Tag: war

Lind > Mitchell + Douhet

William S. Lind was right. Again.

ISIS has almost doubled the land it controls in Syria since the US-led coalition began airstrikes against the extremist group in the summer, a new map has revealed. The extremist group has continued to expand its ‘caliphate’, despite more than 800 airstrikes hitting targets in ISIS-controlled areas since last summer.

The map, created by the Coalition for a Democratic Syria (CDS), shows just how much land has fallen to ISIS – which now has a third of the country under its control. Before the summer, the militants controlled just half that.

Airpower is nothing more than a supporting arm. Sans nukes, it has never succeeded in accomplishing anything on its own. It’s interesting to see that even in combination with non-US ground forces in Iraq, all it has been able to do is prevent ISIS from expanding further.

Even those with zero interest in things military should keep this in mind, because what it means is that any politician threatening air strikes is essentially promising to do nothing. Note that immigrants, who are a form of boots on the ground, are far more dangerous than air strikes.

Rules of war, and the violations therein

Bill Whittle writes a poignant explanation of the challenge facing a 2GW military that finds itself in a 4GW war:

War is hell, and soldiers have to live there. It is an unbearable burden; unbearable in the sense that not a single man and woman who has been fully exposed to war has ever come back home. Someone else comes back home. Sometimes, it is a better person. Sometimes a worse one. But they are different, all changed in the horror and crucible of war.

And so from the beginning of war, there exists between soldiers a bond that cannot be described. There is the obvious connection of a soldier to his comrades, but there is too a strong sense of respect and kinship with the soldier on the other side of No Man’s Land, shivering in cold wet places just the same, under orders and doing his job, too — just wanting to get the thing over with and go home.

Surrender is a mercy in such a place. The idea that certain death may be avoided, that one might be willing to simply give up fighting and still survive, is mercy of the deepest blue. Surrendering enemy soldiers are often greeted with a warmth and understanding that friendly civilians do not receive, for they have shared in the misery and hardship of war in ways that we comfortable and safe civilians can never know.

Surrender, in war, is perhaps the ultimate of Sanctuaries. It is a way out when hope and rescue have fled the field. Honorable surrender has never been treated with shame by any American unit I have ever heard of.

And so, when groups of un-uniformed enemy soldiers waving white flags suddenly drop and open fire on unsuspecting, generous and honorable Americans, then the masters of these men have made a terrible bargain. They have destroyed the Sanctuary of Surrender, and eliminated for their own men a deep and abiding refuge in the nightmare of the battlefield.

They have done this to their own men. Not us. We have known of the brutality of the Iraqi army regarding prisoners from at least as far back as those taken and beaten during the first Gulf War, and as far as improvements over the intervening years, we might perhaps call Jessica Lynch to tell us of any newfound magnanimity on the part of the Ba’athists.

False surrender as a weapon of ambush is an abomination. When it is repeated, it is obvious that is not an aberration; it is policy. It is, like the abandonment of the uniform, a tactic to gain a short-term advantage that leads to long-term hardship and misery for their own troops. It is a Devil’s bargain, and they have had the Devil to pay for it — as have we.

They violate the Sanctuary of the Uniform. They violate the Sanctuary of Surrender. And the most reprehensible of all is the violation of the Sanctuary of Mercy.

What Whittle fails to understand is that the Eastern enemy the Western militaries are engaging have NEVER respected the rules of Westphalian war. As William S. Lind notes, uniforms are an aspect of 1GW order.

As long as Western armies insist on attempting to fight a 4GW war with 2GW tactics, they are going to be at a significant disadvantage, and one that likely outweights their various advantages. When the rules change, the players have to change with the rules.

Note that few, if any, Western armies have ever succeeded in causing an Eastern foe to modify its non-Westphalian tactics in imitation of the Western army.

However, Whittle needs to be corrected about this historically erroneous statement: “Honorable surrender has never been treated with shame by any American unit I have ever heard of.”

One incident of which I am aware is when the 45th Division of the US Army killed between 30 and 50 prisoners of war after the liberation of Dachau. It appears they mistook Hungarian Waffen-SS troops who had retreated to the camp with the SS-Totenkopf guards, not that killing the camp guards would have been acceptable under the principle of Sanctuary anyway.

The incident was buried by Gen. George Patton.

