Tag: war

The USA Already Lost WWIII

As I’ve been banging repeatedly on since 2004, warfare since 1940 has primarily concerned industrial capacity. Of course, the Clown World establishment doesn’t listen to me, so they’re genuinely confused and afraid now that it’s clear that both China and North Korea are formally allied with Russia, giving the sovereign nations a 100x advantage over the post-industrial financialized economies of Clown World.

Remember when the narrative was that it was Russia totally reliant on Western-supplied parts in its weaponry? Here an American general literally admits the entire U.S. military structure would collapse in a day if China issued an embargo against them:

‘If we were in a war with China and it stopped providing parts, we wouldn’t be able to build the planes and weapons we needed,’ he said.

A startling report released earlier this year revealed Chinese firms have a stranglehold across 12 critical technologies that are vital to US national security, including nuclear modernization, hypersonic and space technologies.

The study, which was carried out by defense software firm Govini, delivered a damning indictment on the American armaments industry.

‘U.S. domestic production capacity is a shriveled shadow of its former self,’ the report said. ‘Crucial categories of industry for U.S. national defense are no longer built in any of the 50 states.’

Remember when it was Russia using Western chips in all of its missiles?

Perhaps most worryingly, Govini found that more than 40 per cent of the semiconductors that sustain Department of Defense (DoD) weapons systems are now sourced from China.

How the tides have turned.

It seems the West is slowly coming to its awakening moment: it stands no chance in a long term conflict against the manufacturing powerhouse of the Russia-China-North Korea-Iran bloc.

The central problem is that the strategic geniuses of Clown World are neocons like the Kagan clan, who understand nothing of military history. Their expertise is in subjective rhetoric and subversion, not objective logic and reality. They’re like the bad guys in a Hollywood horror flick, where all that is necessary to defeat them is to refuse to believe in them and proceed as if they don’t even exist.

The astonishing thing is that the corpocracy is still exporting manufacturing capacity abroad. Just yesterday, John Deere announced that it was moving its factories to Mexico. So US manufacturing capacity is actually shrinking, just as European energy production is shrinking, while Russia, China, and North Korea are all ramping up their production of everything from ammunition to tanks.

Clown World should surrender now. But they won’t, because they don’t deal in objective reality. They never have.

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The Russian Historiography of WII

This looks like a book worth reading once I’m finished with Jack Vance’s Treasury.

The Postil (TP): You have written a trilogy on the Great Patriotic War, that is the Second World War as experienced by Soviet Union. The first part of this magisterial study will be published soon. What is your overall aim?

Michael Jabara Carley (MJC): My trilogy, as I call it, deals with the origins and early conduct of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War (Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina). The VOV is the name given to the war in Soviet and Russian history arising from the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. My work runs from January 1930 to December 1941. My project was first entitled “A Near-run Thing: The Improbable Grand Alliance of World War II,” supported by an “Insight” research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My initial objective was to write a narrative history of how the USSR, Britain, and the United States, powers hostile to each other during the interwar years, became allies against Nazi Germany and the Axis. The work evolved from an envisioned single volume into three dealing with Soviet relations with the great and lesser European powers and the United States.

TP: Is there a difference between a Western historiography of WWII and a Russian one?

MJC: Oh yes, the difference is enormous. During the war, it was clear to all who had eyes to see that the Red Army played the key role in smashing the Nazi Wehrmacht and winning the war in Europe. The United States and Britain played supporting roles. After 1945 the war became an important object of propaganda in the Cold War. The new narrative was that the United States or Churchill single-handedly won the war in which the USSR was practically invisible. In the western media, histories, iconography, Hollywood films, comic books, more recently video games, the Red Army is invisible. The key moment in the war was operation Overlord, the Normandy landings, when in fact, they were an anticlimax, grand to be sure, in a war whose outcome had already been determined by the Red Army. In the context of the Cold War, it was normal that the United States would seek in various ways to rub out the memories of the Soviet role in the war, for otherwise how could you portray the USSR as a menacing communist enemy.

I’ll report back on it once I’ve finished it. It should be interesting to see if he supports or contradicts the Icebreaker theory of Operation Barbarossa.

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Slowly, Then Suddenly

I concur with the Armchair Warlord’s take on how the Russian strategy is likely to switch to a much more aggressive mode of offense when the time is deemed right.

