Tag: war

Importing Taiwan’s Semiconductor Industry

There is a lot more going on in the trade war between the USA and China than just escalating tariff rates. The Chinese are obviously concerned that the US is going to essentially import all of Taiwan’s most valuable intellectual capital.

In response to media query on concerns on the Taiwan island over the US hollowing out its semiconductor industry are growing, Zhu Fenglian, a spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, said that the concerns of Taiwan’s industry are not groundless. TSMC has long become a political pledge of the DPP authorities’ attempts to seek “Taiwan independence” by leaning on the US. It is only a matter of time before Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is handed over by Lai Ching-te, who is a “professional traitor of Taiwan.”

According to Reuters reports, TSMC and Intel recently discussed a preliminary agreement to form a joint venture to operate the US chipmaker’s factories. TSMC will take a 20 percent stake in the new company. Taiwan’s major chipmaker United Microelectronics and US-based GlobalFoundries are looking into the possibility of a merger.

As hard as it is to build, it falls as quickly as a spark sets hair on fire. If the DPP authorities are allowed to continue down the dangerous path of selling out Taiwan and ruining Taiwan, Taiwan’s industrial sector and the public will not only lose their current jobs, but also the opportunities for future development, said Zhu.

This is where trade war can lead to actual war. Remember, what President Trump is attempting to do is set up the USA in the best possible position for when the current international trade regime collapses entirely. Getting Taiwanese semiconductor companies to move to the USA would be a major coup, and it’s obviously one that the Chinese authorities will seek to prevent.

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NATO’s Failed War on Russia

It’s obviously not a proxy war when literally thousands of soldiers from NATO countries have been killed inside undisputed Russian territory. The Russians released a report on bodies recovered from the Kursk incursion; these are fatalities, not casualties.

In just a few months, NATO lost nearly as many soldiers as the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” did in eight years of invading and occupying Iraq. The USA didn’t lose a proxy war in Ukraine, it lost an actual war; remember, these are just the fatalities from one single Ukrainian offensive.

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Ill-Suited for War

It turns out that the profit motive tends to undermine actual military performance, which is why Clown World has long preferred subversion and color revolution to direct conflict:

Spiegel published a quite eye-opening piece yesterday, which reveals the long-kept truth about the performance of German weapons systems in real wartime conditions:

A German military assessment exposes major issues with NATO weapons in Ukraine.

The PzH 2000 howitzer, while advanced, is so technically fragile that its combat usefulness is in doubt. The Leopard 1A5 tank is used mostly as makeshift artillery due to weak armor. The Leopard 2A6 is too expensive and complex to maintain at the front.

Air defense systems also face problems. The IRIS-T works well, but ammo is too costly and scarce. The Patriot system is called “unsuitable for combat” because its MAN carrier vehicles are outdated and lack spare parts.

This information was revealed in a transcript of a lecture given by the deputy military attaché of the German embassy in Kiev. The summary of the paper is very clear: “Hardly any large German piece of equipment is fully suitable for war.”

The report cites “an internal paper of the Bundeswehr” about the real practicality of Germany’s top weapons. We can assume that the very same results extend to the entire constellation of NATO weaponry in general, since they are virtually all constructed with the same design philosophies, often even with interoperable systems—like the 120mm Rheinmetall tank barrels shared between the Abrams and Leopard series.

Also, for the sake of thoroughness and to establish context, Spiegel explains that the ‘report’ was taken from a lecture given to junior officers of the Bundeswehr by a ‘deputy military attaché of the German embassy in Kiev.

None of this should come as a surprise. The so-called “military-industrial complex” is neither military nor industrial; it’s really just another way of feeding off federal funds through government grants, no different than Politico making a living by selling massively overpriced subscriptions to USAID.

And the more things change… overengineered, expensive, hard-to-maintain weapons systems have been a German tradition since at least WWII, one that the USA inherited when it imported all the German scientists in the post-WWII migration that launched the US space program.