It takes two to tango

But only one party to wage war. This is honest, but remarkably stupid commentary on the current European situation from the Mayor of London:

About 10 years ago, the whole Danish cartoon controversy blew up – and I remember distinctly concluding that I would never have published them in The Spectator, which I edited, not just because they were gratuitously inflammatory, but because I didn’t see how I could justify my decision to the widows and orphans of my staff, in the event of an attack on our offices (and I note that one of the German publications to use the Charlie Hebdo cartoons has just been fire-bombed).

It is essential to admit this element of fear (and several editors have been candid enough to do so), because fear is a very bad and corrosive thing. Fear leads to anger. Fear leads to mistrust. Fear can make you irrational, and in the case of Islamist terrorism, the resulting fear can obviously encourage prejudice and division. Fear leads to hatred – and that is exactly what those terrorists hope to provoke. They want to see anti-Muslim marches of the kind that are now appearing in Germany; they want an anti-Muslim backlash; they want war; and it would be absolutely fatal if we were to allow ourselves to fall for it.

Imagine if, instead of his famous call to “fight them on the beaches”, Winston Churchill had said something like this back in 1940. “Fear leads to hatred and that is exactly what the Nazis hope to provoke. They want to see us sending out warships to guard the Channel. They want an anti-German backlash; they want war and it would be absolutely fatal if we were to allow ourselves to fall for it.”

The astonishing thing is that Boris Johnson knows his history. He and other self-admitted cowards know that Chamberlain was wrong to attempt to appease Hitler, just as FDR was wrong to attempt to appease Stalin, and yet they are making precisely the same mistake by trying to pretend that Islam can be won over if they are sufficiently accommodating.

Everything about the multicultural status quo is a lie. The headline in the Telegraph says: “Paris march of unity: after a minute’s silence the crowd roared ‘We are not afraid!'”

They lie. They are most certainly afraid. They are afraid of the Muslims in their midst, and they are afraid of the nationalist forces that are rising. They are right to be afraid, because it is primarily their fault that the Reconquista 2.0 is now both necessary and inevitable.

Multiculturalism’s last gasp

The march in Paris today is a pathetic and pointless globalist fart in the wind of the resurgent nationalism that will scour Europe in the next decade:

One million people were today preparing to march through the streets of Paris in tribute to the 17 victims of massacre in the city. British Prime Minister David Cameron was one of approximately 40 world leaders scheduled to take part in the solidarity march in the French capital. In a show of support for the French people, Mr Cameron was to stand alongside French President Francois Hollande in sympathy for the victims executed by terrorists….

Security services across the world have reportedly received intelligence that more terror attacks are ‘highly likely’, as a ring of steel was placed around the French capital for today’s march. There are fears that Al Qaeda and Islamic State-linked terror cells will be activated as the city prepares to host the rally this afternoon.

By mid-morning, approximately 2,000 police officers and 1,400 soldiers were deployed across Paris in an atmosphere described by one officer on the scene as ‘extremely tense’. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said ‘exceptional measures’ were being taken to try and prevent further attacks, including deploying snipers on roofs.

This is nothing more than a futile demonstration meant to prop up the failing status quo, which is so fragile that a single jihadist could render it all moot in seconds today. None of this will end until the genie is again returned to the bottle, which is to say, until Islam has been forcibly expelled from the continent for the third time.

The multiculturalist position consists of lies stacked upon more lies. When Angela Merkel claims there is no place for anti-Muslim intolerance, she is attacking more than TWO-THIRDS of the German electorate that is not Muslim. In a November poll by the Bertelsmann Foundation, 61 percent of the German people said: “Islam has no place in the West”.

61 percent is not an outlier. That is the mainstream position. That is the will of the people. That was before PEGIDA, before the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and before the Jewish deli murders. It is probably over 70 percent by now. What there is no place for is traitorous, anti-democratic “leaders” like Merkel, Hollande, Cameron, and the other anti-nationalists who are marching in Paris today.

Islam is not compatible with the West. Islam is literally at war with the West, which is part of the Dar al-Harb, “the House of War”. As Mizanur Rahman has declared, Britain is the enemy of Islam. So is France. So is Germany. So is Italy. So is the United States of America. Samuel Huntington warned of this coming great clash of civilizations back in 1993. Enoch Powell warned of the rivers of blood that would flow if mass immigration from non-European countries was permitted back in 1968.

That long-predicted day has finally arrived. If the situation is not adequately addressed in the next decade, then the Rotherhams and Parises will eventually become Peshawars and Bagas. Now the victims of Islam in the West are numbered in double-digits, eventually they will be numbered in the hundreds and the thousands, if the Reconquista 2.0 does not begin sooner rather than later.

