[After 8 years of low-grade civil war between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in Novorussia (Donbass Region), Ukraine unilaterally escalated the war along the Donbass front in late February]
By now it’s abundantly clear that the neo-Orwellian “Two Minute Hate” Russophobic campaign launched by the Empire of Lies after the start of Operation Z is actually “24/7 Hate”.
Vast swathes of NATOstan have been corralled into behaving like a Russophobic lynch mob. No dissent is tolerated. The full psyops has de facto upgraded the Empire of Lies to the status of Empire of Hate in a Total War – hybrid and otherwise – to cancel Russia.
Hate, after all, packs way more punch than mere lies, which are now veering into abject ridiculousness, as in U.S. “intelligence” resorting to – what else – lies to fight the info war against Russia.
If the propaganda overdrive has been lethally effective amidst the zombified Western masses – call it a “win” in the P.R. war – in the front where it really matters, inside Russia, it’s a major fail.
Public opinion support for both Operation Z and President Putin is unprecedented. After videos of torture of Russian POWs that caused widespread revulsion, Russian civil society is even bracing for a “Long War” lasting months, not weeks, as long as the targets of the Russian High Command – actually a military secret – are met.
The stated aims are “demilitarization” and “denazification” of a future neutral Ukraine – but geopolitically reach way beyond: the aim is to turn the post-1945 European collective security arrangement upside down, forcing NATO to understand and come to terms with the concept of “indivisible security”. This is an extremely complex process that will reach the next decade.
The NATOstan sphere simply cannot admit in public a series of facts that a military analyst of the caliber of Andrei Martyanov has been explaining for years. And that adds to their collective pain.
Russia can take on NATO and smash it to bits in 48 hours. It may employ advanced strategic deterrence systems unmatched across the West. Its southern axis – from the Caucasus and West Asia to Central Asia – is fully stabilized. And if the going gets really tough, Mr. Zircon can deliver his hypersonic nuclear business card with the other side not even knowing what hit it.
“Europe has chosen its fate”
It may be enlightening to see how these complex processes are interpreted by Russians – whose points of view are now completely blocked across NATOstan.
Let’s take two examples. The first is Lieutenant General L.P. Reshetnikov, in an analytical note examining facts of the ground war.
Some key takeaways:
– “Over Romania and Poland there are airborne early warning aircraft of NATO with experienced crews, there are U.S. intelligence satellites in the sky all the time. I remind you that just in terms of budgets for our Roscosmos we allocated $2.5 billion a year, the civil budget of NASA is $25 billion, the civil budget of SpaceX alone is equal to Roscosmos – and that is not counting the tens of billions of dollars annually for the entire U.S. feverishly unfolding the control system of the entire planet.”
– The war is unfolding according to “NATO’s eyes and brains. The Ukronazis are nothing but free controlled zombies. And the Ukrainian army is a remotely controlled zombie organism.”
– “The tactics and strategy of this war will be the subject of textbooks for military academies around the world. Once again: the Russian army is smashing a Nazi zombie organism, fully integrated with the eyes and brain of NATO.”
Now let’s switch to Oleg Makarenko, who focuses on the Big Picture.
– “The West considers itself ‘the whole world’ only because it has not yet received a sufficiently sensitive punch on the nose. It just so happened that Russia is now giving him this click: with the rear support of Asia, Africa and Latin America. And the West can do absolutely nothing with us, since it also lags behind us in terms of the number of nuclear warheads.”
– “Europe has chosen its fate. And chose fate for Russia. What you are seeing now is the death of Europe. Even if it does not come to nuclear strikes on industrial centers, Europe is doomed. In a situation where European industry is left without cheap Russian energy sources and raw materials – and China will begin to receive these same energy carriers and raw materials at a discount, there can be no talk of any real competition with China from Europe. As a result, literally everything will collapse there – after industry, agriculture will collapse, welfare and social security will collapse, hunger, banditry and chaos will begin.”
It’s fair to consider Reshetnikov and Makarenko as faithfully representing the overall Russian sentiment, which interprets the crude Bucha false flag as a cover to obscure the Ukrainian army torture of Russian POWs.
And, deeper still, Bucha allowed the disappearance of Pentagon bioweapon labs from the Western mediasphere, complete with its ramifications: evidence of a concerted American drive to ultimately deploy real weapons of mass destruction against Russia.
The multi-level Bucha hoax had to include the Brit presidency of the UN Security Council actually blocking a serious discussion, a day before the Russian Ministry of Defense struggled to present to the UN – predictably minus the U.S. and the UK – all the bioweapon facts they have unearthed in Ukraine. The Chinese were horrified by the findings.
The Russian Investigative Committee at least persists in its work, with 100 researchers unearthing evidence of war crimes across Donbass to be presented at a tribunal in the near future, most probably set up in Donetsk.
And that brings us back to the facts on the ground. There’s a lot of analytical discussion on the possible endgame of Operation Z. A fair assessment would include the liberation of all of Novorossiya and total control of the Black Sea coastline that currently is part of Ukraine.
“Ukraine” in fact was never a state; it was always an annex to another state or empire such as Poland, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and crucially Russia.
The landmark Russian state was Kievan Rus. “Ukraine”, in old Russian, means “border region”. In the past, it referred to the westernmost regions of the Russian Empire. When the Empire started expanding south, the new regions annexed mostly from Turkish rule were called Novorossiya (“New Russia”) and the northeastern regions, Malorossiya (“Little Russia”).
It was up to the USSR in the early 1920s to jumble it all together and name it “Ukraine” – adding Galicia in the west, which was historically non-Russian.
Yet the key development is when the USSR broke up in 1991. As the Empire of Lies de facto controlled post-Soviet Russia, they could never have possibly allowed the real Russian regions of the USSR – that is, Novorossiya and Malorossiya – to be again incorporated to the Russian Federation.
Russia is now re-incorporating them – in an “I Did It, My Way” manner.
Vamos a bailar in European Puerto Rico
By now it’s also quite clear to any serious geopolitical analysis that Operation Z opened a Pandora’s box. And the supreme historical victim of all the toxicity finally let loose is bound to be Europe.
The indispensable Michael Hudson, in a new essay on the U.S. dollar devouring the euro, argues half in jest that Europe might as well surrender its currency, and go on like “a somewhat larger version of Puerto Rico.”
After all, Europe “has pretty much ceased to be a politically independent state, it is beginning to look more like Panama and Liberia – ‘flag of convenience’ offshore banking centers that are not real ‘states’ because they don’t issue their own currency, but use the U.S. dollar.”
In synch with quite a few Russian, Chinese and Iranian analysts, Hudson advances that the war in Ukraine – actually in its “full-blown version as the New Cold War” – is likely to last “at least a decade, perhaps two as the U.S. extends the fight between neoliberalism and socialism [meaning the Chinese system] to encompass a worldwide conflict.”
