While it’s not my intention to link the daily Sigma Game post here on a regular basis, I suspect this particular SSH application will be of some interest here even to those readers who usually prefer to ignore discussions of the socio-sexual hierarchy.
Please note that I am absolutely, 100-percent, not saying that modern geopolitical analysis is not insane, retarded, and reliably wrong, only that a sound grasp of the SSH will prove beneficial to anyone who is forced to pay attention to or otherwise utilize those analyses.
The US is preparing for a “sustained” bombing campaign in Yemen after ten days of airstrikes failed to undermine the ability of Houthi fighters to target ships in the Red Sea, the Washington Post has reported, citing unnamed officials.
The administration of President Joe Biden does not expect a protracted operation such as the US campaigns in Iraq or Afghanistan, but at the same time it cannot provide a timeframe for when Houthi military capabilities will be adequately diminished, the newspaper reported on Saturday.
Washington’s strategy is to curb the ability of the Shiite militant group to target ships off the coast of Yemen, or at least create safe conditions for shipping companies to resume sending vessels through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, sources added.
That will show them! There’s nothing like shooting several years’ production of ballistic missiles on some empty tents and camels to let people know you mean business. I mean, if I owned a US-flagged cargo ship, that would make me feel good about my chances of transiting the Red Sea, right?
Surely the Yemenis will surrender once they see their industrial intrastructure bombed back to the Stone Age. And by “industrial infrastructure” I mean rocks and sand.
The long-predicted end of Air Power has already arrived. But the battlefield reign of the drone, first evidenced in the brief Second Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020, then subsequently confirmed by the NATO-Russian war in the Ukraine, looks to be a very short one.
An industry team has for the first time destroyed an aerial target using a high-power shot with its DragonFire laser, the British Defence Ministry announced Friday. The trial with the direct-energy weapon is considered a significant milestone toward the deployment of the system, possibly within five years. Efforts to quickly field such weapons are partly driven by conflicts in Ukraine and near the Red Sea, where expensive air defense missiles are used against cheap but effective drones. The cost of operating the laser is typically less than £10 (U.S. $13) per shot, the ministry noted.
So, the question of who is going to dominate the future battlefield can be reduced to the question of who can make more vehicle-mounted laser platforms, more cheaply, than anyone else. The technology isn’t especially difficult, which means it will be a matter of industrial capacity and efficiency.
So this is clearly not a development that favors the military wing of the neo-globalist order.
On the plus side, this brings us one step closer to laser-equipped cyber otters for the home.
Apparently two proxy defeats for NATO at the hands of Russia, in Georgia and in Ukraine, haven’t been enough, as leaked plans published in Bild indicate that the neoclowns won’t be content until NATO is directly defeated in Europe.
As the West continues to wage a hybrid proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, supplying the Kiev regime with modern weapons systems, it has been hyping up allegations of a broader “Russian threat” for all of Western Europe and NATO – claims that have been dismissed as false and ridiculed by the Kremlin. “Germany is gearing up for “war between NATO’s forces and Russia,” which could begin in the summer of 2025, Bild has written, citing a “secret” Bundeswehr document.
According to the alleged “training scenario” of the German Ministry of Defense, “on ‘Day X,’ NATO’s commander-in-chief will give the order to move 300,000 troops to the eastern flank, including 30,000 Bundeswehr soldiers,” the tabloid states. The escalation could reportedly begin as early as February 2024 with the start of Russia’s active offensive against the positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. By June of the same year, according to Bild, Russia will have forced Kiev’s military to retreat.
Without offering any specific details, the publication noted that the most likely location for a “clash” will purportedly be the so-called “Suwalki Gap” or “Suwalki Corridor” (Przesmyk suwalski). This is a section about 100 km long near the city of Suwalki in the northeast of Poland, located between Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad region.
In July, according to the “secret document,” Russia might allegedly launch “cyber attacks and other forms of hybrid warfare” against the Baltic countries. Furthermore, “clashes” would occur which Moscow ostensibly could use as a pretext to begin large-scale exercises on its territory and in Belarus, as per the authors. By October Russia could allegedly transfer troops and medium-range missiles to its Kaliningrad region, and December might see a border conflict erupt in the Suwalki Corridor.
According to Bild, the “secret document” also indicates that when Washington is temporarily left without a leader as a result of the presidential elections in the United States in 2014, “Russia, with the support of Belarus, will repeat the 2014 invasion of Ukraine on NATO territory.” No further clarification is offered to these wild scenarios and off-mark references. One can guess what the mention of 2014 events refers to the Euromaidan (lit. “Euro Square”) coup fomented and sponsored by the West that culminated in the ouster of Ukraine’s government, and its replacement with a pro-US, and pro-NATO regime hostile to Russia. Furthermore, Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and its chances of gaining the coveted status in the alliance remain uncertain.