Sooner or later, it will begin. All of this could have been easily prevented, but the Left preached its lies of open borders and immigration and tolerance and diversity, and the people of the West stupidly believed them. Some fools still believe them, although most who claim to do so primarily cling to them out of fear and desperate hope against hope. But prevention is no longer an option. The choice is now between Charlie Hebdo and Charlie Martel.

As for those who claim that we cannot hold all Muslims responsible for the actions of their military wing, I will remind them that the free people of the West had absolutely no problem holding all Germans responsible for the actions of a few National Socialists. I note that the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, has already declared that France is at war with “radical Islam”, even though the vast majority of radical Muslims did not kill anyone in Paris this week.

The fact is that Islam is already at war with the West, regardless of what its “moderate” Fifth Columnists falsely claim. It has always been at war with the West, it simply hasn’t always had the ability to effectively wage that war. But the West gave it that ability and now the people of the West are paying the price through fear, crime, taxes, the loss of liberty, and blood.

“This bloodbath proves that those who laughed at or ignored the fears of so many people about a looming danger of Islamism were wrong,” said Alexander Gauland, a regional leader of AfD, which has its roots in the euro crisis and is currently riding at 25% in nationwide polls, on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. “This gives new weight to Pegida demands.”

In France the leader of the far-right Front National, Marine Le Pen, went further. “We must be in a position to respond to the war that has been declared by Islamist fundamentalism,” she said after a meeting on Friday of party leaders called at the Élysée Palace by the president, François Hollande.

“I regret that word has not been uttered by [Hollande] nor other politicians. The first thing when one is fighting a war is to be able to know what we’re fighting. We’re fighting an ideology, Islamist fundamentalism. Not to say it is a proof of weakness.”

Hultgreen-Curie waits

The RAF foolishly decides to defy Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome:

First woman to command an RAF fast jet squadron named as Wing Commander Nikki Thomas. Wg Cdr Thomas is expected to lead bombing missions over Iraq this summer.  A woman who has become the first to command an RAF fast jet squadron is expected to lead bombing missions over Iraq this summer.

​Wing Commander Nikki Thomas​, who took charge of the newly reformed No 12 Squadron at RAF Marham in Norfolk​ ​on Friday​, flew a daring low mission to help foil a deadly rocket attack on a UK base in Afghanistan. The 36-year-old is a weapons system operator with extensive experience of combat operations, clocking up more than 35 missions in Afghanistan within three months alone. 

One wishes the Wing Commander the best of luck, but let’s face it, the odds are not on her side. It’s a daring move, especially after the first female Royal Navy captain lasted all of three months.

In not entirely unrelated news, the Marines are finding it hard to find a single woman who can pass the officer course:

Two female Marine officers who volunteered to attempt the Corps’ challenging Infantry Officer Course did not proceed beyond the first day of the course, a Marine Corps spokesperson confirms to the Free Beacon. The two were the only female officers attempting the course in the current cycle, which began Thursday in Quantico, Virginia.

With the two most recent drops, there have been 29 attempts by female officers to pass the course since women have been allowed to volunteer, with none making it to graduation. (At least one woman has attempted the course more than once.) Only three female officers have made it beyond the initial day of training, a grueling evaluation known as the Combat Endurance Test, or CET. Male officers also regularly fail to pass the CET, and the overall course has a substantial attrition rate for males.

The Marine Corps spokesperson, Captain Maureen Krebs, told the Free Beacon that the two officers, “did not meet the standards required of them on day one in order to continue on with the course.” Fifteen male officers also did not meet the standards. Of the 118 officers who began the course, 101 proceeded to the second day. 

It’s mildly amusing to see that the reporter feels the need to point out that men have been known to fail the course as well, although at least he’s honest enough to provide the statistics that demonstrate show 13 percent of the male candidates failed CET, compared to 100 percent of the female candidates.

The Marines are under tremendous pressure to water down their standards. One hopes, for the sake of future Marines, they will stand firm nevertheless. And we can be all but certain that if a woman ever does pass the course, she’ll be a strong candidate for Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome.

This is what diversity looks like

As usual, we’re seeing most of the usual suspects telling the usual taqiyya, claiming that murdering people is against Islam, that it’s just a few bad apples, that Christians do it too, that Charlie Hebdo had it coming, and so forth.

They are all lies. Islam is a religion of the sword and has been since its inception.