What may be seriously in dispute is whether the U.S., after “the economic conquest of Europe”, will be able to “lock in African, South American and Asian countries”. The Eurasia integration process, rolling in earnest for 10 years now, conducted by the Russia-China strategic partnership and expanding to most of the Global South, will go no holds barred to prevent it.
There’s no question, as Hudson states, that “the world economy is being enflamed” – with the U.S. weaponizing trade. Yet on the Right Side of History we have the Rublegas, the petroyuan, the new monetary/financial system being designed in a partnership between the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China.
And that’s something no puny Cancel Culture War can erase.
The unaccountable coterie of neocons and liberal interventionists who orchestrated two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East are now stoking a suicidal war with Russia.
“Whores of War,” original illustration by Mr. Fish.
The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.
They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institute. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any empire, including that of the U.S., leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next.
I spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent reporting on the suffering, misery, and murderous rampages these shills for war engineered and funded. My first encounter with them was in Central America. Elliot Abrams — convicted of providing misleading testimony to Congress on the Iran-Contra Affair and later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush so he could return to government to sell us the Iraq War — and Robert Kagan, director of the State Department’s public diplomacy office for Latin America — were propagandists for the brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as the rapists and homicidal thugs that made up the rogue Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which they illegally funded. Their job was to discredit our reporting.
“Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished.”
They, and their coterie of fellow war lovers, went on to push for the expansion of NATO in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, violating an agreement not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany and recklessly antagonizing Russia. They were and are cheerleaders for the apartheid state of Israel, justifying its war crimes against Palestinians and myopically conflating Israel’s interests with those of the U.S. They advocated for air strikes in Serbia, calling for the U.S. to “take out” Slobodan Milosevic. They were the authors of the policy to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, with their typical cluelessness, wrote in April 2002 that “the road that leads to real security and peace” is “the road that runs through Baghdad.”
We saw how that worked out. That road led to the dissolution of Iraq, the destruction of its civilian infrastructure, including the obliteration of 18 of 20 electricity-generating plants and nearly all the water-pumping and sanitation systems during a 43-day period when 90,000 tons of bombs were rained down on the country, the rise of radical jihadist groups throughout the region, and failed states.
The war in Iraq, along with the humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, shredded the illusion of U.S. military and global hegemony. It also inflicted on Iraqis, who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11, the widespread killing of civilians, the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, and the ascendancy of Iran as the preeminent power in the region.
Push for War & Overthrows
They continue to call for a war with Iran, with Fred Kagan stating that “there is nothing we can do short of attacking to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons.” They pushed for the overthrow of President Nicholas Maduro, after trying to do the same to Hugo Chavez, in Venezuela. They have targeted Daniel Ortega, their old nemesis in Nicaragua.
They embrace a purblind nationalism that prohibits them from seeing the world from any perspective other than their own. They know nothing about the machinery of war, its consequences, or its inevitable blowback. They know nothing about the peoples and cultures they target for violent regeneration. They believe in their divine right to impose their “values” on others by force. Fiasco after fiasco. Now they are stoking a war with Russia.
“The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,” Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš observed.
“Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell — it’s other people (other nations, another tribe). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images — as nationalists.”
The Biden administration is filled with these ignoramuses, including Joe Biden. Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan, serves as Biden’s undersecretary of state for political affairs. Antony Blinken is secretary of state. Jake Sullivan is national security adviser.
Oct. 8, 2014: U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland at a Ukrainian State Border Guard Service Base in Kiev. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)
They come from this cabal of moral and intellectual trolls that includes Kimberly Kagan, the wife of Fred Kagan, who founded The Institute for the Study of War, William Kristol, Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Gary Schmitt, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Frum and others. Many were once staunch Republicans or, like Nuland, served in Republican and Democratic administrations. Nuland was the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
They are united by the demand for larger and larger defense budgets and an ever-expanding military. Julian Benda called these courtiers to power “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.”
They once railed against liberal weakness and appeasement. But they swiftly migrated to the Democratic Party rather than support Donald Trump, who showed no desire to start a conflict with Russia and who called the invasion of Iraq a “big, fat mistake.” Besides, as they correctly pointed out, Hillary Clinton was a fellow neocon. And liberals wonder why nearly half the electorate, who revile these arrogant unelected power brokers, as they should, voted for Trump.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during presidential election 2016. (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)
These ideologues did not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every dead body I stood over in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gaza, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, their intellectual dishonesty and their sick bloodlust.
They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military. But they eagerly ship young American men and women off to fight and die for their self-delusional dreams of empire and American hegemony. Or, as in Ukraine, they provide hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry and logistical support to sustain long and bloody proxy wars.
Historical time stopped for them with the end of World War II. The overthrow of democratically elected governments by the U.S. during the Cold War in Indonesia, Guatemala, the Congo, Iran and Chile (where the C.I.A. oversaw the assassination of the commander-in-chief of the army, General René Schneider, and President Salvador Allende); the Bay of Pigs; the atrocities and war crimes that defined the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos; even the disasters they manufactured in the Middle East, have disappeared into the black hole of their collective historical amnesia.
“Julian Benda called these courtiers to power ‘the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.’ ”
American global domination, they claim, is benign, a force for good, “benevolent hegemony.” The world, Charles Krauthammer insisted, welcomes “our power.” All enemies, from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, are the new Hitler. All U.S. interventions are a fight for freedom that make the world a safer place. All refusals to bomb and occupy another country are a 1938 Munich moment, a pathetic retreat from confronting evil by the new Neville Chamberlain. We do have enemies abroad. But our most dangerous enemy is within.
The warmongers build a campaign against a country such as Iraq or Russia and then wait for a crisis — they call it the next Pearl Harbor — to justify the unjustifiable.
In 1998, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, along with a dozen other prominent neoconservatives, wrote an open letter to President Bill Clinton denouncing his policy of containment of Iraq as a failure and demanding that he go to war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. To continue the “course of weakness and drift,” they warned, was to “put our interests and our future at risk.”
Neera Tanden and William Kristol in a dialog on Sept. 30, 2018. (Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan)
Huge majorities in Congress, Republican and Democrat, rushed to pass the Iraq Liberation Act. Few Democrats or Republicans dared be seen as soft on national security. The act stated that the United States government would work to “remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein” and authorized $99 million towards that goal, some of it being used to fund Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress that would become instrumental in disseminating the fabrications and lies used to justify the Iraq war during the administration of George W. Bush.
The attacks of 9/11 gave the war party its opening, first with Afghanistan, then Iraq. Krauthammer, who knew nothing about the Muslim world, wrote that:
“the way to tame the Arab street is not with appeasement and sweet sensitivity but with raw power and victory…The elementary truth that seems to elude the experts again and again…is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything, psychologically above all. The psychology in the [Middle East] is now one of fear and deep respect for American power. Now is the time to use it.”
Removing Saddam Hussein from power, Kristol crowed, would “transform the political landscape of the Middle East.”