Which, of course, is also a fraud. No wonder the Russians are entirely confident of victory even if they have to face the entire continent of Europe alone. Simply living in objective reality instead of a hazy fog of financialization and rhetorical fever dreams is a material advantage that cannot be overcome, no matter how many delusional sales pitches are pronounced by unelected politicians.

Here is a useful metric: if a leader has no genuine followers, he’s a puppet and everything he says will be intrinsically false and is intended to be misleading.

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Unthinkable Evacuations

Simplicius observes that the mainstream media is now openly accepting the idea that Ukraine is going to have to give up its five former separatist provinces that are now part of Russia:

For the first time we’re beginning to see major Western publications begin realistically acknowledging the possibility of Ukraine losing all five of the regions demanded by Putin, including Kherson and Zaporozhye in whole. Until now these long-standing Russian demands were virtually ignored or dismissed out of hand by MSM, which only spoke condescendingly enough about the prospects of Russia keeping Crimea, Lugansk, and Donetsk, let alone the others.

But now, reality is beginning to dawn on them. The Telegraph piece breaks the omerta and broaches the delicate eventuality:

How would the map of Ukraine change after such a one-sided ceasefire? Putin claims five provinces: Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. The last three are still only partially occupied by the Russians.

Agreeing to withdraw Ukrainian forces from these regions would increase the Russian-occupied area from about 20pc to roughly 25pc of Ukraine’s sovereign territory. That might sound like a sacrifice worth making to stop the slaughter, though it would inevitably deprive Kyiv of yet more economic resources and its fortified front lines.

But such a deal would also mean evacuating millions of civilians. After the well-documented murder, torture and abduction of tens of thousands in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere, it is unthinkable that Zelensky would abandon his people to Putin’s paramilitaries and secret police. So a war-torn, impoverished country would have to absorb a huge influx of refugees.

Confirmation they understand this would include losing the capital cities of these regions themselves:

Worse, a ceasefire on Putin’s terms would crush Ukrainian morale. Some of the cities that would be lost, including Kherson itself, have already been liberated from the Russians, often at great cost.

It’s clear that little by little the inevitable acceptance of Russia’s full demands is being digested.

But what’s particularly fascinating—and egregious—to observe about the above, is the suggestion that “evacuating millions of civilians”, particularly after many of them were allegedly ‘tortured and murdered’, is something so unthinkable, that it beggars the contemporary imagination, and should definitely be resisted by the moral forces of the world. After all, there is simply no place on earth we could even conceive of where millions of people are currently under similar threat of both mass genocide and forced displacement. The highly principled Western press would certainly apprise us of such an obvious parallel, bringing to light the stupendous hypocrisy thereof, were it to exist somewhere on this small rock, no?

And this highly righteous press would unquestionably condemn the mirroring tragedy—if such a hypothetical one existed—with the same pharisaical outrage as exhibited here, right?

….Right?

The propaganda ministers of Clown World still don’t seem to grasp that it’s no longer possible to decry the actions of the declared bad guy du jour while simultaneously defending precisely the same actions by a different international actor. If the world is supposed to respect the Israeli claim on Palestine due to its historical conquest of Canaan, and assert that the various acts of aggression and ethnic cleansing are justified by that claim, how do they imagine that the much stronger Russian claim to eastern Ukraine or the even stronger Chinese claim to Taiwan are not similarly justified?

The interesting thing which very few people appear to be noticing is the way in which the stage has been set for an Israeli-Turkish struggle for not only Syria, but Jerusalem itself. After all, the Turks owned that land for nearly 200 years, from 1517 to 1917.

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China Hits Back

Even though the trade war is not the war that China can win right now.

China will soon impose an additional 34 per cent tariffs on all American imports in retaliation for Donald Trump’s 34 per cent levy. Beijing announced the measure today, the most serious escalation in a trade war with Trump that has fed fears of a recession and triggered a global stock market rout.