“Actions of Russia and the West, culminating in the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of NATO soldiers and the inevitable outbreak of war in the summer of 2025 are described down to the exact month and location,” the publication stated in reference to the ‘secret’ Bundeswehr plan.
One wonders with what army NATO is supposedly going to be fighting this war. The vaunted Polish army? The Texas National Guard? And, more importantly, with what ammunition, artillery, and air support? And while I have no doubt that this “leak” is actually pure wishful thinking on the part of Donald Kagan’s neoclown crew, and has been released with the intention of baiting Russia into some sort of precipitate action, it’s pretty clear that Russia isn’t falling for it, as Russia Today has reported:
Moscow has ridiculed the claims, calling them a “hoax.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Monday that he refused to “even comment on this report.” Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also brushed the claims off as a “last year’s powerful zodiac forecast.”
Russia has no need to go to war with NATO in the next year. Both the German and the US economies are rapidly collapsing, not because of Russia or China, but due to the greening of the former and the parasitical financialization of the latter. The Yemeni stranglehold on the Red Sea isn’t exactly helping either the Clown World economies either.
What Russia will likely be doing in 2025 instead of fighting a third round with NATO is supporting the rising nationalist parties across Europe by offering logistical support to the third-world remigration programs that will a) be massively popular and b) put the final nail in the coffin of the neoliberal globalization that is the foundation of the Clown World Order. The AfD isn’t looking to bankrupt Germany or fight Russia on the USA’s behalf, and pushing the German people toward another defeat at the hands of Russia will likely be enough to break the CDU/CSU and SPD/Green alliance that has been methodically destroying Germany.
Germany on edge as far-right’s bold mass deportation plan shakes nation
This isn’t to say it isn’t possible for NATO to force Russia into taking the Baltic States in the same way Ukraine forced Russia into taking the Donbass. But outside of the Baltics, there aren’t many ethnic Russians, and if we learned one thing from the failed Ukraine offensive, it is that Russia is perfectly content to defend itself and let the NATO forces dash itself to pieces against its fortifications.
Furthermore, I don’t see how the USA can possibly send 200,000 troops to Europe so long as Israel is engaged in hostilities in the Middle East. The US military isn’t strong enough to fight on two major fronts anymore, and if the US were to commit to go to war in Eastern Europe, it would be effectively hanging Israel out to dry by making it clear to everyone that the US cavalry would not be coming to its rescue.
Andrei Martyanov explains why it’s not just the loss of US industrial capacity that has hamstrung its once-superlative military infrastructure and rendered the US military incapable of defeating Russia, China, or quite possibly, even Yemen.
In theory the US may build, in the next 10+ years, some facilities to increase production of 155-mm shells or drones. But it will not be able to match industrial capacity of Russia in this respect, even with theoretical addition of future, if any, European capacity. The issue here is not just quantity–the target impossible to reach due to utter destruction of US manufacturing base and an extremely complex supply chains for military production. This all is just the tip of the iceberg. The main body of the iceberg is a complete catastrophe that the US military doctrine, and, as a result, procurement development is. I spoke about it for years–some gaps, such as in air defense or missilery the US will not be able to close, because as I type this, this gap continues to grow. It is measured not in years but in generations. This is, as an example, the result of misguided and illiterate approach to air defense based on… air power. You have to literally undo the whole thing, and this requires not just building some facilities, but a complete rethinking of America’s defense or, rather, “offense” philosophy which doesn’t work. It never did. This is impossible in the present state of the American geopolitical thought without rethinking the United States as it perceived itself in the last hundred years. The US has no courage, intellect and will to do so because it leads to a destruction of America’s mythology.
So, the US is stuck. So, it is good that John Mearsheimer understands parts of it, but he doesn’t understand the heart of the matter. After the US strategically and operationally “planned” VSU’s “counteroffensive”, the question of the competence of the US military establishment arose and was answered–it is incompetent! It will take a generation or two to even teach those who are currently in the plebe years in US service academies to think properly and within the framework of America’s REAL military and industrial capability. This REAL capability has nothing in common with the US halcyon years of WW II and after and it is not coming back. Russia will not allow the US to unleash the war in Europe while thinking that the US can sit this one out again behind the ocean. Doesn’t work like this anymore, especially with the construction tempo of Russia Navy’s subs such as 3M22 Zircon carriers Yasen-class subs and frigates which already have Zircons deployed. These are technologies the US simply doesn’t have and are nowhere near of getting them. China can rely on them, and much more from Russia in case of the US deciding to commit suicide, the US cannot.