It did, of course, but not in ways that benefited the U.S.
“Historical time stopped for them with the end of World War II.”
They lust for apocalyptic global war. Fred Kagan, the brother of Robert, a military historian, wrote in 1999 that “America must be able to fight Iraq and North Korea, and also be able to fight genocide in the Balkans and elsewhere without compromising its ability to fight two major regional conflicts. And it must be able to contemplate war with China or Russia some considerable (but not infinite) time from now [author’s emphasis].”
They believe violence magically solves all disputes, even the Israeli-Palestinian morass. In a bizarre interview immediately after 9/11, Donald Kagan, the Yale classicist and rightwing ideologue who was the father of Robert and Fred, called, along with his son Fred, for the deployment of U.S. troops in Gaza so we could “take the war to these people.”
They have long demanded the stationing of NATO troops in Ukraine, with Robert Kagan saying that “we need to not worry that the problem is our encirclement rather than Russian ambitions.” His wife, Victoria Nuland, was outed in a leaked phone conversation in 2014 with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, disparaging the EU and plotting to remove the lawfully elected President Viktor Yanukovych and install compliant Ukrainian politicians in power, most of whom did eventually take power.
They lobbied for U.S. troops to be sent to Syria to assist “moderate” rebels seeking to overthrow Basha al-Assad. Instead, the intervention spawned the Caliphate. The U.S. ended up bombing the very forces they had armed, becoming Assad’s de facto air force.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the attacks of 9/11, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Putin, like everyone else they target, only understands force. We can, they assure us, militarily bend Russia to our will.
“Toward a Europe Whole and Free,” April 29-30, 2014. From left: Moderator David Ensor, Voice of America director; Robert Kagan, senior fellow, Brookings; Frederick Kempe, president and CEO, Atlantic Council; Alexandr Vondra, former minister of defense of the Czech Republic. (Atlantic Council, Flickr)
“It is true that acting firmly in 2008 or 2014 would have meant risking conflict,” Robert Kagan wrote in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, lamenting our refusal to militarily confront Russia earlier. He wrote:
“But Washington is risking conflict now; Russia’s ambitions have created an inherently dangerous situation. It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small: Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world.”
In short, don’t worry about going to war with Russia, Putin won’t use the bomb.
I do not know if these people are stupid or cynical or both. They are lavishly funded by the war industry. They are never dropped from the networks for their repeated idiocy. They rotate in and out of power, parked in places like The Council on Foreign Relations or The Brookings Institute, before being called back into government. They are as welcome in the Obama or Biden White House as the Bush White House.
The Cold War, for them, never ended. The world remains binary, us and them, good and evil. They are never held accountable. When one military intervention goes up in flames, they are ready to promote the next. These Dr. Strangeloves, if we don’t stop them, will terminate life as we know it on the planet.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times
War is creeping closer to NATO's borders. On Sunday, a Ukrainian base just 11 miles from Poland was struck by Russian rockets. It seems like a warning. If one of those missiles had traveled just a few seconds farther west, NATO — and therefore the United States — and Russia could be on the verge of war.
While we can hope that cooler heads would prevail in case of such an accident or "accident," that's by no means guaranteed. So, if the occasion arose, could NATO pull the trigger on a full-scale war against Russia right this moment?
The short answer is "no," and it's time for both armchair military strategists and lawmakers calling for escalation to realize it.
"We're in a reassurance posture, for our allies. We're showing we're in the game and our commitment is still strong," David Shlapak of the Rand Corporation, told The Week in a recent interview. "We're not in a deterrence posture. We're not in a credible warfighting posture."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for a no-fly zone (NFZ) many times, and there are plenty of people in the foreign policy establishment and even Congress who want to give it to him. NATO isn't ready to do that either.
To set up a no-fly zone, the United States would have to move hundreds of planes from bases around the world. It would take weeks to set up and couldn't be done under cloak of darkness. The Russians would know NATO was coming, and if you knew NATO was coming, wouldn't you take countermeasures? Wouldn't you see an act of war on the horizon?
Even if NATO got around Russia's plans, enforcing the NFZ would mean shooting down Russian planes. It would also mean taking out Russian anti-aircraft defenses so NATO warplanes could fly safely, according to experts who spoke with The Week. Those, of course, are on the ground, many of them inside Russian and Belarusian borders. Taking them out would involve NATO in a ground war, and the West is even less ready for that.
There are 74,000 U.S. military personnel in Europe, including the United Kingdom, Italy, France, and Spain, with the largest number (36,000) in Germany. Not all these people are front-line fighters. Many are involved in logistics, maintenance, and other tasks. There is a broader, 40,000-strong NATO response force, too, and some thousands of these troops are in the front-line Baltic nations of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. All told, fewer than 100,000 NATO forces in Europe are even close to being ready to fight.
The Russian force brought together for the Ukraine invasion is double that, about 190,000, and total Russian forces number 900,000.
Could NATO bring a larger force to bear? You bet. But it would take months, according to Shlapak.
For NATO to truly be ready to face down Russia, at least 100,000 more troops would have to be transported to Europe from the United States, Mark Cancian, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Week. Weapons, equipment, and logistics would all have to be scaled up accordingly.
Once preparations were made on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, ships would have to make the 3,000-mile trip to bases in Europe like Bremerhaven, Germany, and from there they would have to be deployed wherever they were needed most.
All of this would take between two and three months, Cancian and Shlapak agreed. All of it would be visible by satellite and in every other way imaginable. Getting ready for war is loud.
When the coalition of the willing went into Iraq in 2003, it took months to build up forces on Iraq's borders. It was obvious — everyone knew the war was coming — but the foe was so inferior, all they could do was dig in and hope the U.S. would lose interest in fighting.
That is not the case with Russia. As NATO planes approach Ukrainian borders with hostile intent, Russia's forces can meet them, and what are the chances Russia wouldn't strike first? If you were Russian President Vladimir Putin, would you wait for warplanes to attack you before you attacked them?
Similarly, ships crossing the Atlantic have been sunk before, and all parties have spent 80 since World War II improving their technique. Russia and NATO regularly patrol each other's shores, ready for war — waiting for provocation. It's fair to say hundreds of ships steaming toward Europe for a fight might be considered a provocation.
Of course, the ultimate provocation is declaring war on a sovereign and Western-friendly nation, so perhaps anything NATO and the West do is justified. And there are precedents for arming our enemy's enemy without full-scale war breaking out (for example, the delivery of Stinger missiles to the mujahideen fighting Russia in Afghanistan in the 1980s).
But there have already been a series of provocations by the West, including sending Javelin anti-tank weapons into Ukraine by the hundreds. From the most extreme Russian point of view, this is basically NATO saying, "We are supplying weapons to kill your children." And if, as many observers have pointed out, the Russian military isn't living up to tactical and strategic expectations and can't actually capture the Baltics before the U.S. can blink, Putin still has the option of going nuclear, even if it's just on the tactical scale.