The new tariff, which comes into effect on April 10, matches the rate of the ‘reciprocal’ tariff imposed by Trump this week. The levies are in addition to the existing tariffs already imposed on US goods.

US exports to China totalled $143.5 billion last year, according to Office of the US Trade Representative data. Oilseeds and grains, including soybeans, machinery and aerospace products were America’s top exports to the country. The US imported $438.9 billion worth of goods from China last year, with top imports including electrical and electronic equipment, machinery, toys, and plastics.

I don’t know why China is doing this, since the balance of trade surplus means that the more US-China trade declines, the more it will hurt China rather than the USA. All I can think is that China isn’t actually concerned about the inevitable trade war, but is more interested in gradually turning up the heat in a conflict that it knows to be unavoidable.

Time would appear to be on China’s side in this regard. It has been 25 years since Bill Clinton announced the United States-China Relation Act of 2000 that opened the floodgates of US-China trade.

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EU Hit From Both Sides

The EU’s reaction to getting a taste of its own medicine is downright humorous:

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyden has three big concerns with the new trade/tariff reset. I strongly suggest everyone to read the EU concerns slowly to fully absorb decades of hypocrisy now surfacing:

  • The EU will not be able to compete for U.S. market share with 20% general tariffs and 25% auto tariffs.
  • The EU must deploy countermeasures against the risk of losing industrial capacity and manufacturing to the United States.
  • The EU must defend itself against China dumping cheap products into the EU now rejected by the USA.

Von der Leyen is concerned mostly about the extremely valuable U.S. consumer being leveraged by President Trump, essentially blocking exploitation from EU and Asia. The EU will not tolerate losing access to the most valuable customers in the world, Americans.

So, just to be clear, the EU is now going to a) fight a shooting war with Russia, b) fight an economic war with the USA, and c) fight an economic war with China.

I strongly recommend exiting the so-called Union at the earliest opportunity to every leader of an EU member state. The EU is the last surviving vestige of the neo-liberal world order and it’s going to collapse soon.

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Rumors of War: Flashpoint Iran

There are growing rumors that the USA is going to hit Iran hard on Israel’s behalf:

I’m currently in Tel Aviv, and according to several senior political, military and diplomatic sources, the United States and Israel are preparing to launch a strike on Iran that will finally eradicate the threat posed by the country’s nuclear weapons programme.

‘This should have been avoided a long time ago’, a senior Israeli government source told me. ‘It’s time to draw a line.’

On Monday, Trump announced with typical grandiloquence: ‘If they [Iran] don’t make a deal, there will be bombing… it will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.’ Some observers believed this was just more hyperbolic rhetoric. But the Israeli source was clear. ‘It’s not just a crazy insistence. It’s extremely important for the stability of Israel and the world.’

Threats of military action against Iran’s nuclear weapons programme have been made before. But there’s now clear evidence that, this time, both the US and Israel intend to do more than just rattle their sabres. A week ago the US deployed a trio of B2 ‘Spirit’ stealth bombers, accompanied by long-range refuelling assets, to its Chagos Islands base on Diego Garcia, bringing the total strength of the bomber force there to seven. This was significant because it’s rare to see such a major concentration of these sophisticated – and expensive – assets, and the B2s have the capability to deploy the GBU-57 ‘Bunker Buster’ which can penetrate Iran’s hardened nuclear shelters.

According to a second senior diplomatic source: ‘From Israel’s perspective, with Trump in the White House, this represents the optimum moment to deal with Iran. There won’t be a better chance.’

This isn’t what Americans elected President Trump for. But it is what his AIPAC-affiliated financial investors supported him for. It’s all very impressive and intimidating, I’m sure. But two things occur to me:

  1. The US military thought it could take down the Russians too.
  2. The USA’s Syracuse moment is coming. This may not be it. But it’s exactly the sort of thing that declining empires on the verge of collapse have a tendency to do, because they believe they still can.