Christian popes are given names like Pius and Benedictus and Clemens. Islamic caliphs were proud to bear names such as al-Mansur “the victorious”, which the Caliph of Cordoba assumed after his victory at the Battle of Torrevicente in 981. Furthermore, if it is reasonable to hold Christians today responsible for the actions of other Christians during the Crusades nearly one thousand years ago, how is it unreasonable to hold Muslims today responsible for the action of other Muslims yesterday?

As I have repeatedly observed, we are about fifty years into the third great wave of Islamic expansion in the West. It was previously turned back at Tours, and again at Vienna. Given the delusions that still persist among the Western governments and the left side of the West’s electorates, it seems unlikely that the murderous assault on the Charlie Hebdo offices mark the high water mark of the third wave of Islamic aggression.

But the first shots in Reconquista 2.0 have already been fired; they were fired in Norway by Anders Breivik. And that is the terrible point to which multiculturalism and diversity and tolerance has brought the West: the choice between Breivik and Hebdo. Many have embraced the hashtag #JeSuiCharlie, but as Iowahawk wisely noted, never bring a candlelight vigil to a gunfight.

It will, of course, take time for people to understand that there is no third option, that reinforcing not only decades of failure, but irrational ideological dogma, is absolutely and utterly doomed to even more cataclysmic failure. It will take more attacks by the invaders, more innocent deaths, more dead Westerners, before the people throw out their traitorous governments and their ridiculous pleas for “unity” and true national leaderships arise to expel the invaders.

This pattern of Quislingesque behavior on the part of the Western elite is nothing new. A reader, JS, notes:

I’ve been reading Kissinger’s Diplomacy, and noted that in the lead-up
to WW2, many leaders in Europe and England were much more favorably
disposed towards a hostile and rearming Germany than they were to the Right
in their own countries. Like the Left today, their tactic in response to a
challenge was to attempt to cover themselves in ‘moar’ humiliation,
abase themselves even further. According to Kissinger,
they received grand accolades from other world leaders while betraying
their own peoples and increasing the death toll of WW2 by orders of
magnitude by disarming when they should have been attacking Hitler’s
Germany before Germany was prepared for offensive warfare.

Look at the picture above. Look at the terror and helplessness of the French policeman in his last moments. Look at what his surrender and willingness to appease his Muslim killer accomplished. That is what diversity looks like. That is what diversity means.

Then again, in the end, it may be that #JeSuiCharlie will turn out to be an appropriate slogan. After all, there was once another Frenchman named Charlie who was not afraid to confront the Islamic invader, Charlie Martel.

UPDATE: More blessings of diversity in Paris today:

Terrified workers in Paris’s business district were warned not to leave their office after a gunmen was seen outside – just hours after a female police officer was shot dead by a ‘North African wielding an assault rifle’. 

Mailvox: is war in decline?

CED asks about The Remnants of War and the idea that war is in decline:

Are you aware of the book The Remnants of War by John Mueller? It was published back in 2004, with a paperback edition in 2007. The book argues that contrary to popular belief, war is on its way out, and the only people still engaging in it are opportunistic criminals easily scared off by competent, disciplined troops from developed countries.

Its main thrust is that developed countries, which used to get into frequent wars with each other, no longer did due to the harrowing experience of World War I, and that World War II was an aberration caused by Hitler’s personal charisma. The book states that changing cultural attitudes toward organized violence, not trade links or new military technologies like nukes, ended war as a possibility among developed states.

Furthermore, even in undeveloped states, much of the “war” is caused by roving yet cowardly criminal gangs that seek easy targets, not disciplined soldiers or even guerrillas (he emphasizes the Yugoslav wars as Exhibit A) — and that this is the main form of warfare that remains. According to Mueller, this form of war can only be handled by competent native governments with disciplined police and military forces. Once this is done, war, like slavery and dueling before it, will recede as a human institution. A related point he makes is that ethnic conflict need not explode into civil war if there is a competent government in place.

Now, it has been a long time since this book was published. I see a few problems with his thesis:

Chinese saber-rattling. In the South and East China Sea, China has been building up its navy in preparation for a war. This has driven countries like Vietnam closer to the US and forced Japan to begin its own military buildup. Of course, there’s also Taiwan. While Mueller is careful to say that war between disciplined, developed states is still possible, it cuts against another claim he makes — that the Cold War’s losers see the world the same way as the winners and thus don’t want to upset the international order.