Nobody knows where the world goes from there. But with Putin becoming more bellicose every day, Russian forces ratcheting up brutality against civilians in Ukraine, and with the fighting coming to NATO's very doorstep, there is every chance that we are on the verge of a true world war.
[First Biden removes the "terrorist" designation from the Colombian FARC terrorist group, clearing the way to openly embrace the group for some future American-sponsored terror campaign, much like the Obama/Biden creation of ISIS in Iraq and Syria (What Is The Truth About ISIS?). Qatar and Saudi Arabia built ISIS for Obama from the remains of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in order to create a terrorist jihadi army, for the purpose of overthrowing Bashar Assad. ISIS was created to fight the wars started by Obama, Biden and Hillary inside Syria and Libya, serving as another CIA-created terrorist Islamist army, just like their Al-Qaeda predecessors.
Biden then designates the Colombian narco-state as a major non-NATO ally, even though it is home to hordes of "rehabilitated" FARC terrorists, in addition to all the Colombian cocaine cartel/mafias, not to mention all of those former American-trained military "death squads". He chooses the Colombian mercenaries/terrorists for the mission in Ukraine because these same killers have been killing for Western interests all over the globe for the past decade. Russia understands that the Colombian terrorists are the NEW ISIS.]
"In politics, the only true thing is what is not seen", José Martí.
1. The geopolitical consequences of the NATO-Russia confrontation impact Our America. The implications of the military conflict in Europe will be capital for the continent. This will increase the struggle of China, Russia and the United States for political influence and markets in America. Latin America and the Caribbean will be a key territory in the global dispute, a fundamental geo-strategic space.
2. Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua constitute important States for the current geopolitical confrontation between the great powers of the world. Additionally, history shows that the Latin American and Caribbean region is considered by the world's elites as a reservoir of raw materials. The foreign policy of imperialism, and particularly of the United States, confirms such an assertion. The armed confrontation in Europe, the consequences derived from the imposition of unilateral coercive measures against the Russian Federation, the international prices of hydrocarbons, the European energy dependency and the global problem of supply chains, place the United States and the European Union in a true energy emergency with serious economic consequences.
3. The "Provisional National Security Strategic Guide" approved by Biden defines Venezuela as a relevant State for US Military Doctrine. Venezuela's energy potential, among other things, places the country in the order of priorities that the US has in the region. Consequently, after the conflict between NATO and Russia, Venezuela will be the center of gravity of Washington's military planning. The official public agenda of the Biden-Duque meeting contains as topics to be discussed, among others, the "promotion of democracy and security." Hidden under this diplomatic euphemism is the approach to the Pentagon's military design for the region, the regional efforts against the Russian-Chinese alliance, and especially the new roadmap to end the Bolivarian Revolution. In that geo-strategic design,
4. It should be noted that Colombia joined NATO in 2018. The Armed Forces. Colombian companies have already adopted the NATO Doctrine, standardized their procedures and pursue interoperability through a "capability and training portfolio" provided by the Organization. The possible scenario assessed by the Pentagon consists of using Colombia to attack Venezuela, an issue that would allow it to take advantage of its status as a global partner of NATO, to invoke Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. The Principle of Collective Security contained in this article obliges NATO Member States to carry out military operations in the face of any attack on a State of the Organization. Consequently, a possible inter-state armed confrontation between Colombia and Venezuela would attempt to cover up US aggression. and NATO against Venezuela. This would mean a change in military tactics that could consist, instead of resorting exclusively to outsourcing the war through paramilitaries and mercenaries as has been happening in Apure, generating a casus belli with the Colombian State that allows NATO to carry out military operations against Venezuela. . In this scenario, Colombia would carry out the aggression, the border states governed by the opposition would be the first territories to join the plan, and NATO would serve to stop the military support of the allied powers of Venezuela. generate a casus belli with the Colombian State that allows NATO to carry out military operations against Venezuela. In this scenario, Colombia would carry out the aggression, the border states governed by the opposition would be the first territories to join the plan, and NATO would serve to stop the military support of the allied powers of Venezuela. generate a casus belli with the Colombian State that allows NATO to carry out military operations against Venezuela. In this scenario, Colombia would carry out the aggression, the border states governed by the opposition would be the first territories to join the plan, and NATO would serve to stop the military support of the allied powers of Venezuela.
5. Preparations for War? In keeping with NATO guidelines, the Damascus Doctrine, officially assumed since 2016, intends to prepare Colombia for a regular war. This supposes a hypothesis of armed conflict that places Venezuela as its main enemy. Indeed, Colombia is already organizing its Armed Forces. in a versatile way, it prepares them for multiple missions, it organizes Task Forces according to the peculiarity of military challenges, it structures its Joint Commands and equips them with new armored units as well as it seeks to obtain state-of-the-art combat aircraft to achieve supremacy. air, among other things. Joint military exercises, close military cooperation with the Pentagon, the US military bases around Venezuela and the deployment of its Security Assistance Brigade in New Granadan territory are part of the indications of the scenario that has been taking shape. Biden has already extended Executive Order 13962 of March 2015 where they describe Venezuela as a threat to their national security. This means that against Venezuela all options are on the table.
[Biden has revealed the next phase in his military moves against Russia, without having to risk open war w/Russian forces over Polish planes. By designating narco-state Colombia as a non-NATO US ally in the Ukraine affair, he is showing his hand. Colombian mercenary/terrorists have been a mainstay in the American attempt to overthrow Syria, as well as providing a terrorist army to Blackwater fame Eric Prince, which he fights for the king of UAE. Do not forget that 2 shady Americans recently hired a squad of Colombian terrorist/mercenaries to capture or kill the Pres. of Haiti...surely Putin will understand that Colombian fighter in Ukraine are American sent terrorists.]
By DARLENE SUPERVILLE - Associated Press By DARLENE SUPERVILLE - Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Thursday that he intends to designate Colombia as a major non-NATO ally, a step that will provide the Latin American nation with benefits in the areas of defense, trade and security cooperation.
Biden made the announcement as he hosted Colombian President Ivan Duque at the White House for the first time. The visit follows weekend talks between Biden administration officials and the leftist government of Nicolás Maduro in neighboring Venezuela, which has a tense relationship with both the U.S. and Colombia.
Avoiding a potentially awkward moment, neither Biden nor Duque raised the U.S.-Venezuela meeting in their public remarks. Colombia is a close U.S. ally, and Duque leads opposition to Maduro in the region,
Biden said he intends to bring Colombia into the NATO fold.
“That's exactly what you are, a major, major non-NATO ally, and this is a recognition of the unique and close relationship between our countries," he told Duque, who sat directly across from the president at a large table in the Cabinet Room, each leader joined by a small group of advisers.
"Colombia is the lynchpin, in my view, to the whole hemisphere,“ Biden said.