The Stavka has placed a heavy emphasis on efficiency in this war. Many Russian decisions at the operational-strategic level can be explained simply by their seeking the most efficient means to inflict mass casualties on the AFU with the lowest risk to themselves. Thus, any decision to transition to high-speed, mobile warfare from low-speed, positional war can be expected to follow that rubric. In other words, the Russians will launch an offensive to rout the AFU after its back is broken in positional war, rather than attack seeking to “change the game” and defeat the Ukrainians in mobile war. The “game” heavily favors the Russians and they’re not in a rush to change it!

The difference between these scenarios can be seen quite easily by comparing two very successful offensives: Operation Bagration in 1944 and the 1975 Ho Chi Minh Offensive. Bagration routed the once-mighty Army Group Center – at the cost of 180,000 killed in action, three times the total Russian death toll of this war. I’m sure the Russians would much prefer the 8,000-strong butcher’s bill of North Vietnam’s war-ending 1975 operation – and they have the strategic insight to see that modern Ukraine, as a corrupt and deeply dysfunctional garrison state propped up by endless foreign aid, is far more akin to South Vietnam than Nazi Germany.

So what does this look like in practice? The Russians are going to keep poking and prodding in their usual methodical way until part of the line collapses “in depth,” and then all hell is going to break loose.

It seems most observers have forgotten that the Russians have already shown great flexibility in their approach to the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. The initial gambit was a high-risk, low-cost decapitation strike at Kiev combined with support for very rapid advancement into the Donbass by the separatist militias backed by Russian air and artillery support. Only when the limits of that approach were reached did they switch to using Chechen and mercenary light infantry to storm fortified locations like Bahkmut, after which they switched again to the brutal, but low-risk attrition warfare we’ve been seeing over the last year.

Therefore, it is correct to anticipate another change in grand tactics, (the more proper term in this context as the strategic objectives remain unchanged) which will primarily depend upon whether a) the Ukrainian Armed Forces break under the relentless attritional pressure or b) if NATO ground forces are sent in to prevent the UFA from breaking. Remember, the Russian strategists will comprehensively plan for all possible situations, not merely the particular scenarios that the enemy media deems most likely.

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Why Putin Waits

Simplicius explains why the Russians are in no hurry to finish off the Ukrainian resistance:

Everyone understands the dry points of Putin’s demands, which he has articulated over the course of months, about deNazification, keeping to current battlefield gains and ‘realities’, etc. But the single most important point which has flown completely under the radar, and which I believe is actually the very heart of Putin’s proposal, is hinted at in the earlier video where he says that mere ‘ceasefires’ are inadequate, and that he is seeking a permanent solution of some kind.

He didn’t specify there, but he has before—multiple times. What Putin alludes to is that in order to end the Ukrainian war for good, Russia will take no less than a re-working of the entire European security framework. This is why he harps on Zelensky’s illegitimacy, it’s because Putin wants to build up to the fact that there must be a far larger, overriding framework of guarantors which is immutable and inviolable, rather than flimsy and ephemeral like Zelensky.

What Putin is seeking is revolutionary: he wants to re-establish a whole new, modern Westphalian Peace. He wants the Ukrainian war to be the linchpin of a new global security system that plays into all the recent BRICS declarations of ‘reworking the UN’ and every other major global institution. Putin wants to reshape how the entire international system functions vis-a-vis their security relationships; in essence, it would be the first new concrete paradigm of the post-Cold War and ‘Iron Curtain’ era.

So for all those people who are asking: what is the ultimate price Putin is willing to pay to give up Russia’s maximalist aims in Ukraine—would he do it for the basic terms of demilitarization, no joining NATO, and all that? Not likely: because there is no way to guarantee Ukraine’s adherence to any such agreements. The only way to end the war would be a reworking of the entire system in such a way as to give Russia credible confidence in the new system holding indefinitely. It would take, as I said, a new Westphalian framework that institutionalizes new, much broader realities of what countries can and cannot do in overreaching via provocative actions against one another. If you really listen to Putin’s speeches and statements on this issue, this is the secret he’s intimating—though not very loudly or aggressively, for now. The reason for that is likely because he knows it’s too ambitious of an opening ‘ask’, and he would prefer to first lure the parties in via basic conditions before escalating it to the logical conclusion when it comes to the issue of: how do we realistically guarantee such conditions between parties?