It is grim picture of corruption, financial and, most importantly, intellectual within the US military and foreign policy establishment, and what John Mearsheimer fails to understand–these are not just some pieces of hardware whose utility the US suddenly recognized. Nope, the REAL experience of SMO is way more than technological, it is above all operational and strategic, which made Russia’s General Staff a well-oiled machine which merely uses 404 as a trap and a junkyard for NATO’s military capacity, because Russia fights not Ukraine, she fights NATO.
Having read two of Martyanov’s excellent books on US military and imperial decline, both of which were written and published well before the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, it’s clear that he’s identified something that goes well beyond the common level of military analysis in the Western think tanks.
What he’s talking about here is neither the loss of US industry nor the inability of the US to design, build, and procure hypersonic missiles, inexpensive missile platforms, and squad-level drone swarms. It’s not even the demographic changes, and the fact that the USA is now an empire with a foreign elite ruling over a melange of peoples who have no connection to the heritage Americans or even first-wave immigrants who fought its previous wars. What’s he’s talking about is the fundamental failure of the US military strategists to understand the realities of military power and the way that a sea-based naval power accustomed to relatively small expeditionary conflicts well away from home simply doesn’t possess the operational and strategic capability to defeat a massive land-based power that is on a reasonably similar technological level.
Britain couldn’t defeat France. The USA couldn’t defeat Germany. And Athens lost to Sparta in the end.
British and US forces have rained bombs on Iran-backed rebels in Yemen using warships, fighter jets and submarines. After the airstrikes, Rishi Sunak said attacks on international shipping by Houthi rebels ‘cannot stand’, while US President Joe Biden hailed the ‘successful’ blitz and vowed more action if it was needed.
Explosions were heard in the capital Sana’a and other major cities shortly before midnight in a drastic escalation of tensions in the Middle East.
US and UK forces – including four Typhoon jets – bombed more than a dozen sites used by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen in a massive retaliatory strike using warship-launched Tomahawk missiles and fighter jets, US officials said.
The four RAF Typhoons used Paveway IV guided bombs to ‘conduct precision strikes’ on two targets that had been chosen to ‘reduce the Houthis’ capability to violate international law’.
One of the targets was a launching site for reconnaissance and attack drones in Bani, north-western Yemen. Another was an airfield in Abs in the same area of Yemen.
Officials said the Houthi rebels, who have carried out a series of attacks in the Red Sea, had ignored a ‘final warning’ as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak signed off on the raids during an emergency cabinet meeting last night.
Somehow, I have the very strong impression that this is not going to go the way the neoclown geostrategists believe it is going to go. The Yemenis have survived years of being attacked by US-backed Saudi forces, so a few airstrikes, however massive, are very unlikely to cause them to stop blocking the Red Sea.
So it really looks a lot like the US and UK forces taking the bait, although it’s not yet clear whose bait that would be. The problem is that both countries have taken a strong position that providing missiles to combatants is not a casus belli; objecting to Iranian, Chinese, or Russian missiles being used against US or UK ships would immediately provide Russia with cause for attacking either country.
UPDATE: An unconfirmed claim. The fact that no ship name or description was provided makes me very dubious, but we’ll find out soon enough.
“By the grace of Almighty Allah, we sank the first American ship with everyone on board using our missiles.”
Thomas Friedman was correct about the battle in Ukraine being massively significant with regards to the future direction of the world, but he had it precisely backwards with regards to what the inevitable conclusions of the various third parties watching the conflict would be.
While the battle on the ground that triggered World War Wired is ostensibly over who should control Ukraine, do not be fooled. This has quickly turned into “the big battle” between the two most dominant political systems in the world today: free-market, “rule-of-law democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy,” the Swedish expert on the Russian economy Anders Aslund remarked to me.
Though this war is far from over, and Vladimir Putin may still find a way to prevail and come out stronger, if he doesn’t, it could be a watershed in the conflict between democratic and undemocratic systems. It is worth recalling that World War II put an end to fascism, and that the Cold War put an end to orthodox communism, eventually even in China. So, what happens on the streets of Kyiv, Mariupol and the Donbas region could influence political systems far beyond Ukraine and far into the future.