Duque said Biden’s announcement recognized “values and the principles” shared by both Western Hemisphere countries.
Back home, Duque has been criticized for not sitting down earlier with the U.S. president, his strategic partner. The two did meet briefly late last year at a gathering of world leaders for a climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
Duque's visit to the White House came amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine and approaching presidential elections in Colombia that will decide his successor.
When both presidents mentioned Venezuela, it was in the context of the assistance Colombia has provided nearly 2 million Venezuelan refugees who have crossed the border to flee poor economic and living conditions back home.
Duque has led regional opposition to Venezuela's Maduro, whom he describes as a “dictator" — a characterization he repeated under questioning by Colombian journalists after his meeting with Biden. Duque recognizes opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president.
Colombia’s government has questioned the military assistance Russia has provided to Venezuela and has expressed fears of possible “foreign interference” in Colombia, which shares a vast border with Venezuela, without providing evidence.
Duque has not spoken publicly about the U.S.-Venezuela meeting, and continued to hold his tongue Thursday following the White House visit.
“On the issues and details having to do with the visit (to Venezuela), I think U.S. authorities have to answer about that,” he told the Colombian journalists. “Our position with respect to the regime of Nicolás Maduro has not changed at all.”
Colombian Vice President and Foreign Minister Marta Lucía Ramírez has said the meeting “took her by surprise.”
Venezuela recently announced a military deployment on the border to combat what it said are Colombian armed groups.
Both Biden and Duque denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Biden saying it was not just a threat to Ukraine but to “peace and stability” everywhere. He commended Duque for the strong stance he took against the invasion, including Colombia's vote in the U.N. General Assembly to condemn Russia's actions.
Duque has spoken out against Russia and pledged support for the international humanitarian response and the “corresponding sanctions.”
The war, which has entered its third week, is a “very horrifying moment for the world” that must be condemned “with a very strong sentiment," Duque said.
“Nothing justifies the bloodbath that we have been seeing continuously over the news in the last week,” he emphasized.
According to the State Department, U.S. law allows the designation of “major non-NATO ally” status for friendly countries, providing them with certain benefits in the areas of defense, trade and security cooperation. It's a symbol of close ties.
However, such countries are not entitled to the same security guarantees as full-fledged members of the NATO alliance. NATO member countries agree to defend each other if one comes under attack, but that protection does not extend to a major non-NATO ally.
Duque's visit comes shortly before a possible change in government in Colombia. It will hold presidential elections on May 29 and leftist candidate and Duque rival Gustavo Petro leads in the polls. Presidents in Colombia are limited to one, four-year term.
Petro has said he has other priorities and Colombia should not interfere in the invasion of Ukraine but focus on resolving internal problems with illegal armed groups.
Associated Press writers Astrid Suarez in Bogotá, Colombia, and Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.
Israel is having problems trying to profit from the Mediterranean gas field that it has been trying to steal from some of its neighbors. Drilling has been stopped since May 3, 2012 (SEE: Leviathan Oil Well Drilling Postponed) by Noble Energy’s “Homer Ferrington” rig, which had been working in the Leviathan gas field. Drilling stopped because of the unexpected high gas pressures encountered at the greatest depths.
Development of high-pressure gas, or “sour gas” (high sulfur content plus high pressure) requires deeper wells (new deep-drilling rig has been held-up in S. Korea until late next year) and extra facilities for reducing the pressure and lowering the sulfur content of the gas, in addition to the missing infrastructure that will be needed to be built for moving the gas from the Mediterranean to Israel, or to LP gas facilities, for shipping the product elsewhere.
In addition to the drilling problems, there have also been legal hang-ups (court challenge to monopoly ownership of Leviathan), as well as financing difficulties in acquiring partners. The major oil companies are afraid to invest in Israel, for fear of pissing-off the Arabs. Even companies like Dutch giant Shell will only consider investing in gas and oil exploration through third party partners, like Woodside Petroleum (Shell holds 23% of Woodside stock), which is allegedly a conglomerate composed of Chinese, Texas and Australian interests, in order to have deniability about any investment which might develop.
According to this interview in MoneyWeek, with Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, he claimed in 2006 that he “owned Woodside Petroleum,” The Woodside Energy company is currently at the center of an international spy scandal after having just acquired drilling rights off East Timor. That acquisition is at the center of an international stink storm that is now being generated by govt. leakers. A cloud of suspicion hangs over the drilling contract which may have relied upon insider information, obtained through espionage conducted by Australian spy agency ASIS, Australian Secret Intelligence Service (SEE: Australia’s Timor Spying Scandal. More Whistleblowers Emerge).
Here we have a very clear example of a national spy agency serving the interests of the corporations, confirming the evidence that Steve Kangas died for to bring it to the Internet. Steve died of a gunshot wound to the head in the home offices of conservative leader Richard Mellon Scaife. Mr. Scaife was Kangas’ favorite research subject (SEE: The Origins of the Overclass). His focus was upon exposing the nexus between the CIA and the rich and powerful and the corporations which they owned.
Are NSA spies acting as mentors to other intelligence agencies, manipulating them to align their interests with theirs, to facilitate their search for insider information for the big oil companies and corporations?
[From partners in the original war on terrorism, to the enemies that we appear to be today, what went wrong with the US/Russian era of cooperation? We went our separate ways in 2003, when Bush began his vendetta against Saddam Hussain and "Seven countries", former client states of the Soviet Union in the Middle East. Next, came the first anti-Russian "color revolution" in Ukraine in 2004, followed by a 2nd color revolution in 2014-15...all elements of an economic war against the Russian oil/gas industry (Gazprom), intended to bankrupt Russia by surgically removing key state Ukraine from that supply system, thereby destroying the heart of the Russian economy. "Independent Ukraine" has always been a pauper state, dependent on the generosity of Russia to furnish the base energy needs of its own people, choosing instead, to act as an nonpaying parasite on the Russian suppliers, as the price for allowing Russia to transit gas through Ukraine to the rest of Europe, or else to shut-down. When Russia chose to pipe its energy around Ukraine in new pipelines, the US waged further economic warfare against every project, promising Europe non-existent American LP Gas to replace the missing fuel. With the American-induced cancellation of both Northstream and Turkstream projects, Russia (Gazprom) had to retrench in Ukraine to continue to service Europe. Further U.S. attempts to strangulate the Russian economy and to isolate Putin run great risk of bringing about world war.]
As the battle of wills and might between Russia and the west over the fate of Ukraine unfolds, there is one key fact to bear in mind: Vladimir Putin has never lost a war. During past conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and Crimea over his two decades in power, Putin succeeded by giving his armed forces clear, achievable military objectives that would allow him to declare victory, credibly, in the eyes of the Russian people and a wary, watching world. His latest initiative in Ukraine is unlikely to be any different.
