Tag: war

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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The War in the North

Despite having failed to finish off Hamas, Israel is seriously contemplating launching a war with Hezbollah, which Simplicius expects will have serious ramifications for Ukraine:

A biblical red glow torments the skies of northern Israel, which now burns with a Zionist’s zeal for Palestinian land, after a series of Hezbollah strikes. The gods of war are smiling favorably on the coming summer, as flashpoints all across the globe heat up. And the mother of all of them threatens to engulf the region in even more flame with the announcement that Israel could launch the long-awaited war against Hezbollah by mid-June, with rumor claiming the Knesset may vote to take action as early as tonight.

This happens to convolve with a host of other ponderous developments, which include Russia’s slow buildup for a large-scale escalation in the north. If Israel truly kicks off another massive war to its own north, it could be the final nail in Ukraine’s coffin.

Recall that in a short 4 months, we will have reached the 1 year anniversary of Israel’s invasion of Gaza and its meandering war against Hamas. If in almost a full year of fighting, Israel can make no real headway against the comparatively tiny Hamas, how long would it take for them to tame Hezbollah in what can only be expected to be a far more ‘high intensity’ conflict?

You can be sure that every available Western munition—particularly of the artillery variety—will be routed to Israel and Ukraine will be historically screwed at the key moment of Russia’s largest scale maneuvers. It would be the ultimate irony should Ukraine fall as consequence of Israel’s actions—but alas, Zelensky and Netanyahu appear locked into parallel fates: both require the continuation of war to survive their political crises.

And the big question remains: when will China – or in its delusions of military supremacy, the USA – elect to open the Asian front.

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Magical Thinking and the Impotence of Mammon

The self-appointed gods of Clown World are having trouble understanding the difference between power and influence, and that no amount of influence – which is what money always and ultimately amounts to – is an effective substitute for actual material power:

We come back to the question of why anybody believed $60 billion could move the needle for Kiev’s cause in the first place. But this question is, alas, difficult to answer because policymaking in Washington is enshrouded under a thick fog that consists of two dominant components: magical thinking and political imperatives. For those who earnestly believed that $60 billion would turn the tide of the war, it is more of the former; for those aligning themselves with the political winds and pretending to support Ukraine much as a mime pretends to be trapped in a phone booth, it is the latter. In many cases it is both, and it is difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends.

Magical thinking is a recognizable symptom of that particular moment in time when an erstwhile great power is in decline but events have not quite yet forced it to come to grips with that decline. It is also a time of diminished scope for action. In times past, perhaps Washington would have solved a crisis such as Ukraine through crafty diplomacy or orchestrated a formidable proxy war with its industrial might and military expertise. But the US now seems incapable of sophisticated diplomacy and its industrial base has badly atrophied through decades of offshoring and financialization. After mostly fighting insurgencies in recent times, it now has no idea how to fight a peer war. About all that it can muster is aid bills with large dollar figures. If all you have is a hammer, the old saying goes, every problem looks like a nail. If all you have left is a printing press for dollars, then every problem must be solvable by an infusion of money – even if it’s not entirely clear what that money can buy.

But here we have stumbled onto something interesting: a belief in the omnipotence of money. Perhaps not a sincere belief; are there any sincere beliefs in Washington? Let’s think of it more as an ingrained pattern of thought for confronting a wide range of problems. In that sense, it is a framework suspiciously reminiscent of the approach used to combat financial crises. It doesn’t seem like so much of a stretch to imagine the entire Ukraine aid discussion framed as something that has become very familiar in recent years: a financial bailout.

A too-big-to-fail financial institution called Ukraine is teetering on the edge of failure and a bailout is needed. Although the bank is far away from the heart of Wall Street, there are fears of contagion – if this one fails, others will follow and soon no bank anywhere will be safe. The bank’s owners may be crooks, but that is not what is preoccupying policymakers. They are nervous about a spread that has suddenly moved against the bank: it is supposed to trade at 1:1 but has blown out to 1:10 (the ratio of artillery fire by Ukrainian and Russian forces). Shoving a $60-billion bailout into the bank should at least put out the fires and calm markets.

Zoltan Poszar, the legendary former Credit Suisse chief strategist who needs no introduction in finance circles, made a fascinating observation on the topic of the reflexive response of throwing money at a problem. Poszar was speaking narrowly about how a certain group of people approach a certain problem and was not talking about policymaking, much less Ukraine, but his conclusion traces the contours of something deeper.

When the specter of inflation reemerged in 2021, Poszar made the rounds of portfolio managers and, after talking with them, reached an interesting conclusion: nobody knew how to think about inflation. Nearly everyone on Wall Street is too young to remember the last serious bout of inflation, which occurred way back in the 1980s. So, according to Poszar, they all thought of the spike in the inflation charts as just another spread that blew out on their Bloomberg screens that could be solved by throwing balance sheet at it – a “crisis of basis” as he calls it. The formative experiences for today’s denizens of Wall Street, Poszar explains, are the Asian financial crisis of 1998, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, some spread blowouts since 2015, and the pandemic. In all of these cases, money was pumped in and eventually the dislocations disappeared.

To put this in plain English, Poszar’s clients hadn’t encountered a problem that couldn’t be solved – or at least swept under the rug – by simply adding money, in whatever form, whether via an emergency loan or quantitative easing. This is of course a bit of an oversimplification, but it captures something of the essence of the prevailing pattern of thought.

The seeds of failure are sown by the blooming flowers of success. The current generation of clowns have literally never encountered a problem that could not be solved by throwing money at it. All of their theoretical and practical knowledge points to the same solution: more money.