Russia’s interference in Ukraine. Russia was the principal loser in the Cold War, and there is very little evidence that they see the world the “same way” as the US and the EU. The interference in the Ukraine, as well as the sanctions imposed in response, to say nothing of Putin’s domestic policies that are at odds with Western promotion of homosexuality and godlessness, show fundamental differences. The only reason there has been no war is because it would inevitably go nuclear.

The Iraq debacle. Take note of when The Remnants of War was published — 2004, a mere one year after the Iraq invasion. Disciplined US troops displaced Saddam’s government and occupied the country, policing it to get rid of opportunistic predators that wanted to profit from the social chaos. Things still looked hopeful for the occupation at the time. Eleven years later, The US has withdrawn and the Islamic State has risen. Either the Muslim fundamentalists have proven more disciplined, or war isn’t declining as much as Mueller would have us believe. In his schema, something like the Islamic State shouldn’t even be possible.

Fourth-generation war. To Mueller, “war” is a battle between disciplined armies for control of a government or territory, or between a government and disciplined guerrilla forces. He waves off notions of 4GW (though he never uses the term) by saying that war has been reduced to its dregs — mere predation by criminal packs in areas without effective governments. To Mueller, what appears to be a “new form of war” is just the death rattle of war, and once those areas could be competently policed, even criminal “war” will disappear. In contrast, William S. Lind says that 4GW is the wave of the future and has been defeating the state wherever it has arisen. This complicates Mueller’s conclusions about the inevitable end of war, though he does mention that a government has to be effective to end war. Lind also says that 4GW comes from a state’s crisis of legitimacy, so maybe both Mueller and Lind are making the same point in a different way.

Anyway, do you have any thoughts on John Mueller’s idea that war is on the decline and soon to disappear as a human institution?

I was not aware of the book, but if CED has fairly represented Mueller’s views, I think his core idea is conventional, outdated, short-sighted, and ahistorical, and temporally biased. There have always been periods of relative peace. During such periods, it is common for the more foolish sort of thinkers to believe that those periods have somehow magically become established as the permanent human norm. Considering that the world has been in one of the longer periods of economic growth, technological advancement, and population growth since 1950, and it should be no surprise that even after 9/11 and the dot com crash, there were still those who thought that this time, it would be different.

I’ve been reading World Order by Henry Kissinger, and it is clear that one reason the global elite is attempting to tighten its grasp these days is because it fears the world declining into the sort of disorder that makes it difficult to milk. But it will fail, order will decline into disorder, and low-grade war will cover most of the planet because the centers of order are no longer homogenous and stable.

The one genuinely mitigating factor is the way in which nuclear weapons tend to prevent the major state militaries from engaging each other. But this too creates problems, as it forces them to fight on the 4GW non-battlefield where their every action tends to foster more of the very disorder they are attempting to destroy.

We are fortunate to have lived in such peaceful times. It is unlikely that our children and our grandchildren will be similarly fortunate. So, my answer is no. War is not in decline. As I wrote in the preface to RIDING THE RED HORSE:

[T]he end of the Pax Americana is rapidly approaching and it is readily apparent to every well-informed observer that War is preparing to mount his steed, and he will soon be once more riding that terrible red horse over the nations of men.

It is no accident that the THERE WILL BE WAR series came to an end in 1989, in harmony with the end of the Cold War. Nor is it an accident that there is an increased interest for military fiction, or that we launched RIDING THE RED HORSE this month.

Henry Kissinger writes in World Order:

In the world of geopolitics, the order established and proclaimed as universal by the Western countries stands at a turning point. Its nostrums are understood globally, but there is no consensus about their application; indeed, concepts such as democracy, human rights, and international law are given such divergent interpretations that warring parties regularly invoke them against each other as battle cries. The system’s rules have been promulgated but have proven ineffective absent active enforcement. The pledge of partnership and community has in some regions been replaced, or at least accompanied, by a harder-edged testing of limits.

A quarter century of political and economic crises perceived as produced, or at least abetted, by Western admonitions and practices—along with imploding regional orders, sectarian bloodbaths, terrorism, and wars ended on terms short of victory—has thrown into question the optimistic assumptions of the immediate post–Cold War era: that the spread of democracy and free markets would automatically create a just, peaceful, and inclusive world.

Translation: don’t count on the end of history. And mark this: “A struggle between regions could be even more debilitating than the struggle between nations has been.”