Despite months of military build-up along Ukraine's borders and repeated warnings from the Biden administration that an incursion could happen at any time, the February 24 pre-dawn bombing campaign that kicked off Europe's first land war in decades seemed to come as a surprise to many Ukrainians. In major cities across a country the size of the state of Texas, stunned citizens, lulled into complacency by their president's repeated reassurances that Russia would not invade, watched and listened to the sound of thunderous explosions targeting Ukrainian military bases, airports and command and control centers. Within 24 hours, the conflict spread rapidly, with Russian tanks and troops moving swiftly toward Kyiv, the capital, and fighting around Chernobyl, the site of the disastrous 1986 nuclear reactor meltdown. Shock and awe, Russian style.
Despite repeated warnings that an invasion was imminent, many Ukrainians were shocked by the arrival of Russian troops. Here, members of Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces participate in a drill days before the bombings began. Ethan Swope/Bloomberg/Getty
In an instant, Russian President Putin's invasion of Ukraine destroyed the post Cold War security order in Europe—one centered, to Russia's fury, by an often-expanding NATO alliance. Analysts expect that, once Kyiv falls, the military aggression will give way to a political settlement that puts a Russia-friendly government in place. By February 25, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was considering an invitation from Moscow to hold "neutrality" talks in neighboring Belarus. If those talks happen, Putin will then be able to pull back troops and end the conflict—while having dealt the West a humiliating blow.
And that, military and Russia experts agree, may be the real point.
Ukraine, of course, is not a NATO member; the possibility that it might join the Alliance some day, as other countries that were once part of the old Soviet bloc have done, is a key issue in the current conflict. Putin's actions, a brazen defiance in the face of repeated warnings and threats of sanctions from U.S. President Joe Biden and western allies, now make it a certainty, if it wasn't before, that membership will never happen. Putin's aggression will also serve as a stark warning to countries formerly part of the Soviet Union of the possible repercussions of getting too cozy with the West.
The post Soviet status quo in Eastern Europe was one "that [Putin] never accepted," says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor in chief of Russia in Global Affairs, a Moscow-based foreign policy journal. "It ate at him. He believes Russia was treated [by the West] as a second class citizen after the Soviet Union fell."
Now, western diplomats and intelligence officials believe, Putin seeks to decapitate the western-leaning leadership in Kyiv headed by Zelensky and replace it with a government that will be loyal to "the new Tsar," as former Estonian President Toomas Ilves calls Putin. That could happen, U.S. intelligence officials tell Newsweek, within days. Putin does not want, nor does he need, to occupy the entire country to accomplish his greater goals, intelligence analysts and officials say. As Ilves puts it, "He wants a puppet state like Belarus," another former Soviet province just north of Ukraine, and from which troops poured into Ukraine as the Russian bombing ramped up. With a new reality on the ground in Eastern Europe, Ilves continues, "Putin then wants to rewrite the security rules of the road between him and NATO."
Ukraine itself appears to share at least part of that view. A statement from Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine's presidential chief of staff, and shared with Newsweek by Ukraine's embassy in Washington, outlined what Kyiv suspected were Moscow's goals. "The Office of the President of Ukraine believes the Russian federation has two tactical goals—to seize territories and attack the legitimate political leadership of Ukraine in order to spread chaos and [to] install a marionette government that would sign a peace deal on bilateral relations with Russia," Podolyak said.
A man clears debris at a damaged residential building at Koshytsa Street, a suburb of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, where a military shell allegedly hit, on February 25, 2022.Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty
A United States that thought it was pivoting to Asia, and focusing on China—a country that is its preeminent rival going forward—has now been dragged back to Eastern Europe, where for centuries so much blood has been spilled. Putin now has the world's full, undivided attention, in the same way that every Secretary General in the Soviet era did. In chilling televised remarks after the invasion had begun, Putin said, "whoever tries to interfere [in Ukraine] should know that Russia's response will be immediate, and will lead to such consequences that you have never experienced in your history."
Russia is now back in the limelight, a nation that is demonstrating, with a display of military might, that it remains a Great Power. Which is precisely where Putin wants his nation to be. He believes Russia should at all times command respect from the rest of the world, "and when it doesn't command respect, it should command fear," as Lukyanov of Russia in Global Affairs puts it.
Mission accomplished. As Rose Gottemoeller, former deputy secretary general of NATO and a long time Russia watcher characterized it recently on the CBS podcast Intelligence Matters, "This is [Putin's] 'look at me' moment."
The West Responds
Within hours of the invasion, the United States and its allies responded by sharply ratcheting up economic sanctions but it's unclear whether the moves will deter the Russian leader. In a speech announcing the response, Biden said more than half of the West's high tech exports to Russia would be slashed, "degrading their industrial capacity," and hurting industries like aerospace and shipbuilding. He's also freezing the U.S. assets of four additional Russian banks, including VTB, the country's second largest financial institution, whose CEO is very close to Putin. "This is going to impose severe costs on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time," Biden said.
President Joe Biden takes questions after giving an update on the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C.Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/Getty
The following day, the White House announced it would join the European Union in implementing sanctions against Putin personally. The Russian President is widely thought to be one of the world's richest men, allegedly hiding much of his wealth in shell companies in various tax havens throughout the world.
How effective the sanctions will be is unclear. Putin, for his part, believes he has effectively made his country sanctions-proof. Russia has over $630 billion in hard currency reserves, and rakes in $14 billion per month in oil and gas exports. As Russia's ambassador to Sweden, Viktor Tatarintsev, told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet days before the invasion began, when the West ramped up threats of financial penalties in a futile effort to prevent military action, "Excuse my language, but we don't give a shit about your sanctions."
Biden, in his remarks the day the invasion began, said he believes Putin may have brought himself a world of trouble by invading Ukraine. "History has shown time and again how swift gains in territory give way to grinding occupation, acts of mass civil disobedience and strategic dead ends," he said. And in fact, thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been training as part of newly formed "territorial defense organizations" set up in order to resist the Russians.
But U.S. intelligence officials privately do not share Biden's optimism about "mass disobedience." One official who spoke to Newsweek on background because he is not authorized to speak on the record said, "After the government in Kyiv is dismantled, there will be no opposition within Ukraine for us to support militarily."
His pessimism is rooted in Putin's past behavior, most notably when he presided over a scorched earth campaign to brutally put down an insurgency in Chechnya more than 20 years ago. He says, "It's not realistic to mount an opposition campaign. [Putin] does not value human life the same way that the free world does, hence [Russian troops] will eradicate any opposition en masse."