This is why Putin is likely in no great rush to end the war: in order to effect such an ambitious world-reshaping plan, he knows the current political class has to first be waited out.

As I’ve been pointing out from the beginning, Putin knows he’s not at war with Ukraine. He’s not even at war with the USA or the West. He’s at war with Clown World, and there are safer, easier ways to defeat his enemies than to wade through literal continents of armies to do so. He understands, as does Xi, that time is on his side.

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Believing Their Own Word-Magic

Morgoth observes that the insane retardery of Clown World has now gone from redefining invaders as refugees and Pakistani rapists as English grooming gangs to a very dangerous redefinition of war as not-war:

It is stated quite clearly by a left-leaning, neoliberal outlet that there should be no brakes whatsoever on action taken against Russia because they’re all talk and no punch. Yet, the entire reason we’re in this mess is precisely because Russia invaded Ukraine in the teeth of Western opposition and condemnation. The reality of what is being proposed here is bombing campaigns inside Russia, including Russian cities, using weapons and aircraft supplied directly by Western powers, including personnel.

However, if we just play fast and loose with the definitions and framing, it will lose its bite; we can spin it a bit so the Western public can consume it more handily. It is hardly novel to highlight the degree to which Western journalists and politicians exist within their own bubble; now, they’re convincing themselves, entombing themselves within a narrative, that they can treat Russia however they like.

Niland certainly isn’t a lone voice. Establishment figures such as Boris Johnson have angrily demanded the West give Ukraine everything it needs to stay in the fight; the block was always that Russia is a nuclear power and allied with China. The evolving narrative is that Putin just talks a lot, and he won’t retaliate whatever we do. It is the logic of the drunk driver convincing himself he’s good for another four pints because he had a hearty dinner — it’s convenient bullshit rather than a reflection of reality.

I’m by no means a Putin fanboy; the camp I’m sitting in is the “anti-dying slowly in a cloud of nuclear fallout camp”. Putin is no stranger to weaving bullshit narratives himself. After all, he never even “invaded” Ukraine; he conducted a “special military operation”. The more we in the West convince ourselves, or are told by our betters, that Russia can be attacked with impunity, the more it will be. The more Russia is attacked, the greater the chance of retaliation because the Russian people will demand it.

Yet, astonishingly, Western establishment politicians and journalists are unable to see and understand basic logic in the same way they managed to convince themselves or compartmentalise foreign rape gangs or that a piece of paper doesn’t make a Somalian Irish.

Once you start believing lies in the face of the observable truth, you have no control over when to stop because you no longer have the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, or reality from your own wishful thinking.

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Time is on Xi’s Side

It’s clear that Xi is fully informed with regards to the US strategy to fight China while it still has some advantages left to it:

Xi Jinping has said that the US tried to provoke the Chinese military into attacking Taiwan but that Beijing did not take the bait, the Financial Times reported on Saturday, citing sources. According to people familiar with the matter cited by the paper, Xi made the remarks during a private meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in April 2023. The Chinese president also reportedly relayed concerns about Washington’s alleged attempts to trick Beijing into invading the self-governed island to his officials.

Beijing considers Taiwan to be sovereign Chinese territory under its One-China policy. The island has been self-governing since 1949 when nationalists fled the mainland with US help after losing the Chinese Civil War to the communists.

Financial Times described Xi’s reported remarks to von der Leyen as the first known time he told a foreign leader that the US was trying to goad Beijing into invading Taiwan. The Chinese president also reportedly explained that a conflict with the US would be detrimental to China and derail its plans for a “great rejuvenation” by 2049.

As I have repeatedly written, China wants a peaceful reunification with Taiwan island on the basis of the Hong Kong model. While there is no formal time limit to Taiwan’s US-backed pseudo-independence, everyone on all sides of the equation knows there is a practical limit, even if no one knows what it is. As the Chinese economy and military power continues to grow, and as the US economy and military power continues to decline, eventually a tipping point will be reached at which the Taiwanese faith in the USA and the USA’s willingness to go to war simultaneously vanish.

That is when China will peacefully take full political control of the island. Once the inevitable becomes the undeniable, any possibility of war over Taiwan will disappear. Unlike Russia, which was unable to resist the bait of a Ukrainian invasion of the Donbass republics and the potential loss of the Crimea and was forced to intervene militarily, Clown World possesses no similarly effective bait for China. It’s worth noting that despite being lured into launching the Special Military Operation, Putin has steadfastly resisted the invitation to attack the USA, the UK, Poland, or any of the European countries despite the relentless provocations by those effective belligerents.