We’ll see. I still find it difficult to believe that the God-Emperor is anywhere nearly as genuinely Israel First as his public rhetoric tends to paint him. And certainly, the US-based diasporans don’t tend to believe he’s on truly on their side.

There is only one way to find out, and that is to wait and see.

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Performative Bluster and Sychronized Idiocy

Things are not looking good at all for the core nations of the European Union. The smart thing to do for the smaller nations is to get out of it as soon as possible… although the moronic strategeries of the Starmer regime in the UK demonstrate that simply leaving the EU isn’t enough, the point is to abandon their commitment to suicide by Clown World.

Mr. Trump, the uber-realist, knows that the Russians are going to roll up in Ukraine this spring and there is increasingly not much that can be done about that, except to try to put the best face on it — which is, that it wasn’t his war. As long as the coke freak Zelensky remains in charge, Ukraine will be negotiation-unworthy, as the Russian phrase goes. So, US-Russia peace talks were largely diplomatic showbiz. Both Putin and Mr. Trump were painfully aware of this, and hence, Mr. Trump’s latest performative bluster about “more sanctions” will probably not amount to anything.

And also hence, the synchronized idiocy on display in France, Germany, and the UK. They were all-in on the neo-con scheme that is now falling apart and its failure has driven them plumb crazy. As the US drops out of the stupid proxy war, they declare their intention to take it from here and go beat-up Russia. Their war-drums are teaspoons beating on so many quiches.

Soon-to-be chancellor Friedrich Merz proposes an 800-billion-Euro debt spree to finance the re-arming of Germany, which, just now, is utterly incapable of war. He is insane.

German industry is collapsing from a lack of affordable natural gas (as arranged by “Joe Biden” blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, danke schön). Turning Volkswagen factories to missile production will not help the German people one bit. It probably will remind them about the Weimar hyper-inflation, though.

Macron pledges to put French boots on the ground in Ukraine. Ain’t gonna happen.

Today, his stooge judiciary found political rival Marine LePen guilty of a Mickey Mouse offense in order to bar her from running against him in the next election. Ain’t gonna work. He will provoke the biggest national uprising since the Bastille. His government will be too busy putting down French Revolution 2.0 to play war games in history’s graveyard of armies. Maybe he’ll try nukes. I’m sure that’ll work — if you’re eager to see Russian hypersonic “hazelnuts” rain down on the Île-de-France.

And then, there is the amazing idiot PM Keir Starmer in the UK, calling on his “coalition of the willing” to step up and intervene in the lost cause that is Ukraine.

How many hands went up on that call? For practical purposes, the Brits have no war-fighting capacity whatsoever, and no resources for generating such capacity. And, anyway, they are facing some dreadful combo of a civil war / internal jihad against their own indigenous population, plus an economic collapse cherry-on-top.

In short, Europe has so many incipient existential problems that the whole story is about to shift its focus from the already-sealed fate of Ukraine to the very dark prospects for the core nations of Old-World Western Civ.

At this point, Vladimir Putin merits the Nobel Peace Prize several times over in light of his refusal to respond to the various casus belli he’s been repeatedly provided by the USA, Germany, France, and Britain, as per the New York Times.

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There Will Be No Deal

Big Serge, one of the Internet’s foremost military historians, doesn’t see any negotiated deal bringing an end to the war in Ukraine:

I have never made any bones about my belief that the war in Ukraine will be resolved militarily: that is, it will be fought to its conclusion and end in the defeat of Ukraine in the east, Russian control of vast swathes of the country, and the subordination of a rump Ukraine to Russian interests. Trump’s self conception is greatly tied up in his image as a “dealmaker”, and his view of foreign affairs as fundamentally transactional in nature. As the American president, he has the power to force this framing on Ukraine, but not on Russia. There remain intractable gulfs between Russia’s war aims and what Kiev is willing to discuss, and it is doubtful that Trump will be able to reconcile these differences. Russia, however, does not need to accept a partial victory simply in the name of goodwill and negotiation. Moscow has recourse to a more primal form of power. The sword predates and transcends the pen. Negotiation, as such, must bow to the reality of the battlefield, and no amount of sharp deal making can transcend the more ancient law of blood.