Indeed, Putin's history as a commander in chief of Russia's military shows that there may be reason to doubt Biden's optimism that Ukraine will turn into a quagmire for Moscow. Beyond the ruthless campaign to put down Muslim rebels in Chechnya, he hived off the two sections of the former Soviet state of Georgia that he wanted to control in 2008. Then in 2014 he took back Crimea in Ukraine, and set up separatist movements in two heavily Russian provinces in the east, Donetsk and Luhansk. (The day before the February 24th invasion, Putin declared those two provinces were now "independent republics." )
Ukrainian servicemen ride on tanks towards the front line with Russian forces in the Lugansk region of Ukraine on February 25, 2022. Anatolii Stepanov/AFP/Getty
And on the complex battlefield in Syria, where the U.S. and Russians risked conflict, former President Barack Obama funded opposition rebel groups, including some tied to Al Qaeda, then failed to enforce his own red line after President Basar Al Assad used poison gas on his enemies. Putin sent Russian troops in with one goal: that Assad maintain his grip on power. He remains in office to this day.
The Ultimate Goal
What is Putin's endgame now? The Russian leader is fueled by rage and seeks revenge against the West for his homeland's perceived mistreatment, says Peter Rough, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington. The country Putin grew up in, and the one he served as a KGB officer, dissolved in 1991. In its stead came chaos at home, and, in Putin's view, betrayal from abroad.
The demise of the Soviet Union, he has famously said, "was the most catastrophic geopolitical event of the 20th century" (worse, even, than World War II, in which 20 million Soviet citizens were killed). His resentment over what happened to his country, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, is more widely shared by Russians than many in the West appreciate.
As the Moscow bureau chief for this magazine in the early 2000s, I saw organized crime take over businesses large and small; the country's finances were in shambles. The government was unable to pay the salaries of a once proud military. I interviewed an Army colonel stationed on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in Russia's far east, who wept as he confessed he wasn't able to buy his wife a birthday present a few weeks earlier because he had not been paid his wages in months.
Boris Yeltsin, once the democratic hero who helped bring down the Soviet Union, had turned into a drunken mess as the first freely elected president of Russia; his inner circle was corrupt, enriching themselves as ordinary citizens struggled amidst the post Soviet chaos. On New Year's Day, at the dawn of the new millennium, Yeltsin stepped down. He was replaced by the man he had named Prime Minister months earlier, Vladimir Putin.
Twenty-two years later, in an extraordinary 55-minute speech to his country on Monday February 21, Putin aired many of his grievances in a way he rarely had publicly before, as a prelude to war. In it, he said, "Ukraine is not a separate country," and that "Ukrainians and Russians were brethren, one and the same." Kyiv, in his view, had been ripped unceremoniously from Mother Russia when the Soviet Union dissolved. He then recounted the West's early promise not to expand NATO.
He recalled how coldly then President Bill Clinton responded to his query, not long after he became President of Russia in 2000, about whether Moscow could ever be a member of NATO. He recalled, bitterly, how he was assured that NATO's expansion eastward—to include countries that had been members of the Warsaw Pact, Moscow's former client states—would "only improve their relations with us, even create a belt of states friendly to Russia.
Everything," Putin said, "turned out exactly the opposite. They were just words."
Russian President Vladimir Putin arrives to chair a Security Council meeting via a video link in Moscow on February 25, 2022. AlexeyNikolsky/AFP/Getty
How does Putin seek revenge for this betrayal? To the extent he can, he wants to piece together a new Russian Empire. Not necessarily every province of the former Soviet Union, but those parts of the pre-Soviet empire, established by the Tsars, who were largely Russian speaking, orthodox Christian and who looked first to Kyiv, and then later to Moscow, as the political, cultural and spiritual center of the world.
Putin is a nationalist first and foremost. Ukraine, plainly, is central to this vision. But it also includes the countries—former Soviet provinces—that are now effectively Russian client states (Belarus), as well as those Moscow wishes to control yet again: the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia (the latter three are now members of NATO, for whom the alliance is obligated to fight in the event one of them is attacked.) Putin in his pre-invasion speech said it was "madness" that the Baltics were ever allowed to leave the USSR. He has demanded—preposterously—that the Alliance pull back to its 1997 stance, when there were just 16 members, as opposed to 30 today.
Point, Counterpoint
It is for that reason that Biden is moving more NATO troops and materiel into the Baltics. On February 25, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the Alliance would for the first time dispatch troops from the Spearhead Unit of its so-called Response Force—formed in 2014—to member states along the eastern front. NATO describes the Response Force as ''highly ready and technologically advanced." It consists of 40,000 troops from a variety of NATO countries. Stoltenberg declined to say precisely how many troops would be deployed now.
More deployments are likely in the months ahead. President Biden vowed in no uncertain terms that an attack on a NATO member would trigger Article 5, the provision that maintains any armed attack against one country in the Alliance is considered an attack against all. If Putin moves on the Baltics, or on any NATO members who formerly were part of the Warsaw Pact—like Poland, Romania or Bulgaria, all of which border Ukraine—then Moscow will be at war with NATO.
With the invasion of Ukraine, analysts believe, Putin hoped to shake NATO. He wanted, says Douglas Wise, a former CIA officer and deputy director at the Defense Intelligence Agency, "to further divide our allies, and cement existing fissures and disunity within [the Alliance] and the EU. He also believes he can benefit by humiliating the Western leaders and institutions when they fail to develop credible and practical options to counter his aggression."
Whether Putin benefits at home for his audacious attack on Ukraine is not yet clear. (There were small protests in major Russian cities in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.) But if creating more stress on NATO was one of his goals, that failed.
Ukrainians hold a protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine outside Downing Street, central London.Stefan Rousseau/Getty
The Germans were widely viewed as the weakest link when it came to Russia, because of the two countries' significant trade ties. And at the outset of the crisis, that skepticism seemed justified. Early on, for example, Estonia wanted to send a batch of old howitizers in its possession to Kyiv. But NATO regulations say that any weaponry given or sold to a non-NATO member must be approved by the country of origin. In this case, that country did not exist: The howitzers had been in possession of the old East Germany. Upon unification, Germany took control of them and ultimately passed them on to Finland, who eventually gave them to Estonia. When Tallinn wanted to send them on to Ukraine, to do its bit to help shore up Kyiv's defenses, Germany—astonishingly—declined to approve the transfer.
That was followed by Berlin's deep reluctance to stop the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline linking Germany and Russia, despite pressure to do so from its own ambassador to the U.S., Emily Haber. Following the refusal, Haber wrote a widely publicized cable to new Chancellor Olaf Scholz, saying that the country was gaining a reputation as a bad ally.
To Putin, this must have indicated that his gas-politik was paying huge dividends. But it didn't last long. Scholz visited Washington in early February and, in a post meeting press conference with Biden, stood by meekly as the president asserted that Nord Stream 2 was dead if Moscow took military action against Ukraine. On cue, hours after the invasion began last month, Germany halted certification of the $11 billion project.
In fact, far from deepening fissures within the alliance, Putin's Ukraine gambit has had the opposite effect. Former CIA Director and Army General David Petraeus, upon returning from the Munich Security Conference shortly before the invasion, said he had never seen the Alliance so unified since the days when he served at NATO headquarters during the Cold War.