Both Xi and Putin clearly understand that the USA is controlled by satanic foreign forces who value American lives no more highly than its Kiev regime values Ukrainian lives. They also understand that the satanic forces can only degrade and destroy, they can neither build nor maintain a society capable of exerting power on a global or even regional scale. Putin has even said as much about the United States in his June 14th speech at the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs:

As for the United States itself, the ongoing attempts by the liberal-globalist elites ruling there today to spread their ideology worldwide by any means, to maintain their imperial status, their dominance, only further exhaust the country, lead it to degradation, and directly contradict the true interests of the American people. If it weren’t for this dead-end path, aggressive messianism, mixed with a belief in their own chosenness and exceptionalism, international relations would have long been stabilized.

World War III is proving to be more sophisticated, and even more interesting, than either of its predecessors, because two of the central figures on the nationalist side have a not-inconsiderable understanding of the true nature, and the material limitations, of their enemy.

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The End of Carrier Diplomacy

It is widely believed that the Yemenis damaged the USS Eisenhower sufficiently to force it to retreat from the Red Sea before it was sunk:

According to satellite images published by navigation trackers, the Eisenhower was seen sailing north off the coast of Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, heading to the far north of the Red Sea, more than 1,100 kilometers from Yemen. The Eisenhower had noticeably repositioned over the past two days, moving from off the coast of Qunfudhah in southern Saudi Arabia to off the coast of Jeddah before moving further north.

This retreat coincided with two ballistic and cruise missile attacks and drone strikes launched by Yemeni Armed Forces on the aircraft carrier since Friday, in response to recent American and British assaults that resulted in the deaths and injuries of 58 civilians. This escalation prompted Sana’a to vow a “firm and deterrent” response, according to the Supreme Political Council.

The blatant retreat of Eisenhower has put the United States in an extremely embarrassing position after attempting to cover up the Yemeni attacks on the carrier through silence. Many activists have sparked a wide debate regarding Eisenhower’s status following the attacks, leading Captain Chaudhary Hill to release a video to calm public opinion. However, the video showing a fighter jet taking off from the carrier turned out to be an old clip from March, reinforcing suspicions that Eisenhower might have sustained significant damage from the Yemeni attacks.

I, and many other observers, have long predicted that it would be the sinking of a US aircraft carrier that would definitively mark the end of US global military supremacy. However, I’d always assumed it would probably be a Chinese hypersonic missile, or possibly a Russian hypersonic missile, that would provide the historical coup de grace.

But the fact that it might be a lowly desert people taking down the mighty symbol of one of the most powerful empires to ever dominate the planet would be both fitting and ironic. There is too much disinformation and misinformation to confirm the rumors yet, but the longer the USS Eisenhower stays dark, the more it looks as if the USA has passed its Syracuse Moment.

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Regime Change in France and Germany

Macron has already waved the white flag and called for parliamentary elections. Now Germany’s government is almost certain to collapse in the aftermath of the European elections:

Germany’s ruling coalition has been roundly beaten by opposition parties in Sunday’s vote for the EU Parliament, coming in behind the conservatives and the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, according to exit polls. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats (SPD) received around 14% of the vote, down from 15.8% in 2019, marking their worst results in decades, according to early forecasts from ZDF and ARD based on partial counting.

The conservative center-right main opposition, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU), is predicted to take first place with around 30%.

The AfD rose to second place with around 16%. The ultra-conservative Eurosceptic party has lobbied for cutting off deliveries of weapons to Ukraine and ending the sanctions on Russia, calling for peace talks instead. Despite several scandals in the run-up to the election, their support has grown by almost 5% in the last five years.

Literally no one in Europe outside of Poland and the Baltics wants to fight Russia, and the only reason they do is because they think the USA and the larger European countries will do the fighting for them. The idea that failure on the battlefield was going to cause Putin to lose popularity and power was never anything more than pure projection and neocon wet dreams, as we’re now seeing the inevitable result of NATO losing its proxy war against the Russian-supported Donbass militias.

The sooner the Europeans break with Clown World’s totalitarian convergence and restore economic relations with Russia and the rest of BRICSIA, the better it will be for the planet.

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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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