and Manchuria in the 20th century is because the air force, the navy, and 600,000 army regulars have been preparing for a successful war against NATO that would probably end with the Russian occupation of the entire continent of Europe.

Which, as Macgregor, Martynov, and every competent observer of the last two years very well knows, is something that neither Putin nor any of the Russian generals want. Both the Russians and their Chinese counterparts have witnessed how empire and the foreign occupations it requires destroyed both British and American societies within decades. Even Israel’s micro-empire in Palestine is now causing tremendous rifts in Israeli society due to the current expansionary efforts.

Fortunately, the US is not very unlikely to intervene directly, because its primary concern is now the Southeast Asian front it is desperately trying to shore up in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam. And while it may try to use the Poles, the French, the Finns, and the Germans as a second proxy force in Ukraine, I expect all of the various attempts in this regard to fail as soon as it becomes impossible for the European media to hide the true state of affairs and the complete imbalance of power that currently prevails on the continent from the voters of the European nations. Fear of the Russians might sway the Poles, the Baltics, and the Finns, but the possibility of war won’t increase support for the current governments anywhere else, most of which are already unpopular due to the migrant invasions.

If there is one thing I have learned while living in Europe for nearly 30 years, it is that Europeans are very nearly as clueless about the USA as Americans are about Europe. Much like the US Boomers, even the Millennial Europeans believe that the USA of today is essentially the same as the USA of the 1950s. That’s why the average Finn and the average Swede are genuinely naive enough to believe that the US military can protect them from the Russians when they might as reasonably rely upon Japan or Botswana to do so.

But it’s pretty clear that Putin and his generals have already concluded that only an actual demonstration of sufficient force will serve to impose a more realistic perspective on the delusional leaders of the erstwhile West, which is why I anticipate more unexpected fireworks and major infrastructural collapses this summer.

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Finland Played for Fools

The Finns are giving up their national sovereignty to Clown World because, despite decades of evidence, they actually believe that the US military is going to defend them against Russia:

The DCA gives the American military access to 15 bases in Finland and allows the deployment of military equipment and supplies on Finnish territory, as well as the free movement of US aircraft, ships, and vehicles. Members of the US military and the facilities they use would also get special legal protections.

When the DCA was signed, Finnish Defense Minister Antti Hakkanen said it was “a guarantee from the world’s largest military power that they will defend us.”

First, the USA is no longer the world’s largest military power except in two categories, sea power and space power, neither of which is sufficient to defend against Russia’s advantages with regards to infantry power, artillery power, air power, or nuclear power.

Second, the Finns should have probably asked the Poles what Britain’s guarantee was worth, or the Vietnamese, the Afghans, or the Iraqis what their US guarantees secured them in the end.

History strongly suggests that what best protects a small country is neutrality combined with a population willing to defend against any encroachments on its sovereignty. The single most dangerous position to assume is permitting a cowardly or corrupt elite inclined toward surrender that chooses a side in a battle between two major powers in the erroneous belief that this will either a) secure their own positions or b) protect the country.

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