Indeed, other autocratic leaders, like China’s, are watching Russia carefully. They see its economy being weakened by Western sanctions, thousands of its young technologists fleeing to escape a government denying them access to the internet and credible news and its inept army seemingly unable to gather, share and funnel accurate information to the top. Those leaders have to be asking themselves: “Holy cow — am I that vulnerable? Am I presiding over a similar house of cards?”
Everyone is watching.
Putin Had No Clue How Many of Us Would Be Watching, THE NEW YORK TIMES, 4 August 2022
Directly counter to the Clown World narrative, it is the self-styled “democratic” systems championed by credentialed neoclowns like Friedman that have been exposed as ineffective and fragile frauds. In fact, in his 2018 book entitled Losing Military Supremacy, Andrei Martyanov described as “the strategic folly of the 21st century” something that has already come to pass.
In what can only be described as the strategic folly of the 21st century—the United States missed a historic opportunity to ally with Russia based on equal and mutually beneficial relations. This opportunity today is gone. Pushing Russia, through condescension, blackmail, humiliation and ignorance, away from itself in the 1990s, the United States committed the cardinal sin of Anglo-Saxon and now neo-conservative geopolitical calculus—they pushed Russia and China together, while simultaneously providing China with all the necessary tools, from investment to access to markets, thus making her the largest economy in the world. Today, the United States faces two nuclear and industrial superpowers, one of which fields a world-class armed forces. If the military-political, as opposed to merely economic, alliance between Russia and China, is ever formalized—this will spell the final doom for the United States as a global power.
Andrei Martyanov LOSING MILITARY SUPREMACY, 2018
That military-politico-economic alliance has already been formalized in the form of BRICS, and exceeds the scope of which Martyanov expected would be necessary to “spell the final doom of the United States as a global power”. WWIII is already as over as WWII was the moment Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; given the combined demographic and industrial power that BRICS can bring to bear, the eventual outcome is not even remotely in doubt. While there are still a lot of questions of what the post-WWIII, post-Clown World world, post-liberal world will look like, and who will be the foremost power, there can be absolutely no doubt about which side is going to win it. And it’s not going to be NATO, the USA, the liberal world order, or Clown World.
History is a reliable guide in this context. All the geostrategic analysis, however excellent, isn’t even necessary. The oldest society and its decadent empire ruled by foreigners, with its massive amount of debt and an aging currency, never wins. It is always eventually challenged, then superseded, by nations with newer and less-corrupted societal organizations.
Clown World and its liberal Enlightenment philosophy has had a successful, though not particularly long historical run. But its fundamental philosophies have proven themselves to be both false, as well as an insufficient foundation for national, or even societal, survival. Its fate is certain and its collapse has begun, although it obviously hasn’t been completed yet.
An insightful observation by Andrei Martyanov from his 2018 book Losing Military Supremacy : the myopia of American strategic planning:
“The Americans in their intercourse with strangers appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise. The most slender eulogium is acceptable to them; the most exalted seldom contents them; they unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves.“
The American vaingloriousness described by Tocqueville has today become a clear and present danger to the world and it is, in the end, a direct threat to what’s left of America’s democratic institutions and processes. It threatens a shaky republic and it is embedded in the very foundation of a now increasingly obvious American decline. Of course, there are many opinions about American decline on the public discussion stage—some opinions reject the whole idea of an American decline out of hand as propaganda; others go to the other extreme by proposing an imminent collapse and disintegration of the United States into several states. What is lost in this contentious debate is the troubling fact of the very real and very dangerous decline of American cognitive faculties, which is also accompanied by what Robert Reilly termed de-Hellenization—a complete loss of sound reasoning across the whole spectrum of national activities from foreign policy, to economics, to war, to culture.
This decline is more than visible, it is omnipresent in the everyday lives of many Americans and even affects people from other nations and continents. This decline has deeper roots than the mere change of some economic paradigm, albeit this too matters a great deal. It portends a total existential crisis of American national mythology—a crisis of the American soul that has nothing to do with the superficial, mass-media driven ideological or party affiliations—rather, it is the decline of a national consensus. This decline reflects the American failure to form a real nation, a process which, as paradoxical as it may sound, was prevented by a sequence of historic events in the 20th century, which turned the tables on American fortunes.
That vaingloriousness and sense of exceptionalism has proven fatal, as it was exploited ruthlessly by the foreign invaders who played expertly upon the concept of “an idea nation” and “a nation of immigrants”. But contrary to those who would blame the decline of the USA solely on the two Jewish invasions – really three, in light of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974 – the seeds of the failure of Americans to successfully build a genuine nation were observably present long before the first major wave of immigration from Central Europe peaked in 1850 and the violent transformation of a Republic to an Empire in 1865.