I assume he’s right. I wish he wasn’t, but all of the various factors point to an intractable impossibility. Even the Israelis and the Palestinians were able to establish a peacefire, but the quad-belligerents of Russia, Kiev, Brussels, and the USA simply have too many conflicting interests to manage even that.

While Brussels has been sidelined and its views are irrelevant, the USA has been reluctant to accept the facts of the situation and is still, publicly, at least, posturing as if it has any influence over Russia. Unless and until the Trump administration recognizes that it cannot make Russia do anything, its posturing is no more meaningful than Kiev’s more obviously irrelevant posturing. I see absolutely no purpose in President Trump blathering about his emotions vis-a-vis the Russian President; just pull the plug already!

Russia isn’t that far off from its real goals. So, its interests are almost certainly best served by continuing the war, taking everything it wishes, and then agreeing to talking about a settlement that will give it even more. This is why the correct move by the USA is to withdraw all support for Ukraine and the EU alike, and force the unconditional surrender that will be the eventual outcome of a war that continues into 2026.

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The USA Attacked Russia

To absolutely no one’s surprise, the New York Times reveals that the USA, under the Fake Biden interregnum, was a co-belligerent in the NATO war against Russia:

The administration of US President Joe Biden was far more deeply involved in backing Ukraine’s fight against Russia than previously acknowledged, a New York Times investigation has claimed, stressing that Washington’s intelligence was indispensable for Kiev’s military operations.

The lengthy report released on Saturday offers a deep dive into an “extraordinary partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology” that became Kiev’s “secret weapon” in countering Russia.

While the Pentagon supplied Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in military aid, it also provided crucial intelligence that enabled Kiev to attack Russian command and control centers and other high-value targets starting in mid-2022, the NYT said.

According to the article, the heart of this partnership lay at the US Army facility in Wiesbaden, Germany, where American and Ukrainian officers set daily targeting priorities which they reportedly referred to as “points of interest,” for fear of appearing too provocative.

American and Ukrainian officers planned major counteroffensives together and launched large long-range high-precision strikes, using Western-supplied weapons on Russia’s Crimea, the NYT also claimed. The US has also dispatched dozens of military advisers to Ukraine, some of whom were allowed to travel close to the frontline.

In 2024, the US extended its permissions to allow Ukraine carry out limited long-range strikes using American-supplied weapons into internationally recognized Russian territory – for years considered a “red line.” Washington provided Kiev with the targeting data for the strikes. One European intelligence official was shocked by the level of US involvement in the conflict, telling the Times, “they are part of the kill chain now.”

Russia would be perfectly within its rights to launch retaliatory strikes on London, Paris, Brussels, or Washington DC now. The globalist organizations headquartered in those four cities are 100-percent guilty of having attacked Russia. The only reason it won’t do so is because time is on its side; the last desperate hope of Clown World is to provoke Russia into striking back hard enough to galvanize widespread Western support for a war on Russia.

The fact that Clown World’s very clever and not-at-all transparent strategy rests on such an obvious non-starter only serves to underline how fragile their globalist neo-tower of Babel is now. At this point, Americans wouldn’t care if Russian troops not only took Kiev and Odessa, they wouldn’t care if they occupied Berlin and Brussels as well.

The constant portrayal of the patient, cautious Putin, who is probably the individual most responsible for preventing WWIII, as an aggressive dictator is such a complete inversion of the truth that it is probably going to be genuinely shocking to most people when he is eventually succeeded by a much more hardline figure who is much more willing to hold Russia’s enemies accountable for their constant provocations.

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