Female intelligence

 It appears the Female Imperative now takes precedence over national security:

For the past eight months, there has
been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House,
the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a
means of identifying characters in the devastating report
it released last week on the C.I.A.’s abusive interrogation and
detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now
we know one reason why.

The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story
revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of
high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does
not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible
judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs
through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was
given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks;
she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she
misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an
absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely
told congressional overseers that the torture worked.

Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for
the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional
studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church
Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a
painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in
order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable.
Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to
NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former
intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on
background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many
intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail
for what she has done.”

Instead, however, she has
been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently
working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch,
she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was
also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)

This is an example of another reason not to permit women in the military. Women are not considered to be fully accountable in modern American society, and soldiers who are unaccountable to civilian leadership are not desirable in anything that still pretends to be a free society.

The hope for world order

If you’re having trouble seeing things from the globalist perspective and wondering how they can possibly justify their ruthless attacks on national and individual sovereignty, it can be helpful to read their doctrines. Henry Kissinger puts forth his global vision in World Order:

The issue of peace in the Middle East has, in recent years, focused on the highly technical subject of nuclear weapons in Iran. There is no shortcut around the imperative of preventing their appearance. But it is well to recall periods when other seemingly intractable crises in the Middle East were given a new dimension by fortitude and vision.

Between 1967 and 1973, there had been two Arab-Israeli wars, two American military alerts, an invasion of Jordan by Syria, a massive American airlift into a war zone, multiple hijackings of airliners, and the breaking of diplomatic relations with the United States by most Arab countries. Yet it was followed by a peace process that yielded three Egyptian-Israeli agreements (culminating in a peace treaty in 1979); a disengagement agreement with Syria in 1974 (which has lasted four decades, despite the Syrian civil war); the Madrid Conference in 1991, which restarted the peace process; the Oslo agreement between the PLO and Israel in 1993; and a peace treaty between Jordan and Israel in 1994.

These goals were reached because three conditions were met: an active American policy; the thwarting of designs seeking to establish a regional order by imposing universalist principles through violence; and the emergence of leaders with a vision of peace…. Once again, doctrines of violent intimidation challenge the hopes for world order. But when they are thwarted—and nothing less will do—there may come a moment similar to what led to the breakthroughs recounted here, when vision overcame reality.

Kissinger is a clear and lucid writer. His historical knowledge is deep and impressive. But he makes no case for his vision, he simply assumes the reader will share it; and it is easy to understand why America finds itself caught up in a convoluted web of international intrigue given the political influence of the author. The arrogance and hypocrisy in that open tacit claim that “nothing less will do” than the imposition of universalist principles through violence by leaders with a vision of peace is astonishing. And more than a little ironic in light of Kissinger’s criticism of the “remarkable arrogance” of the European colonial powers.

The pamphlets and treatises of the colonial powers from the dawn of the twentieth century reveal a remarkable arrogance, to the effect that they were entitled to shape a world order by their maxims. Accounts of China or India condescendingly defined a European mission to educate traditional cultures to higher levels of civilization.

What is truly remarkable is the complete lack of self-awareness demonstrated here. The globalists are doing EXACTLY the same thing they complain about the colonial powers having done, and what Kissinger correctly observes the Iranians to be doing: asserting their entitlement to shape a world order by their maxims. But precisely how is Kissinger’s “vision of peace” any more rationally justified or globally authoritative than Mahmound Ahmadinejad’s publicly proclaimed “promise of God”?

And what is the globalist hope for world order if not a doctrine of violent intimidation?

Counterparty risk

Robert Prechter warned of this. It doesn’t matter if you traded right, if you can’t cash in your nominal winnings:

Dear Client,

Please be advised that that most Western Banks have stopped pricing USD/RUB. As such, FXCM can no longer offer this instrument to our clients and will begin closing any existing client trades in USD/RUB effective at Noon EST today, December 16th, 2014, 

So for those curious why there appears to be a collapse in Ruble volatility in the past few hours which in turn has sent both stocks and crude soaring, the answer is simple: nobody is trading it! 

And this is what happened following the post: as soon as all those
short the RUB (long USDRUB) realized they have to take profits, the USDRUB tumbled some 500 pips (!) in the process sending stocks surging.

We appear to have a full-blown financial war underway. I wonder how long it will take Putin to put the ruble on the gold standard. That’s always been his trump card; it eliminates Russia’s ability to play the money multiplication game, but in the end, will provide Russia with a sounder currency than the so-called currency of last resort.