Martyanov’s observations concerning why the USA lost its post-WWII military supremacy are particularly significant now that events in Syria, Ukraine, and the Red Sea have demonstrated to the entire world that the former superpower no longer has the ability to reliably enforce its will outside of its continental region of influence. More importantly, his diagnosis strongly suggests that the situation is not one that is amenable to fixing due to way in which the problems are not political or ideological, but intrinsic and foundational.
An artificial nation cannot, in the long term, be expected to remain cohesive and victorious in the face of a challenge from a genuine nation of similar power. This is an important military lesson, not only for the remnants of heritage America, but also for the would-be builders of a pan-European nation as well as the architects of the unitary Israeli nation, both of whom are twice-dependent upon the concept.
It is said that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Although, in some cases, it’s just the same old thing over and over again. So once the British Armed Forces complete their stunning and brave conquest of Russia, they can head south to refight the war in the Falkland Islands. Or, as I suppose we had better get used to calling them again, the Malvinas.
The row over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands has erupted again after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Argentina issued a statement asking Britain to start negotiations over it again. In a statement issued on Wednesday, the South American country said it intended to restore sovereignty over the islands and intended this to be done through diplomatic means.
This is what the country believes is the “only possible way to restore the exercise of its rights”.
It’s a bit amusing to think of Britain threatening to use what little military force it has to defend British sovereignty off the coast of Argentina when it didn’t use it to resist an ongoing and active invasion of its own island by millions of invaders. Ironically, if Milei hadn’t been foolish enough to spurn Argentina’s BRICS invitation, the Argentines probably could have peacefully taken control of the islands with full support from Russia and China before the end of 2024.
The whole globalization interlude is looking less and less like the end of history and more and more like a truly retarded period of human history that caused far more problems than it could possibly have ever solved.
Here’s a truly contrarian prediction. Whereas the current mainstream perspective is that Anders Breivik was a monster and Norman Borlaug was a scientific saint, before the end of the 21st century, Breivik will be seen as a William Tell-style national hero and Norman Borlaug will be considered a worse historical enemy of Mankind than Hitler and Mao combined.
I could be wrong, of course. It’s entirely possible that no one will remember Breivik because Norwegians and Swedes are as extinct as the Agawam or the Wicocomico, and that Borlaug and his Green Revolution mean nothing to the mixed-race hunter-gathers roaming across the ruins of Europe and America.
Unlike the American people, the Chinese are very well aware of the way in which the CIA is attempting to spy upon them:
The WSJ has exposed quite a bit this time. Firstly, it revealed the public proclamation by the CIA of engaging in espionage activities against China, possibly in an attempt to exaggerate its own value and seek increased budgetary support from Congress. However, this also amounts to self-incrimination. When the US hypes and targets alleged “Chinese spies,” it consistently fails to provide concrete evidence. Instead, it initiates a smear campaign against China and subsequently demands China to prove its innocence. This pattern reveals that the US is fully aware of the lack of legitimacy in these “spy” allegations, yet shamelessly continues to clamor as if “no one can do anything about it.” The US is always very self-confident for being “right,” but its notion of “righteousness” differs fundamentally from the universally accepted definition.
Secondly, it proves that China’s counter-espionage work is highly effective. It has dismantled the US spy network in China and prevented it from rebuilding for 10 years. This is a major achievement in counter-espionage, causing the US to stumble in the face of China’s robust anti-espionage defense. When China revised its Counter-Espionage Law, it faced criticism from Western public opinion. Now it appears that the intention behind this criticism was to pressure China into removing its defenses and allowing their spies to operate freely within China’s borders. Fortunately, China has not fallen into this trap. China has been able to defend against espionage in the past, and will also have the ability to render CIA infiltration useless in the future.
Thirdly, it reminds us that the string of counter-espionage must be tightened. The CIA has indicated that rebuilding its spy network in China is currently their main focus and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. In 2021, there were reports that the CIA established a mission center for China, the only single-country mission center at the agency. All of this may make the situation of China’s counter-espionage more complex and severe.
I very much doubt it is a coincidence that a) Xi unexpectedly took power, b) the CPC terminated its partnership with US Jewry, and c) the US spy network in China was dismantled at approximately the same time. Nor is it a coincidence that the BRICS framework was ready to present to the nonaligned nations within months of the US sanctions regime being imposed upon Russia in response to the Special Military Operation in Ukraine.
So, it’s interesting that China is now willing to openly discuss, in its English state media, what has been happening for the last ten years. I don’t know why this topic is being presented for discussion, but I suspect it is significant in some way.