This is why the rise of the BRICSIA alternative to the USD, the CRIPS alternative to SWIFT, and the Belt and Road alternative to the IMF loansharks are potential death blows to Clown World. They have, in three fell swoops, essentially disarmed Clown World by taking its only weapon out of the equation.

I strongly suspect the fine hand of Wang Hunin in this long-term strategic approach.

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Russia is Playing Black

But I’m not entirely sure that Clown World is even playing chess. It looks a lot more like checkers to me.

In the conversation between Russia and the United States, a certain readable language has emerged that can be read and understood. The sequence of steps and actions is this language: everything has a clear meaning. This makes it possible to understand what both sides are trying to achieve and to state that such a language of gestures is still readable and that the situation has not collapsed into chaos.

Thus, we see a clear desire on the part of the West to drive Russia into an escalation algorithm favorable to NATO. This is a protracted war of attrition against our country, waged exclusively with conventional weapons, for which NATO has the potential for quantitative and/or qualitative advantage. Even in those weapons where Russia has a predominance, NATO is trying to compensate for the situation with the combined use of other means of attack.

Russia is signaling that it sees this scenario and is conducting TNW deployment exercises, albeit without loading warheads. This is a warning that there is a counter-scenario and that the West will not be able to impose its war plan.

The West immediately responds with strikes on Russian missile warning system (MWS) radar stations near Armavir and Orenburg, with a simultaneous attack on an antenna in Crimea, also used for this purpose. So far, this is only a demonstration. But the West has outlined the trajectories of future strikes and made it clear that it is capable of attacking Russia’s SPRN in a combined and serial manner, if Russia develops the topic of TNWs, rather than continuing the war according to the NATO plan by conventional means, where the West expects to realize its resource advantage.

At the same time, Russia is being given to understand that the West sees the problem of manning the AFU and is preparing to introduce contingents of NATO countries into Ukraine. NATO intends to block Russian intentions to block this build-up with TNWs by denoting its ability to blind our Strategic Nuclear Forces. This, according to the West, should force Russia to give up its strong trump card and accept an ultimatum in the fall, the text of which will be approved in Switzerland in June.

At the same time, the West is conducting exercises to launch nuclear attacks near our borders. The pressure on the Russian leadership is exerted on all fronts, in combination. Preparedness for nuclear attacks, counting on internal instability, demonstrating readiness to expand escalation without restrictions – this is the language the West is now using with Russia. The goal is to convince the Russian leadership that it is impossible to inflict unacceptable damage on the West and surrender.

Before us is a chess game where Russia is playing Black. Her strategy is built in relation to White’s strategy. The opening is over, the exchange phase (middlegame) has begun. White shows that he is ready to throw pieces off the board and move to a fight. Black shows that it will cost White a lot.

The strategy of the West is a penned hunt, the strategy of Russia is a hunt for the hunter. These strategies are 200 years old, they are constant and are now being repeated. The West understands only real answers, it will not stop until it has tried everything. Russia will have to respond in kind. It’s about where Ukraine’s borders will be drawn and how the new balance of power in Europe will be formed.

What I find so astonishingly bizarre about the mainstream coverage of the Ukraine situation is the way in which it is always discussed in complete isolation from everything else going on in WWIII. Yes, it’s true that Russia might well struggle if forced to face the combined might of Clown World alone – which is the USA, the UK, the EU, and Japan – but Russia is not alone! Russia is very far from alone, being more closely allied to China than Japan or any of the European satrapies are to the USA.

Defense Minister Minoru Kihara conveyed Tokyo’s “serious concern” about Beijing’s increased military activity near Japan during talks with his Chinese counterpart Dong Jun on Saturday, while both agreed to maintain bilateral dialogue, according to the Japanese Defense Ministry. In their first meeting held on the sidelines of the annual Asia Security Summit in Singapore, known as the Shangri-La Dialogue, Kihara said there are “many security concerns” for the two Asian nations, such as a territorial row in the East China Sea and increased joint military activities by Beijing and Russia around Japan.

Only the UK is tied to the USA by more than threats and political corruption, and both the combined demographics and industrial capacity of the BRICSIA alliance far surpasses that of Clown World. Indeed, I think that the event the Chinese are waiting for prior to their next major move, whatever that may be, is either a) a NATO attack on Russia or b) a massive Russian offensive aimed at knocking Kiev out of the war.

Remember, for all its careful harboring of its resources in the current Special Military Operation, the 20th Century Russians specialized in the Zhukovian art of unexpectedly delivering overwhelming force on a scale larger than anything the West has ever known.

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Taiwan in Three Weeks

I am VERY dubious for a number of reasons, beginning with the interpretation. But then, I was also wrong about the Russian SMO kicking off in February 2022; I didn’t realize Putin was going to actually follow through.

Chinese State TV declaring today that China will reclaim Taiwan, likely in early June. It has begun preparing the Chinese public for coming war and possible political sanctions and isolation!! According to Chinese defense ministry sources, the Chinese army will launch an attack on Taiwan in early June.

Time will tell. I don’t think the threats about the Three Gorges Dam matter very much, though. In fact, if Taiwan is actually threatening the dam, that makes a forced reunification more likely rather than less. And the Chinese military has clearly stepped up the pressure since the recent election of the new pro-independence President.

The just-concluded large-scale joint exercise conducted by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has shocked “Taiwan independence” secessionist forces, with a pilot of the island’s air force reportedly admitting that “the air force will eventually collapse.”

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