The evident unity among the members of what Biden accurately called the most powerful military alliance in history, has only made the plight of Ukraine more poignant. As the invasion unfolded, a member of the Ukrainian parliament in Kyiv, Alexey Goncharenko, begged NATO to impose a no-fly zone, to allow his countrymen to have a fairer fight on the ground. There was zero chance of that happening, because Kyiv wasn't in the club.
Ukrainians flock to the train station to leave capital Kyiv after Russian military intervention in the country in Kyiv, Ukraine on February 25, 2022. Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu Agency/Getty
Soon now, its desire to be part of the West will be moot, as Putin's Russia takes control—little more than 24 hours after the invasion began, Russian forces were already entering the the capital and Kyiv was hit with Russian "cruise or ballistic missiles." Success is inevitable because Biden and the allies have made it clear that Moscow will not meet military resistance from the West. Over and over Biden has told the American people the U.S. will not fight on the ground in Ukraine. He knows the public has no stomach for it.
If events play out as military analysts now expect, the conflict will end relatively quickly with a negotiated settlement that may cede some territory to Russia, the installation of a new Russia-friendly regime in Kyiv and a partial withdrawal of troops that allows Putin to avoid the quagmire the West so badly wants him sucked into. In doing so, Putin will be able to claim that he dealt a devastating setback to NATO, the main goal of his aggression.
For Putin, the sack of Ukraine will likely mark the endgame in his desire to restore the empire. If it doesn't, it will mean at some point the world's two largest nuclear powers will be in a shooting war, with all the risk that entails. With his words and more importantly his actions, Biden is frantically signaling to Putin: this far, but no further. An anxious world hopes the Russian leader, satisfied with victory in Ukraine, will get the message.
In Joe Biden's America, attempting to cancel Joe Rogan is just counter-terror policy.
This is because our ruling class—in the name of "defending democracy"—classifies those who question the regime on any matter of consequence as a threat to the homeland, and pledges to pursue them accordingly.
Our ruling elites have engaged in an overt war on wrongthink masquerading as a domestic counter-terror mission since at least January 6, 2021.
Among the greatest contributors to the current "threat environment," according to the bulletin, is the "widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding...COVD-19."
It would appear the Biden administration considers the ivermectin-hocking, tequila-swigging, Bernie Sanders-supporting Rogan to be public enemy number one on this issue.
Shortly after hosting dissenters from COVID orthodoxy including Drs. Peter McCullough and the then-recently deplatformed Robert Malone on his podcast, Rogan found himself the subject of a cancel campaign contrived by washed-up musicians, non-medical doctors and corporate media whose ratings he has crushed.
This effort was, to put it mildly, disingenuous. We know how seriously to take the administration's views on COVID "misinformation and disinformation" because by its own standards the White House, and its media mouthpieces, have been the most powerful and prolific purveyors of "misinformation."
The administration has flip-flopped on virtually every aspect of the coronavirus to positions that its social media adjuncts used to ban people over. It did so not because "the science" has changed, but because the politics have changed.
Biden's White House says its critics are dangerous—not to the public, but to its rule, as if that rule is equivalent to America or democracy itself, as Dr. Anthony Fauci is to science.
As the DHS bulletin notes, the first key driver of the "heightened threat environment" is the "proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions."
Never mind what those government institutions themselves have done to sow discord or undermine public trust, like, say, calling for Twitter and Facebook to censor people.
It's the critics, the dissenters—those with no monopoly on force or multi-trillion-dollar budgets—who are the real scourge.
The bulletin lists as another potential threat "false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud"—perpetuating the narrative of "insurrection" so central to the effort to persecute wrongthinkers, while eliding that Democrats' own election integrity-eroding measures destroyed confidence in the system.
This illustration photo shows the Spotify page for "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast displayed on a smart phone in Washington, DC on February 7, 2022. - The head of music streaming giant Spotify Daniel Ek has condemned podcaster Joe Rogan's use of a racial slur but insisted that silencing him was not the answer.MANDEL NGAN / AFP/Getty Images
Previous Biden-era bulletins similarly focused on COVID-19 and election integrity, but the latest one—in a new twist—also claims that calls for violence have been tied to anger over "the evacuation and resettlement of Afghan nationals following the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan."
So it's not just questioning the merits of mask and vaccine mandates, or skepticism over the security of mass mail-in elections, but doubts about the wisdom of dropping unvetted refugees from a terror-dominated backwater into the middle of your town that could get you in trouble with the security state.
That strategy calls for confronting long-term contributors to domestic terrorism, including:
enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation.... We will work toward finding ways to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.
Linking speech that does not comport with regime orthodoxy to terror, and using that pretext to police thought—with an armed Ministry of Truth operating out of our national security and law enforcement apparatus—therefore manifestly is "counter-terror" policy.
Casting critics as terrorists and threatening to sic the most powerful, pervasive and sophisticated security state in the history of the world on them is of course not about defending democracy or protecting the truth, but intimidating democratic opposition into silence and submission to an official narrative.
The regime evidently believes it must maintain a monopoly over the American mind to maintain a monopoly on power.
Joe Rogan threatened that power, and therefore constituted a danger. The threat was that he elicited insights from guests who challenged the regime's credibility on all manner of issues related to COVID, and millions of people heard it.
Trump and his allies likewise threatened that power, and therefore constituted a danger. They were—and continue to be—pursued like terrorists, as the House January 6 Committee wields the full force of the federal government to investigate them, surveil their communications and audit their dealings. Why? Trump and his allies called the regime a failure, stated undeniable truths that resonated with Americans to justify that view and supported policies aimed at rectifying said failures that would disempower the ruling elites.
The most meek and unthreatening of January 6 defendants now face extreme, hyper-political prosecutions. They are being made an example of not because they ever posed a credible threat to the regime's power, but as a signal to the millions of peaceful, patriotic Americans who might—through their collective speech, advocacy and voting.
The same goes for the parents outraged over anti-scientific and detrimental COVID-19 policies, and over critical race theory indoctrination in schools. The Department of Justice threatened to pursue them like jihadists—not because they are jihadists, but because parents awakened to the regime's corrupt monopoly on the all-important institution of education could break that monopoly and end the careers of the politicians who support it. They must therefore be chilled.
The war on wrongthink is not about left or right. It's about who rules: a sovereign people or the elites who deign to lord over us.
The ruling class—the "defenders of democracy"—sees citizens on the left and right opposed to its agenda and refuses to address their concerns peaceably. Instead, it calls them terror threats and pursues them using the full power of the public and like-minded private sectors.
The ruling class does not fear misinformation and disinformation. It fears truth, particularly the truth about its own rot, corruption and incompetence, which calls into question its authority.
This leaves us with a question: when everyone, from unorthodox presidents to curious podcasters to caring parents are deemed existential threats to the regime, how strong is the regime?
The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.
